"Yitu Technology" Raises Tens of Millions in Angel Round Led by Yunqi Capital | Yunxun

➤➤➤ Recently, Yitu Technology, a company dedicated to becoming a provider of intelligent vehicle middleware solutions, completed a tens of millions of RMB angel round. Yunqi Capital led the round, with Cornerstone Capital, Xinshang Capital, TusStar Venture Capital, and Zhuoyuan Capital participating. The funds will be used primarily for product R&D, business expansion, and team building.

Founded in June 2023, Yitu Technology is focused on the intelligent vehicle trend, targeting the R&D and commercialization of basic middleware, service middleware, and AI middleware to provide more scientific and customized services for Chinese automakers' intelligent transformation.

Yunqi's View

Yunqi has long focused on "technology enabling industrial upgrading," with "intelligent driving" being one of its sustained areas of focus. It made early lead investments in upstream and downstream companies including Yunqi Capital and Neolix.

Yunqi Capital partner Chen Yu said: "Software-defined vehicles is the defining theme of the auto industry's next decade. As electronic and electrical architectures continue to centralize, the next phase will evolve from single-domain controllers to cockpit-driving fusion and eventually central computing. Against this backdrop, we believe intelligent vehicle middleware is entering the 2.0 era. The industry structure dominated by traditional Tier 1s is being reshuffled. Compared to recent years, penetration growth is accelerating, industry specialization is strengthening, value is deepening, and barriers are rising. We are optimistic about Yitu Technology's character of 'in the heart a tiger, yet sniffing the roses' — based on strong technical R&D capabilities, product definition skills, and broad vision for frontier directions, Yitu Technology has the potential to become a leader in the software-defined vehicle era."

I. Middleware: The Software Foundation Defining Vehicles

As demand for intelligent vehicle features diversifies and smart cockpit applications proliferate, terminal applications in intelligent vehicles have become extraordinarily complex, and technical requirements for middleware are evolving.

Particularly, as underlying chip technology continues to iterate and upper-layer terminal applications diversify, intelligent vehicles have adopted the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) methodology, breaking the relatively closed and rigid structure of traditional automotive software systems. An era of "more open, more accessible" automotive software systems is arriving. Middleware products responsible for communication transmission are the critical link in managing this transition.

As the foundation of future software-defined vehicles, middleware — combined with the major trend of hardware-software decoupled development — can help automakers accelerate integration, improve software reuse, shorten R&D cycles, ensure product quality, and support functional updates throughout a new vehicle's entire lifecycle.

Large model technology has added further fuel to the intelligent vehicle upgrade. On November 8, 2023, Silicon Valley autonomous driving company Ghost Autonomy received a $5 million investment from the OpenAI Startup Fund. The company is attempting to use multimodal model software to understand complex road scenarios and provide road decisions for vehicle control hardware.

Yitu Technology is committed to providing safer, real-time, and reliable cross-domain SOA middleware for China's automotive development. Core founding team members each have over ten years of R&D or management experience in the automotive industry, with proven track records in automotive software architecture design, product development, and commercialization. CTO Zhen Chen is a top technical expert in the industry who has independently developed and open-sourced multiple automotive middleware components now widely used in numerous production vehicles. Currently, the main players in the middleware segment include international companies such as Vector and EB.

II. High-Performance Basic Middleware Platform: Better Experience, Lower Cost

Currently, Yitu Technology has core technologies for high-performance communication scheduling in smart cockpit and advanced intelligent driving middleware. Among these, the company's self-developed SOA communication framework FDBus is an industry core middleware platform, already used in over 100+ vehicle models from Volkswagen, Great Wall Motor, GAC, and NIO, and in mass production and stable operation on over 50 domain controller projects. Its high performance and stability have gained broad recognition.

At the product level, Yitu Technology is currently building a basic middleware platform and full-process tool chain, targeting cross-domain connectivity with excellent performance, small resource footprint, and reliable safety implementation. It can support more complex intelligent vehicle application architectures and provide overall solutions for next-generation electronic and electrical architectures. The company's products can improve overall vehicle performance and user experience while effectively reducing development difficulty and cost.

FDBus was developed by the company's CTO Zhen Chen, a senior technical expert in the middleware field. The solution was contributed to the open-source community in 2019 and has been maintained by Chen long-term. Xiaohang Wu previously served as general manager of a business unit at a leading domestic connected car company, leading the delivery of over 30+ vehicle platforms and 100+ flagship models with complex domain controllers and cockpit-driving fusion product lines. COO Yongfeng Xia has 14 years of experience in automotive embedded software platform product development and previously served as chief product solutions architect at a Fortune 500 automotive parts company. The founding team all graduated from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and have over 10 years of full-stack automotive software R&D and management experience, with unique innovative understanding of business models. R&D personnel account for 70% of the team, which includes senior industry technical experts and extensive automotive OEM and upstream/downstream ecosystem resources, enabling rapid product commercialization.

On the commercialization front, Yitu Technology has already received cooperation intentions from multiple domestic OEMs, chip companies, and Tier 1s. It expects to launch its first-generation high-performance, low-resource-footprint, multi-domain-fusion-supporting middleware platform and full-process tool chain product by early next year. Going forward, Yitu Technology will also actively explore core algorithm services and AI generative technology based on its middleware platform, expanding its application in intelligent vehicle products and the industry to meet more user scenario needs.

It is reported that Yitu Technology has received cooperation intentions from multiple domestic OEMs, chip companies, and Tier 1s, and expects to launch its first-generation high-performance, low-resource-footprint, multi-domain-fusion-supporting middleware platform and full-process tool chain product by early next year. In the future, Yitu Technology will also actively explore core algorithm services and AI generative technology based on its middleware platform, expanding its application in intelligent vehicle products and the industry to meet more user scenario needs.