- Pony.ai is a self-driving car startup.
- Former Baidu chief architect James Peng co-founded Pony.ai in 2016.
- Pony.ai raised $100 million in a Series C round reaching a $5.3 billion valuation.
Self-driving car start-up Pony.ai today revealed that in an expansion of its Series C round, it has raised $100 million. The funds push the sum raised by the firm to over $1 billion at a $5.3 billion post-money valuation. Which is up from $3 billion as of February 2020. Some analysts expect that the pandemic would hasten the implementation of autonomous technology for transportation. Driverless cars will theoretically mitigate the risk of transmitting disease, despite the need for disinfection. During the COVID-19 health crisis, Pony.ai distributed more than 15,000 packages of food and health kits in California.
About Pony.ai
Pony.ai was co-founded by former Baidu chief architect James Peng in 2016 with Tiancheng Lou. Lou worked on the autonomous car project of Google X until it was spun off into Waymo. The two plan to create level 4 autonomous cars for “predictable” environments such as industrial parks, college campuses, and small towns, with a tentative implementation window of several years from now, able to function without human supervision under select conditions, as established by the Society of Automotive Engineers.
Pony’s full-stack hardware platform, PonyAlpha, leverages lidars, radars, and cameras from its self-driving cars to keep tabs on obstacles up to 200 meters. PonyAlpha is the basis for the fully autonomous trucks and freight distribution solution for the company, which started testing in April 2019 and is deployed in test cars in Fremont, California, and in China in Beijing and Guangzhou.
One of the few companies to have obtained an autonomous vehicle testing license in Beijing is Pony.ai, which has offices in Guangzhou and Fremont. In California, the California Public Utilities Commission has obtained a permit for robo-taxi operations. Cruise, AutoX, Aurora, Voyage, Waymo, and Zoox are the only other companies to have obtained such a license in California.
Pony.ai’s Autonomous Driving Projects
Pony.ai partnered with Via and Hyundai last October to launch BotRide. Pony.ai’s second public robo-taxi service in Nansha, China, after a pilot program (PonyPilot). BotRide allowed riders and carpoolers to hail autonomous Hyundai Kona electric SUVs via Via-designed apps sourced from a fleet of 10 cars with behind-the-wheel human safety drivers. Pony.ai entered into an agreement with Bosch in August to “explore the future of autonomous fleet automotive maintenance and repair.” Pony.ai and the Automotive Aftermarket division of Bosch in North America are working to build and test fleet maintenance solutions for commercial robo-taxi systems. Pony.ai says it started in early July to pilot a maintenance program with Bosch in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Autonomous driving guarantees the continuous running of fleets and the elimination of downtime, among other possible benefits. Robo-taxis could reduce the overall cost of ownership of a fleet operator by 30 percent to 50 percent compared to private vehicle ownership and by about 70 percent compared to shared mobility, dramatically disrupting the industry, according to a 2017 McKinsey survey. But robo-taxis may need a significantly different infrastructure for maintenance than cars, partly because they may lack daily monitoring; have only minutes between passengers; and costly, responsive, and unusual parts for sports, such as lidar sensors.
Competition in self-driving carmakers
Pony.ai has a Daimler competition, which received a permit from the Chinese government in summer 2018 to test self-driving cars driven by the Apollo platform of Baidu on public roads in Beijing. And in Brooklyn, start-up Optimus Ride developed a small driverless shuttle fleet. In November 2018, Waymo, which has racked up more than 20 million real-world miles in more than 25 cities across the United States and billions of virtual miles, became the first company to receive a driverless car research permit from the Department of Motor Vehicles of California (DMV). Tesla, Aptiv, Can Mobility, Cruise, Aurora, Argo AI, Pronto.ai, and Nuro are additional competitors. Only Nuro, Waymo, Cruise, and Argo rival Pony.ai’s fundraising, however. Each has raised more than $3 billion in venture capital at valuations ranging from $7.5 billion (Argo) to $175 billion.).
Pony.ai has collaborations to build level 4 robo-taxi vehicles with the Chinese state-owned auto company FAW and GAC Group. It also has a strategic venture with On Semiconductor to prototype machine vision image sensing and processing technologies. Pony.ai has driven more than 1.5 million autonomous kilometers as of the end of 2019. This brings it within striking distance of Yandex (2 million miles) and Baidu (1.8 million miles).
In the series C extension, Brunei Investment Agency, Brunei’s Sovereign Wealth Fund, and CITIC Private Equity Funds Management participated. Toyota, video game publisher Beijing Kunlun Wanwei, Sequoia Capital China, IDG Capital, and Legend Capital are among the previous and current investors in Pony.ai. The Teachers’ Innovation Platform of the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan Board led this latest round. Fidelity China Special Circumstances PLC, 5Y Resources, ClearVue Partners, Eight Paths, and others also participated.
