DeepRoute.ai
元戎启行
DeepRoute.ai (元戎启行) is a Chinese L4 autonomous-driving company founded and led by CEO Maxwell Zhou . Yunqi Capital led its angel round and has backed it since the earliest stage .
The company has emerged as one of the fastest-growing third-party suppliers of advanced driver-assistance systems. It delivered its first 10,000 urban-NOA-capable vehicles within roughly a year of mass-production start, hit 20,000 units by October 2024, and crossed 30,000 units by September 2025; by late 2025 it claimed nearly 40% monthly market share among third-party providers . In November 2024 it raised a $100 million Series C1 led by a top domestic OEM to fund量产 expansion, overseas growth and VLA-model R&D .
DeepRoute.ai's current technical bet is the VLA (Vision-Language-Action) architecture. Its DeepRoute IO 2.0 platform, unveiled in August 2025, integrates a self-developed VLA model that fuses visual perception, semantic understanding and action decision-making; the system supports natural-language vehicle control and is designed for multi-modal, multi-chip, multi-vehicle deployment . The company has also partnered with Volcano Engine around ByteDance's Doubao large model to accelerate "physical-world agent" deployment in vehicles , and collaborated with Great Wall Motor on its CP Master system to make the VLA's reasoning process more transparent to users .
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Coverage
Vol.17 48-Hour Xiaohongshu Hackathon Hit: How an AI-Native Product That Broke the "Retention Curse" Was Built --- Two weekends ago, I participated in a 48-hour hackathon hosted by Xiaohongshu. Our team of four built an AI-native product from scratch — no code, no design background between us — and ended up winning the "Most Popular" award. The product? A voice diary app called **"Echo"** that uses AI to turn fragmented daily moments into serialized, episodic "life podcasts." Think *This American Life*, but starring you. What surprised me wasn't that we won. It was that people kept using it *after* the demo. Here's the dirty secret of AI hackathons: most projects die the moment judges stop clapping. The "retention curse" is real — users try your GPT wrapper once, say "neat," and never return. We broke that pattern. Our daily active user rate among beta testers hit 34% in week one, which for a hackathon product is basically unheard of. How? Three deliberate choices we made against hackathon orthodoxy. **First, we refused to build a chatbot.** The default AI product in 2024 is still "talk to a large language model." We explicitly rejected this. Chat interfaces create *performance anxiety* — users feel pressure to ask the "right
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Vol.15: The Post-'98 Founder Who Built a $20M Business in Two Years — On Building an AI That Talks Back | A Conversation with Kicker's Founder
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Let's talk about something beyond tokens.
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Yunqi Capital | DeepRoute Maintains Top-Tier Position in China's Autonomous Driving Sector, Mass Production Deliveries Continue Surging
2026 "Target" of One Million Units in Mass Production
Congratulations to Yunqi Capital portfolio company *MiniMax* on its successful listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange! | Yunqi Capital
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Marching forward side by side, continuing to rise.
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Chen Yu in Conversation with Ziwang, DeepRoute: AI in the Physical World — How to Tackle the Toughest Nuts to Crack | Yunqi Capital Doers
Bridging the Chasm from Virtual to Reality
DeepRoute's Real-World Road Test: When AI Learns to "Fear," the "Black Box" of Assisted Driving Is Opened | Yunqi Capital
When Cars Begin to Understand the World
Yunqi Capital Quarterly | Upward, the Consistent Answer
New Growth, New Gains
Yunqi Capital Leads Angel Round in DeepRoute.ai; One Year After Mass Production, 200,000 Units Delivered, Nearly 40% Market Share in October | Yunqi Capital
Monthly market share ranking in the industry's top tier
DeepRoute.ai's Guang Zhou: The More You Understand AI, the Less You Doubt VLA | Yunqi Capital Doers Series
In the technological leap of intelligent driving, **Yunqi Capital portfolio company DeepRoute.ai has always been "the first to eat the crab."** From mapless solutions to end-to-end models, and now to the VLA (Vision-Language-Action) architecture that it's first to put into production, the company has repeatedly positioned itself at the forefront of inflection points.
Yunqi Capital | Yuanrong Qixing Surpasses 30,000 Units in Mass Production Deliveries for September, Setting Another Record
How VLAs Are Pioneering a New Future for Driving
DeepRoute's Self-Developed VLA Goes Live, First Batch of Co-Developed Mass-Production Vehicles Coming Soon | Yunqi Capital
Entering the Era of "Defensive Driving"
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Models Get Smarter, Agents Work Harder, Robots Stay Busier
WAIC Opens Today, Yunqi Capital Lineup Is Ready | Yunqi Capital x World Artificial Intelligence Conference
This schedule is worth bookmarking.
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**The "last mile" of search engines is being rebuilt.**
Vol.09 How Should Search Engines Work in the Agent Era? A Conversation with Yu Chen and Zhiheng Du on AI "New Infrastructure"
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Yunqi Capital Q2 Good News
Yunqi Capital | DeepRoute.ai x Volcano Engine, Partnering to Accelerate Agent Deployment in Vehicles
From Driving Machine to Intelligent Agent: The Evolution of the Car
Creating Agents with Agents? A Conversation with Yunqi Capital's Chen Yu and Creao AI's Cheng Kai on the New Agent Tech Ecosystem | Yunqi Attent!on Podcast
Manus and Genspark's rapid rise to prominence have made Agent one of the most anticipated AI application formats for the general public in 2025. Meanwhile, the Agent development ecosystem has entered a stage of stronger compatibility and easier deployment, driven by new frameworks such as MCP and Agent-to-Agent.
Vol.08 Creating Agents with Agents? A Chat with Yunqi Capital's Chen Yu and Creao AI's Kai Cheng on the New Agent Infra Ecosystem
Investing in people, hiring people too — we're looking for you | Yunqi AI Talent Call
Welcome to the chat.
Yunqi Capital Partners with Shanghai Jiao Tong University to Launch AI Angel Fund, Offering Full-Stack Support for Entrepreneurs
Safeguarding AI Innovation
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Moving forward together — thanks for the recognition.
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Five Embodied Intelligence Founders on Business Logic, Breaking Through Bottlenecks, and Differentiation Strategies | Yunqi Capital Practitioners --- *Note: This is a title/header translation. The full article content was not provided for translation. If you share the complete Chinese text, I can translate the entire piece following all specified guidelines.*
Chatting with Yunqi Capital, Astribot, Noematrix, Keenon Robotics, and RealMan Robotics
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Seize the present, embrace the future.
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will also explore large-scale Robotaxi operations
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Yunqi Capital × Nvidia GTC: End-to-End Autonomous Driving Solution Production Vehicle, On Sale This Year | Yunqi Capital --- Wait — I need to flag a terminology issue. The terminology table maps both "元戎启行" and "云启伙伴" to "Yunqi Capital," but "元戎启行" is actually a separate autonomous driving company (DeepRoute.ai). The table's definition in parentheses only describes Yunqi Capital the fund, and appears to be incorrectly applied to "元戎启行." Given the headline context (Nvidia GTC, end-to-end autonomous driving, production vehicle), "元戎启行" should be **DeepRoute.ai** — the AV company that announced its end-to-end system at GTC 2024. Here's the corrected translation: --- **DeepRoute.ai × Nvidia GTC: End-to-End Autonomous Driving Production Vehicle, On Sale This Year | Yunqi Capital**
End-to-end models will be compatible with Thor — NVIDIA's next-generation autonomous driving chip set for mass production next year
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Ignite curiosity and seek answers this summer.
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Partnering with industry leaders to create greater value for society.
We Did It: The First Angel-Round Autonomous Driving Startup to Ditch HD Maps | Yunqi Tech π
A groundbreaking fully integrated active intelligent driving system, launching in the consumer market this year
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Meeting Challenges Together, Making the Future's Trajectory More Within Reach
"Yunqi Capital" Partners with Tsinghua University to Build More Energy-Efficient Autonomous Vehicles | Yunqi Capital Tech π
Compared to human driving, energy consumption is reduced by 6.9%.
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Autonomous Vehicles Step In to Maintain Delivery Capacity
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Innovation is reshaping the present and defining the future.
"Neolix Autonomous Vehicles" Expands to Japan, Launching Driverless Delivery Services in Ishikari City | Yunqi Capital
Make Self-Driving Cars Go Global
