In short, we have completed the A round of financing at the end of last year. This round of financing was jointly led by NIO Capital and Eight Roads Capital. It is mainly used to speed up the productization progress of the autonomous system in open-pit mines, establish a Shanghai office, recruit talents, and prepare for the future expansion of overseas markets.
“This also means that Eacon has completed the Pre-A round and A round of financing in the past six months, with a total amount of over 100 million yuan.”
NIO Capital focuses on important industries such as automobiles, energy, and logistics, and seeks disruptive technologies and business models. It manages RMB and US dollar dual-currency funds. NIO Capital has made a systematic deployment in the field of autonomous driving. Its invested projects include Momenta.ai, Inceptio Technology, Innovusion, Pony.ai, Mainline Technology, Black Sesame Smart Technology, etc.
Eight Roads Capital is a global self-funded investment institution backed by Fidelity Group. It was formerly known as Fidelity Growth Partners. It entered the Chinese market in 1996. As an early investor, it invested in Alibaba, iSoftStone and more than 110 Chinese companies. In the field of autonomous driving, Eight Roads invested in the A1 round of financing of Pony.ai, and continued to follow up in the financing of Pony.ai. At the same time, Fidelity is also an investor in Waymo and Nuro. In addition, Eight Roads Capital is also an investor in the Series A financing of Innovusion, a lidar manufacturer.
Zhu Yan, managing partner of NIO Capital, said: “Autonomous driving is one of NIO Capital’s key areas of deployment. We continue to be optimistic about the commercialization of autonomous driving in China. As one of the easiest scenarios in the field of autonomous driving, mines have a huge market space and are easier to replicate globally. Through the commercial application of autonomous driving, autonomous driving will greatly improve production efficiency, create commercial value, and also create huge social value. has an excellent entrepreneurial team, rich industry resources and long-term strategic vision.”
Cai Yuanxun, senior partner of Eight Roads Capital, said: “Eacon has industry-leading technology and operational capabilities, and can become a leading company in the field of autonomous driving in mining areas. Autonomous driving is a track that we have been focusing on for a long time, and we believe that autonomous technology will become an infrastructure in the future , and then promote the implementation of applications in different subdivision scenarios. Eight Roads Capital has made a layout in the high-speed L4 field by investing in Pony.ai and Innovusion. layout. We look forward to Eight Roads’ global platform providing comprehensive support for the company’s long-term development.”
After the technology matures in the future, the operational capability will be a more important barrier, so Eacon will position itself as an “operator” rather than a provider of autonomous solutions.
An important prerequisite for deep cultivation of autonomous operations in mine is to have an intuitive and deep understanding of mine operation scenarios, and to accumulate sufficient scene data before large-scale commercial implementation to serve technology implementation.
The accumulation and application of scene data, on the one hand, comes from our current technical practice, on the other hand, it depends on our familiarity with the traditional mine business.
For this reason, after the completion of the Pre-A round of financing, Eacon established Ordos Eacon Engineering Co., Ltd. in Inner Mongolia, and formed more than ten traditional mine haulage group to carry out traditional materials haulage in the mine, deeply involved in the haulage operations, with “understanding the scene”, “collecting data”, and “landing talents”, accumulate “engineering capabilities” for autonomous operations. As the technology solutions for autonomous driving become more mature, autonomous alternatives can be gradually carried out on the basis of traditional haulage.