On August 4th, Toyota Motor (China) Investment Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “Toyota China”), Pony.ai, and GAC Toyota Motor Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “GAC Toyota”) held a signing ceremony. The three parties announced the joint establishment of a joint venture company. In order to promote the mass production of L4 autonomous driving pre-installation.
According to the agreement, the joint venture company will be established within this year, with an investment of more than 1 billion yuan, and will provide Toyota’s pure electric vehicle platform for Robotaxi produced by GAC Toyota. These vehicles are equipped with a vehicle redundancy system provided by Toyota that can meet fully unmanned automatic driving, equipped with Pony.ai’s automatic driving system, and put into use through the Pony.ai Robotaxi operating platform.
According to the data, Pony.ai was established in Silicon Valley in the United States at the end of 2016. It is one of the representatives of domestic self-driving car companies. It was co-founded by Peng Jun and Lou Tiancheng and is headquartered in Guangzhou. Tianyancha information shows that Pony.ai has obtained 8 rounds of financing, with a total financing amount of over US$1.1 billion. Investors include Sequoia Capital, IDG Capital, Morningside Capital, Legend Capital, Kaiming Investment, Toyota, and FAW Group wait. Among them, on March 7, 2022, Pony.ai completed its first D-round financing with a valuation of US$8.5 billion, making it the company with the highest valuation among Chinese autonomous driving startups. At that time, the former CFO Lawrence Stein also said: “The company’s financial situation is very stable, which will provide a solid foundation for the development of Pony.ai in the next few years until we start the process of large-scale commercialization.”
