Huawei Photography in Rain and Fog

According to media reports, RoboSense, the technology company of intelligent lidar sensor system, is preparing to go public in Hong Kong next year, with a planned financing of 654.38 billion US dollars.

It is reported that Zou Jun, the former CFO of car home, has been appointed as CFO of Sagitar Juchuang a few days ago and is expected to trade Sagitar Juchuang for listing. Zou Jun was the CFO of China Bicycle Battery Company, GCL Company, Dangdang Company and Dream World. He has been listed in car home and Hongkong, and has rich experience in company operation.

According to public information, sagitar Juchuang was established on 20 14 and is headquartered in Shenzhen. At present, it is the only enterprise in the world to realize the mass production delivery of the second-generation intelligent solid-state laser radar vehicle specifications, and has been designated by many car companies, covering Xpeng, BYD, GAC Ai 'an, Weimar, Extreme Krypton, Zhiji and other models.

Qiu Chunxin, 38, is the founder of Sagitar Juchuang. Before starting a business, he studied for a doctorate in the School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering and Automation of Harbin Institute of Technology.

The predecessor of sagitar Juchuang is Qiu Chunxin's outdoor mobile robot environmental awareness research group, whose main research direction is how to let robots working in the field extract environmental information.

Because the laser radar and depth vision camera used in the project are essential equipment, and there is almost no such thing in China, Qiu Chunxin found business opportunities from it. So after completing the project, a group of members of Harbin Institute of Technology who are good at algorithms decided to make products. Qiu Chunxin founded sagitar Juchuang with the research group as the initial team, and tried to develop robot vision solutions by himself, focusing on lidar.

With the spirit of scientific research, sagitar Juchuang quickly made products. 20 15 years sagitar juchuang static single-line radar products can be shipped in batches. However, it was unrealistic for unmanned driving to enter the automobile market at that time. Qiu Chunxin turned his attention to the home improvement construction industry, and built the first product seeker (non-real-time 3D laser scanner) based on static single-line radar sagitar Juchuang, which landed in the field of scene mapping. Seeker can directly scan the indoor modeling drawing of the room, and the designer only needs to design and render the indoor drawing on this basis, and give the design plan on the same day, which greatly improves the drawing efficiency of home decoration design.

After entering the construction industry, Qiu Chunxin found through market research that with the popularity of VR, panoramic viewing has gradually become a hot trend in the real estate agency industry. All kinds of real estate agents, large and small, are looking for VR viewing solutions, including panoramic cameras. Therefore, compared with the 3D static lidar which needs a perfect solution, the panorama camera of the static 3D lidar for texture and color information may be the requirement for landing faster.

So Qiu Chunxin immediately set up a panoramic viewing project team and launched the second product, IPANO, named "viewing artifact", which is a panorama camera. It can take panoramic photos of houses, meet the needs of VR house viewing, and improve the efficiency of house viewing and the matching rate of transactions in view of the inefficient working status of real estate agents. At the end of 20 15, this product opened the markets in Beijing, Shanghai, Sichuan and other places, and also brought considerable cash flow to the enterprise.

However, "viewing artifacts" is not the vision of sagitar Juchuang. At that time, both Google and Tesla began to shout for unmanned driving, which is undoubtedly the most imaginative market for lidar in the future.

In 20 16, Qiu chunxin separated the products of this camera scheme from an independent group and operated it. The main force of the company is still laser radar.

The development of lidar is not easy. The simplest lidar also needs to climb five mountains: optics, high-speed data processing technology, ranging algorithm, structural design and motor control. From single-line to multi-line, except for the motor control technology, the other four difficulties are multiplied. Therefore, there are only a handful of manufacturers who can make stable and available multi-line lidar in the world, but sagitar Juchuang has made rapid progress.

In June, 2065 438+06 10, sagitar Juchuang developed the mechanical lidar RS-LiDAR, line 16. On September 20 17, the 32-line mass production was completed, then in June 10, sagitar juchuang released the MEMS solid-state laser radar, and in May/20 18, Alibaba rookie launched the unmanned logistics vehicle based on MEMS.

20 19 12, Sagitar Juchuang passed the IATF 16949 quality management system certification in the automobile industry, which also means that it has obtained a "passport" to enter the global automobile market and is fully qualified to supply OEM, Tier 1 and other companies.

From June 5438 to February 2020, the world's first batch of vehicle-mounted MEMS solid-state laser radar RS-LiDAR-M 1 produced by Sagitar Juchuang has been shipped in batches and sent to North America.

In 20021year, sagitar Juchuang took the lead in realizing the complete locking of SOP solid-state laser radar in the world, and after SOP was started in Q2, it took the lead in realizing the mass production delivery of the second generation intelligent solid-state laser radar in the whole industry.

Today, sagitar is the only company in the world to realize the mass production delivery of the second-generation intelligent solid-state laser radar, leading the laser radar industry into the "first year of mass production" and driving the mass production of many automobile brands' pre-installed intelligent solid-state laser radars. At the same time, Qiu Chunxin will also get an IPO.

In the unmanned sensor path, there are three solutions: camera, millimeter wave radar and lidar.

The camera cost is low and the image algorithm is relatively mature, but it is difficult to obtain accurate three-dimensional information, which is greatly limited by ambient light. Millimeter-wave radar can penetrate rain and fog weather, but it can't accurately identify the target, so it can only be used in simple scenes.

The detection distance of lidar is farther than that of camera, and it can accurately obtain the three-dimensional information of objects, and the amount of detection data far exceeds that of millimeter-wave radar, so it has become the favorite environmental awareness solution of unmanned manufacturers at present.

However, the extremely high price of lidar has become a drag on the industry.

The price of 64-line mechanical laser radar used by Google and Baidu is about 700,000 RMB, and the price of 16 line mechanical laser radar also reaches 50,000 RMB. For a 2 million yuan driverless car, the cost of laser radar accounts for 30%-40%.

In the early days, Verdun was the only company that could produce lidar to meet the needs of unmanned driving. The company's products are mainly mechanical lidar. Because the mechanical lidar needs to rotate the emitter continuously to achieve the purpose of dynamic three-dimensional scanning, and needs to be equipped with rotating parts with large volume and weight, it has high cost and large volume, and its service life is generally 1-2 years, so it is difficult to be applied to production vehicles.

It was not until the emergence of hybrid solid-state lidar that this situation began to be broken. 20/kloc-in April, 2005, Quanergy, a startup company, was born at the SAE(Society Autonative Engineer) conference in the United States, and announced that it would launch a hybrid solid-state lidar in the following year at a price of about $250.

The hybrid solid-state laser radar will adopt a completely different technology from Verdun mechanical radar, and rely on MEMS micro-vibration mirror to control the laser emission angle, thus replacing the mechanical rotating structure, reducing the cost, reducing the volume of laser radar, and improving the resolution, controllability and stability.

This also broke the monopoly position of Willetten. Around 20 18 years ago, Verdun occupied nearly 80% market share in the field of unmanned lidar. With the deployment of hybrid solid-state lidar by many companies, the market share of Verizon has been declining in recent years.

Another technology giant bred in Shenzhen. Compared with giants such as Huawei and Tencent, Sagitar Juchuang is relatively young, and it has only developed for seven years since the establishment of 20 14.

On the laser radar subdivision track, sagitar Juchuangli beat Huawei, DJI and other manufacturers, ranking first in China and second in the world. According to the Application Report of 202 1 Lidar in Automobile and Industry released by Yole, Valeo ranked first, accounting for 28%. RoboSense accounted for 10%, ranking second; Luminar, Livox (DJI), Denso, Mainland China and Cepton tied for third place with 7% share; Innoviz, Ibeo, Innovusion, Huawei, Jose Technology, Innovusion and Verdun followed closely, all accounting for 3%.

At present, domestic manufacturers such as Wosai, Sagitar, Huawei, DJI, etc. are relatively advanced. Both Wosai Technology and Sagitar Juchuang have mechanical and mixed solid-state product layouts, and the research and development of pure solid-state solutions such as OPA and FLASH are also stepping up. Sagitar is also the first representative to enter the mass production stage of the second generation hybrid solid-state lidar.

Based on the cost reduction, the mass production and commercialization of lidar may come earlier. According to United Market's report this year, by 2022, the global lidar market will reach 921200 million US dollars, with a compound annual growth rate of 18.5%.

In China, with the acceleration of the transformation and upgrading of the "new four modernizations" of the automobile industry, the "14 th Five-Year Plan" national informatization plan also proposes to realize advanced autopilot applications above L3 level. With the improvement of autonomous driving level, more and more lidar will be loaded on bicycles.

Domestic smart electric vehicle enterprises can't wait to start the competition of laser radar pre-assembly and mass production. From the first-class Tucki P5 of more than 200,000 to the high-end luxury car HiPhiZ, it seems that lidar has become the latest label of automobile intelligence and entered the eve of the outbreak.

Tianyuecha shows that since its establishment, Sagitar Juchuang has obtained 10 round of financing, with investors including Cainiao Network, a smart logistics platform owned by Alibaba, Shang Qi Capital, an investment platform owned by SAIC, BAIC Group, Haitong Securities, Fosun, Oriental Fuhai, Kunzhong Capital and Yuemintou.

Judging from the past financing, sagitar Juchuang has received many blessings from giants such as the automobile industry, and there are also many strategic cooperation with car companies and peers. 202 1 12, RoboSense won the strategic investment from BYD this time, and will be further deeply integrated into the ecological "friend circle" of intelligent new energy automobile industry.

It is worth noting that, before this, Wosai Technology, another domestic lidar leader, submitted a prospectus for listing on the Science and Technology Innovation Board to the Shanghai Stock Exchange as early as 202 1 1. However, on March 5, 20021,Vosai Technology also submitted a document to apply for withdrawing the IPO application, and planned another listing opportunity.

With the termination of the listing of Jose Technology, it also puts a question mark on the optimism of the whole industry to a certain extent. An automobile analyst said that the key technical difficulty of domestic lidar lies in the adoption of vehicle regulations, and the price needs to continue to decrease. The first condition for a car factory to choose a supplier is to pass the safety test, followed by the requirements of the supply chain, which needs to be stable during the life cycle of the vehicle.

However, the obstruction of Jose technology ipo process does not affect the capital market's optimism about it. Shortly after the capital market sprint, Jose technology won a lot of capital competition blessing. June 202 1. Wosai Technology announced the completion of the D round of financing of more than $300 million. Leading investors include Gaoying Venture Capital, Xiaomi Group, Meituan and CITIC Industrial Fund. At the same time, Huatai Dollar Fund, as well as its old shareholders, Lightspeed China, Lightspeed Global and Qiming Chuangtou, etc. Also participated in this round of financing. The capital behind it is also a star gathering, which shows the fiery degree of the self-driving track.