Xiaomi Acquires an Autonomous Driving Technology Company, as Industry Competition Heats Up
Autobit reported on Friday that Chinese tech giant Xiaomi has recently acquired DeepMotion, an autonomous driving technology company.
DeepMotion will have more than 20 people joining Xiaomi at most. This will help Xiaomi fill in its lineup of people responsible for their autonomous driving division and its the technology’s research and development.
According to Tianyancha App, DeepMotion was established in July 2017 in Beijing. Theirregistered capital at that time was around USD $10 million and the company is represented by Li Zhiwei. The company mainly provides automatic driving solutions with high-precision maps as its core, and has a number of patents related to automatic driving.
In 2018, DeepMotion received over US $10 million in A round funding, which was led by Redpoint China Ventures and followed by Source Code Capital in angel investment. People in the industry estimate that the valuation of DeepMotion is at least over 1 billion yuan. After this acquisition, Xiaomi will further increase its strength in the field of autonomous driving.
At the end of March this year, Xiaomi Group announced that its board of directors officially approved the establishment of a smart electric vehicle business, and planned to set up a wholly-owned subsidiary to take charge of the business.
Xiaomi said in the announcement that the initial investment of the smart electric vehicle business project is 10 billion yuan, and it is estimated that the investment in the next 10 years will be USD $10 billion. Lei Jun, CEO of Xiaomi Group, will also take charge of the smart electric vehicle business.
At present, Xiaomi‘s public relations department said it was “unclear” about the acquisition, while DeepMotion has not yet responded.
However, although the news is still unclear, Xiaomi‘s share price has risen by over 5.51% today.
