China-based autonomous driving technology developer Jingchi raised $52m on Tuesday in a pre-series A round that included Nvidia GPU Ventures, the investment subsidiary of graphics processing technology provider Nvidia.
The round was led by venture capital firm Qiming Venture Partners and also featured additional, unnamed investors.
Founded in April 2017, Jingchi bills itself as a mobility-as-a-service provider. It is working on fully autonomous driving technology that integrates artificial intelligence (AI) to understand an environment and enable safe travel largely without requiring human interaction.
The funding will go toward the recruitment of additional R&D staff and the advancement of the company test fleet by the end of 2017.
Jingchi also aims to deploy hundreds of autonomous vehicles powered by Nvidia’s AI computing platform Drive PX in order to operate a ride-hailing service in Anqing City next year. Duane Kuang, founding partner at Qiming, will join the company’s board of directors.
Jing Wang, founder and chief executive of Jingchi, said: “We are creating an innovative mobility ecosystem to transform every single trip to be safer, more efficient, more cost-effective and more leisurely.
“We are determined to bring fully autonomous vehicles to China and become one of the first companies that apply autonomous driving technologies at scale in 2020. With this investment, it makes our dream possible.”