The cost of the Toyota-backed company reached $ 5.3 billion. This makes China's Pony.ai one of the most expensive autonomous control system design startups.
Pony.ai, a startup that develops autonomous management systems, announced the initial stage of a fundraising campaign and raised $ 267 million through it. Writes about it Reuters.
Pony.ai is now valued at $ 5.3 billion, according to the agency, which automatically makes the startup one of the most expensive in autonomous vehicle control systems. PitchBook Data analyst firm claims that Pony.ai has surpassed its main competitors - Aurora and Nuro in terms of cost.
Interestingly, the company announced its last fundraiser in February. Then Toyota Motor Corp. poured about $ 400 million into the startup, and in total Pony.ai received 467 million. After that, the founders of the company - Chinese entrepreneurs James Peng and Lu Tiancheng, who previously worked in Silicon Valley, said that they would study mobility services with Toyota.
Pony.ai also recently received funding from the Chinese state-owned automaker FAW Group, which will now also work with autonomous cars and trucks. One of them, Pony.ai, presented at the annual China International Import Expo (CIIE), which takes place in Shanghai in early November.
The investment in Pony.ai comes at a time when global automakers and tech companies, including Tesla, Waymo, and Alphabet, are investing time, money and effort in developing self-driving cars. For example, in October, the California Department of Motor Vehicles issued a special permit to Cruise to test self-driving cars without a spare driver right on the streets of San Francisco, and Pony.ai's own "drones" are now driving along the streets of Beijing and Guangzhou, as well as American Fremont and Irvine.