5Y News | Jizhi Robotics Announces $30 Million Series A Funding Round

On May 18, 2022, Beijing PhiGent Technology Co., Ltd. ("PhiGent Robotics") announced the completion of its $30 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Zhence Capital, with continued follow-on investments from existing shareholders including Atypical Ventures, 5Y Capital, and GSR Ventures. Strategic investor Horizon Robotics provided substantial support on commercial deployment. The company completed three funding rounds within six months of its founding, reflecting investors' recognition of its rapid growth.

PhiGent Robotics has achieved multiple notable milestones in autonomous driving technology breakthroughs and product deployment centered on visual 3D understanding. Proceeds from this round will be used for core technology R&D, high-quality mass production scaling, and broader commercial deployment.

A partner at 5Y Capital stated: "5Y Capital continuously monitors opportunities for technological transformation and innovation in the market. PhiGent Robotics is a company with deep technical conviction, eager to change industry dynamics and people's lifestyles. For autonomous driving and general robotics, the founding team has unique endgame insights and clever go-to-market strategies that reveal a business landscape with unlimited potential. 5Y Capital believes PhiGent Robotics' core technical capabilities will bring disruptive innovation to the industry."

Founded in August 2021, PhiGent Robotics is among the earliest Chinese pioneers in artificial intelligence algorithms, software, and chips. The founding team has eight years of collaboration history, with successful entrepreneurial experience and extensive commercial deployment expertise. The core team of over 130 members hails from top-tier domestic and international AI algorithm, chip, and autonomous driving companies, as well as mainstream Tier 1 suppliers and OEMs, and continues to attract technical and industry experts from China and abroad. Within just six months of establishment, PhiGent Robotics has achieved a series of industry-notable advances:

First, PhiGent Robotics has fully launched a high-level autonomous driving solution centered on visual 3D understanding, built on a Software 2.0 architecture with end-to-end data-driven development. The entire solution is designed for mass production scaling, capable of adaptively supporting all high-level autonomous driving functions based on a 5R13V sensor configuration while remaining backward-compatible with basic ADAS functions on a 1R1V configuration. As a mature product solution featuring controllable costs, high adaptability, and modular delivery, it immediately garnered close attention from multiple first-tier OEMs and mainstream Tier 1 suppliers upon launch. The company has rapidly secured several in-depth partnerships including mass production intelligent driving projects with domestic leading automakers, achieving significant progress in project execution and commercial deployment while earning strong customer feedback.

Second, PhiGent Robotics has introduced its first full-stack self-developed hardware-software integrated product — the binocular vision radar PhiGent Heimdallr. This innovative and commercially viable product simultaneously obtains 3D foundational descriptive information from Low Level Vision and high-level semantic information from High Level Vision through efficient AI computation, combining both to achieve granular perception and understanding of the real world. This further enhances forward 3D perception capabilities for autonomous driving and drives advancement in autonomous driving classification levels.

PhiGent Heimdallr product image and point cloud visualization

Additionally, on the research front, the team's self-developed BEVDet, a new autonomous driving perception paradigm centered on 3D understanding, achieved world-first place in pure vision 3D object detection on the authoritative autonomous driving benchmark nuScenes (2021). To date, PhiGent Robotics maintains continuous leadership in the BEVDet paradigm on global leaderboards. Compared to many other paradigms, BEVDet offers higher compute efficiency and lower data requirements, aligning with current industry development conditions and demands, and playing a critical role in enabling large-scale mass production of autonomous driving.

BEVDet maintains world-leading performance on nuScenes

Going forward, PhiGent Robotics will continue to pursue its vision of "building 3D intelligent computing for autonomous driving and robotics through hardware-software co-optimization, enabling intelligent interaction between machines and the physical world." The company will continuously address foundational challenges in autonomous driving and robotics through innovative technical breakthroughs, and provide OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers with high-performance, cost-effective, and highly reliable solutions and products through scalable mass production autonomous driving products and business models.

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