QCraft, a self-driving startup backed by Chinese tech giant ByteDance, announced on Monday the closing of a new funding round, following the completion of a Series A round in early 2021.
The financing, a $100 million Series A+ round, was led by YF Capital and Genesis Capital and co-invested by Meituan Longzhu and leading international pension funds, with continued follow-on investment from long-time shareholder IDG, the company said.
QCraft was founded in 2019 by executives who have worked for pioneering self-driving companies such as Waymo, Tesla and Uber.
Since its inception, QCraft has proposed the strategic goal of self-driving "super factory" to efficiently realize the commercialization and scale implementation of self-driving.
At present, QCraft has launched the Longzhou series of driverless vehicles covering multiple types of vehicles, including online vehicles, buses and shuttle buses, etc. The fleet size is expected to exceed 100 units this year.
The Longzhou series driverless vehicles can achieve 360-degree blind zone perception around the body and have 5G+V2X in-vehicle display system.
QCraft launched its first unmanned minibus, Longzhou ONE, which has launched regular operations in more than five cities, including Suzhou, Shenzhen and Wuhan.
The Longzhou ONE has 9 passenger seats and 1 driving seat, but it is no longer the driver who sits in the driver's seat, but the safety officer who monitors the normal operation of the vehicle. The driving operation of the vehicle will be done by QCraft's in-house-developed driverless software system.
Each minibus will have a safety officer early on, with subsequent policy guidance to remove the safety officer.
Qcraft said in March that it had closed a $25 million Series A1 round of funding, when it was reported that ByteDance participated in the round and was also one of the co-leaders.
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