Autonomous Driving Startup WeRide Completes Series C Financing, Bringing the Valuation of the Firm to $3.3 billion

WeRide, a global autonomous driving company, announced today it raised hundreds of millions of dollars in its Series C financing, from IDG Capital, Homeric Capital, CoStone Capital, Cypress Star, Sky9 Capital, K3 Ventures, and others. CMC Capital Partners, Qiming Venture Partners and Alpview Capital also participated in this round as existing investors. The firm is said to be valued at $3.3 billion.

The new round of fundraising followed the autonomous driving startup’s $310 million B round completed in January, led by bus manufacturer Yutong Group.

“With this round of funding, WeRide will continue to invest in R&D and commercialization, with the aim of delivering large-scale autonomous mobility in the coming future,” said Tony Han, Founder and CEO of WeRide.

Established in 2017, WeRide maintains R&D and operation centers in Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Wuhan, Zhengzhou and Anqing, as well as in the Silicon Valley.

The Guangzhou-based firm launched its first Robotaxi service, completely open to the public, in November 2019 in Guangzhou, covering an area of 144 square kilometers. Since June 2020, the service has been available to the public through Amap, a popular ride-hailing mobile app with 140 million monthly active users.

WeRide was one of the first enterprises to open a test ride to the public. Han believes that this would help collect more data in a real scenario to better understand users’ needs. A total of 147,128 trips were completed with more than 60,000 passengers during the first year since operations were launched.

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The leading L4 autonomous driving mobility company also launched a series of videos to document its driverless test drives in urban arterial roads, secondary arterial roads, expressways, tunnels, toll stations, highways, and more.

At present, it is rolling out driverless testing in both China and the U.S. to speed up its growth and prepare for the operation of Mini Robobuses.