SiEngine Completes Roughly 1B Yuan in Round A financing
SiEngine, a 7-nanometer auto-grade SoC provider, on July 19 announced the completion of its Round A financing in which it raised nearly one billion yuan ($148.3 million). The new funds are planned to be used for the batch supply of existing products and the next stage of R&D and deployment of auto-grade, high-computing-power chips.
After obtaining investment from FAW Group in March this year, SiEngine completed this round of financing which was led by Sequoia Capital and followed by Neusoft, Bosch’s Boyuan Capital, SMIC’s China Fortune-Tech Capital, Vision Knight Capital, Guosheng Capital, Hundreds Capital, Cedarlake Capital, Yuexiu Industrial Fund and ICBC International. Index Capital acted as financial adviser.
Established in 2018, SiEngine is jointly funded by Geely-backed ECARX and ARM China, and focuses on the R&D and provision of high-performance auto-grade chips and solutions. The company hopes to begin with intelligent console chips before gradually introducing high-grade automatic driving and vehicle-mounted CPU chips.
The company launched its first domestic 7nm intelligent console chip, the SE1000, on December 10.
The SE1000 is an advanced chip that adopts the 7-nm process, with 8 CPUs, 14-core GPUs and an 8 TOPS int8 programmable convolution neural network engine built in. The chip also conforms to the ASIL-D standard, achieving AEC-Q100 Grade 3 level, with a built-in independent Security Island, providing a high-performance encryption and decryption engine. It can realize multi-dimensional and multi-perspective human-computer interactions, provide complete support for various auxiliary driving functions, and all-round computing power support for the application of intelligent consoles.
According to Wang Kai, CEO of SiEngine, the intelligent console for which the SE1000 chip is geared towards is in high demand. Although it is mainly used in middle and high-end models at present, it will be gradually put into use in more models in the future. According to Roland Berger’s prediction data adopted by the CICC Research Department in its industry analysis report, the industry-wide penetration rate of intelligent consoles will increase from about 30% at present to 90% in 2030, becoming the standard of automobile intelligence.
