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’ […]
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 […]
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 […]
China roundup: Meng Wanzhou’s release and Huawei’s future
Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch’s China roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what they mean to people in the rest of the world. On Friday, Huawei’s chief financial executive Meng Wanzhou was released from house arrest in Vancouver after reaching a breakthrough deal with the U.S. Justice Department. Chinese […]
China Roundup: Kai-Fu Lee’s first Europe bet, WeRide buys a truck startup
Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch’s China Roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what they mean to people in the rest of the world. Despite the geopolitical headwinds for foreign tech firms to enter China, many companies, especially those that find a dependable partner, are still forging ahead. For this […]