Minieye raises $22m as it eyes autopilot industry

Minieye, a visual perception solution provider for vehicles, announced on Monday the completion of the B round of financing, thus receiving a total of 150 million yuan ($22.3 million) capital injection in the first six months this year.

NavInfo Co Ltd led this round of investment through its subsidiary fund, and Zheshang Venture Capital followed suit. According to the company's statement, this round of funds will be used to expand Minieye's market share in the industry, guarantee the cash flow under the business scale, and focus on the development of L2+ autopilot to accelerate its mass production.

Liu Guoqing, CEO of Minieye, said the autopilot industry has entered an acceleration phase and "synergy" will become a new trend. Leading investor NavInfo is a prestigious provider in location services and smart car technology in China, which has built "digital map, car networking, autopilot, chip, location big data". Based on these technologies, NavInfo will assist Minieye to attract more market share. Apart from that, bond with self-visual perception technology, Minieye will cooperate with NavInfo to tap new areas.

Minieye is known for its expertise in computer vision, deep learning, embedded artificial intelligence, automotive electronics and sensor fusion.

"We hope to generate strategic synergies with Minieye, expand Minieye's capabilities through autopilot map, smart horizons, car networking, smart perception and other technologies," said Bi Lei, senior vice-president of NavInfo. "Their environmental awareness solution will improve our autopilot data ecosystem, and jointly promote the automatic driving mass production program."

Minieye also revealed that L2-L3 level autopilot products will be released this year.

Wang Jiaqi contributed to this story