China’s call to foster semiconductor independence has sent investors chasing after chip startups of all sorts. Moffett AI, a Shenzhen-based chip design company, has received a fresh Series A injection. The company did not disclose the exact amount, only saying that the proceeds were in the “several tens of millions of dollars.” The round was […]
China’s robotaxis charged ahead in 2021
Autonomous driving startups in China are in an arms race to put passengers in their machine-driven vehicles. Every few weeks, news arrives that another major player has got the greenlight to launch a new pilot program or a small-scale service. These press releases, often dotted with regulatory jargon and flowery language to aggrandize the companies’ […]
Roblox pauses service in China as it takes ‘important transitory actions’
On December 8, Roblox’s Chinese version LuoBuLeSi, published and operated by Tencent, abruptly closed down its server five months after it launched on iOS and Android. Many users, taken by surprise, took to Chinese social media to complain about the short notice. What users had been playing was in fact an “archive-deleting test version,” LuoBuLeSi […]
How Meituan is redefining food delivery in China with drones
On a congested sidewalk next to a busy mall in Shenzhen, a 20-something woman uses a smartphone app to order a milk tea on Meituan, a major food delivery company. In under ten minutes, the pearl-white drink arrives, not on the back of one of the city’s ubiquitous delivery bikes, but descending from the cloudy […]
The long haul of Microsoft’s China localization
In 2019, when LinkedIn began asking for Chinese users’ phone numbers, it was clear that the professional social network would have to follow a different set of rules in the country. But it realized simply setting up the real-name verification regime required by Chinese authorities wasn’t enough; it faced a mounting task of balancing censorship […]
AI chip maker Kneron raises $25M for autonomous driving push
AI chips, which are semiconductors designed to accelerate machine learning, have many applications. One of the promising use cases, according to Albert Liu, is using AI chips in autonomous driving vehicles. That’s why Liu’s AI chipmaking startup Kneron has been quietly racking up investments to march into smart transportation. It recently closed a new round […]
China’s AI giant SenseTime postpones IPO after US blacklisting
SenseTime, one of China’s most valuable AI solution providers, is putting its $767 million public listing on hold, the company said Monday. The announcement came three weeks after the Hong Kong Stock Exchange gave the go-ahead to SenseTime’s IPO. On December 10, the U.S. Department of Treasury added the firm to a list of “Chinese […]
Autonomous driving startup Deeproute.ai prices L4 solution at $10,000
Deeproute.ai, an autonomous vehicle startup with offices in Shenzhen and Fremont, California, unveiled an ambitious self-driving solution on Wednesday. The package, named DeepRoute-Driver 2.0, is a production-ready Level 4 system that costs approximately $10,000. The price tag is incredible given the hardware used: five solid-state lidar sensors, eight cameras, a proprietary computing system, and an […]
Hong Kong fintech unicorn WeLab raises $240M to buy Indonesian bank
A virtual bank is soon coming to Indonesia. WeLab, a Hong Kong-based fintech unicorn, announced Tuesday its acquisition of Bank Jasa Jakarta (BJJ), an Indonesian commercial bank. With the deal, WeLab is planning to launch a digital bank to capture the country’s enormous unbanked population in the second half of next year. A consortium led […]
Alibaba undergoes major management reshuffle
Alibaba is reassigning roles to four of its executives in one of the biggest reshuffles in its recent history, the company announced on Monday morning. Maggie Wu, the e-commerce titan’s former chief financial officer, will step down next April and be replaced by Toby Xu, current deputy CFO. Wu will continue to be a partner […]