Cathay Innovation has invested in Beijing-based autonomous driving start-up Momenta, as part of a USD57 million Series B financing. GGV Capital also participated in this round.
The financing was was led by Nio Capital with participation from Daimler AG, Shunwei Capital, Sinovation Ventures and Unity Ventures. Momenta is the first-ever investment for Mercedes-Benz parent Daimler AG in a Chinese self-driving company. Cathay Innovation’s LPs also include world renowned tier-one companies that have shown great interest in self-driving technologies.
Founded in early September of 2016, Momenta is building the “brains” for autonomous vehicles. Its deep-learning based software in perception, HD semantic mapping, and data-driven path planning enables the realization of full autonomy. Momenta offers multi-level autonomous driving solutions as well as big data products and services.
Momenta’s team comprises a number of the world’s top experts in computer vision and deep learning, including one of the authors of Faster R-CNN and ResNet, the most influential framework in image recognition, as well as winners of ImageNet 2015, ImageNet2017 and MS COCO Challenge 2015. With advanced technical competence and a strong commitment to innovation, Momenta’s leadership in the autonomous driving software space has been recognized by the world’s renowned automakers and tier one companies.
Xudong Cao, Momenta CEO, says: “With this series B funding, we are focusing on three aspects for the next stage: continuously building our key capacities in Artificial Intelligence, that is, Big Data, Big Computation and AI talents: commercialization of our vision-based perception and HD mapping technologies; and research and development in high frequency scenarios of L4 full autonomous driving.”
Mingpo Cai, President of Cathay Capital Private Equity, adds: “We have been very impressed by Momenta’s world-class team, their extremely promising autonomous driving technology portfolio, and the concrete projects they have developed with a number of domestic and international auto manufacturers. We are living an industrial revolution in transport and mobility, through which new players will emerge. As China is now a top market for self-driving cars and will continue to accelerate in this field, we are convinced that Momenta has the potential to become a global leader.”
Jenny Lee, Managing Partner, GGV Capital, adds: “GGV has been investing globally in the innovation of smart transportation, and autonomous driving is definitely one of the important thesis. After studying the global differences in market, policy and customer dynamics, we see opportunities for different companies to win in different geographies. We believe that Momenta will become the leader in the Chinese autonomous driving market, with its unique approach of data collection and processing, strong capabilities in deep learning, as well as innovative go-to-market strategy.”
