"White Rhino" Closes RMB 200 Million Series B Round, Linear Capital Continues to Double Down | Linear Portfolio

Recently, Linear Capital portfolio company White Rhino, which Linear led in its Pre-A round, announced the completion of a 200 million yuan Series B funding round. This round was led by SF Express, with continued follow-on investment from Linear Capital and participation from Xinyuan Auto. The proceeds will be primarily used for new product R&D, marketing of existing products, and supply chain optimization.

With this funding round closed, White Rhino becomes the first autonomous driving company to simultaneously receive investment from both a leading express delivery firm and a commercial vehicle OEM. The backing of these two strategic investors will accelerate White Rhino's commercial deployment in urban unmanned delivery and further solidify its industry-leading position.

Part.01

L4 Company + Express Delivery Giant + Auto Manufacturer

Building an Iron Triangle of Partnership

Since its founding in 2019, White Rhino has remained focused on providing all-weather, all-road-condition delivery solutions for urban public roads.

As a leader in the logistics industry, SF Express began deep business cooperation with White Rhino in 2024. White Rhino's daily active unmanned vehicles within the SF Express system (hereinafter referred to as "DAUs") have already reached several hundred units, with rapid ongoing deployment. These primarily serve unmanned delivery scenarios from SF Express sorting hubs to last-mile stations, significantly improving logistics efficiency.

Beyond SF Express, White Rhino has also established partnerships with STO, YTO, ZTO, Yunda, and J&T Express. Through actual cooperation with these express delivery clients, it has helped customers achieve logistics efficiency improvements of approximately 20-50%.

To cite a real-world example: one express franchisee deployed three White Rhino unmanned vehicles to cover package transfers for five stations, delivering 5,000 orders daily and achieving delivery cost reductions of over 50%.

At one company-operated express station, couriers previously had to make six round trips daily between the hub and delivery zones, with each one-way trip of 5-10 kilometers taking up to an hour. After introducing unmanned vehicles for transportation, couriers only need to handle last-mile delivery and pickup, significantly reducing their workload while increasing delivery and pickup volumes by 20% and boosting their income — achieving dual improvements in both logistics efficiency and personnel productivity.

The other strategic investor in this round, Xinyuan Auto, is a leading enterprise in urban distribution logistics vehicles. It will provide White Rhino with technical support and manufacturing capabilities in vehicle chassis R&D and automotive-grade standards, promoting the scaled deployment of automotive-grade unmanned vehicle products.

White Rhino founder and CEO Zhu Lei stated that the participation of SF Express and Xinyuan Auto represents not only recognition of White Rhino's technical capabilities and business model exploration, but also validates industry players' long-term optimism for the unmanned delivery sector. "SF Express and Xinyuan Auto are not just our shareholders — we will also coordinate our division of labor with these industry partners to jointly advance the development of the entire industry."

It is understood that in addition to leading express delivery enterprises, White Rhino also maintains deep cooperation with Yonghui Supermarkets, Dada Now, Freshippo, Ele.me, and others. Its unmanned vehicle use cases cover traditional logistics, industrial logistics, retail, fresh groceries, food delivery, cold chain, supermarkets, and security patrol, among many scenarios. The company operates commercially in over 50 cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hefei, Suzhou, Wuxi, Sanya, and Xi'an. It has not only won the trust of numerous clients but has also successively received additional investment from Yonghui, Dada, and SF Express.

Part.02

The Inflection Point for Commercial Unmanned Delivery Has Arrived

Currently, the L4 unmanned delivery industry is transitioning from early-stage "scenario proliferation" to a "focused convergence" phase, with leading players concentrating their efforts on the hub-to-station delivery scenario.

Rather than simply counting vehicle numbers, White Rhino has always used unmanned vehicle "DAUs" as its core metric, focusing on actual vehicle operations. Zhu Lei believes that unmanned vehicles are more like robots — productivity tools. "What we care about isn't how many robots we've produced, but how many robots are actually working every day. That's the real value of unmanned vehicles as productive forces."

Through six years of exploration and daily operations of nearly a thousand vehicles, White Rhino's unmanned vehicles have achieved safe, stable, normalized delivery operations that deliver economic value to customers.

White Rhino's goal is to reach 5,000 daily active unmanned delivery vehicles by 2026.

Although the unmanned delivery sector has made rapid progress in recent years, Zhu Lei notes that "the industry is still in its early stages of development, and compliance challenges remain. There are currently no unified national regulatory standards for products and road rights. While the government maintains an open attitude of 'pilot first, test first,' achieving broader nationwide deployment requires testing and validation in different cities, which carries high costs."

In response to these conditions, White Rhino is also driving industry development through technological innovation and industrial collaboration.

On the technology and product front, White Rhino's unmanned vehicles rely on full-stack self-developed L4 autonomous driving technology, with core technology built on BEV + Transformer architecture to construct an end-to-end autonomous driving closed-loop system covering perception, decision-making, and planning. Combined with multi-layer sensing equipment, it achieves 360° blind-spot-free environmental perception and precise understanding of complex urban scenarios. Additionally, through extreme optimization of online inference, it accomplishes full computing on a single Orin chip. With its full-stack technical closed loop, efficient data-driven approach, and extreme cost control, White Rhino has established significant advantages in safety, autonomous driving capability, and economic viability.

On the compliance front, White Rhino is also actively participating in local government road rights testing, pushing unmanned vehicles from "regional access" toward "national standardization."

With the joint investment and collaboration of leading express delivery enterprises and commercial vehicle manufacturers, White Rhino has already established a strong foundation in scenario access and scaled vehicle manufacturing.

Currently, White Rhino is accelerating the construction of a diversified unmanned driving ecosystem. Beyond logistics, the company has reached deep cooperation with Ele.me to deploy campus unmanned delivery vehicles, solving the "last mile" delivery challenge within enclosed campuses. It has also partnered with urban management departments to deploy intelligent patrol vehicles integrating real-time monitoring and emergency response capabilities, strengthening urban security efficiency. Additionally, it is developing specialized vehicle models adapted to different scenarios for overseas markets including Australia and Europe.

The closing of this funding round and cooperation represents not only an important milestone for White Rhino's development but also a key leap forward propelling urban unmanned delivery vehicles from "technology validation" to "scaled commercial deployment." Going forward, White Rhino will work with more industry partners to drive the commercial deployment of unmanned vehicles in more scenarios, making them truly "part of urban infrastructure."

About Linear Capital

Linear Capital is an early-stage investment institution focused on the "frontier technology + industry" direction — that is, frontier technologies represented by data intelligence, digital new infrastructure, next-generation robotics technology, and new technological transformations in traditional domains (such as biomedicine, materials, energy, etc.), applied across vertical industries to substantially improve industrial efficiency, empower them to solve pain point problems, and complete industrial upgrading — achieving excess returns through substantial increases in industrial value. It currently manages ten funds with total assets under management of approximately $2 billion.

Our investment stage focuses primarily on leading angel to Series A rounds, with individual investment amounts ranging from $1 million to $10 million (or RMB equivalent).

To date, we have made early-stage investments in over 120 entrepreneurial teams including Horizon Robotics, Kujiale, Sensors Data, Tezign, Rokid, Guandata, and Agile Robots. The combined valuation of Linear Capital's portfolio companies is approximately $20 billion.

In the near term, Linear Capital is working to become the premier "Data Intelligence Technology Fund," and in the long term, gradually build itself into the most influential "Frontier Technology Application Fund."