China VC Weekly: AI, NLP and In-Memory Computing

AI and Cloud were the VC focus in China this past week. Smart driving firm Novauto raised an undisclosed sum of tens of millions of yuan, natural language processing company Data Grind bagged 270 million, while in-memory computing firm MemVerge got $19 million from Intel, Cisco and other notable investors.

Novauto gets tens of millions of yuan from Evergrande High Technology and others

Smart driving startup Novauto announced that it has completed a series A round of financing worth tens of millions of yuan, led by Evergrande High Technology. Zhongguancun Development Frontier Enterprise Investment Fund, Hemi Ventures, PC Securities Financial Group and Turing Ventures followed. This round will be used for technology R&D and talent recruitment and building a “high-performance intelligent driving control platform.”

About Novauto

Novauto was established in April 2019. It was jointly incubated by the Tsinghua University School of Vehicle Transportation and the Department of Electronic Engineering of Tsinghua University. Its main service is an intelligent driving control platform that caters to car manufacturers. 

Natural language processing firm Data Grand raises 270 million yuan in a Series B+ round

Chinese text and natural language processing (NLP) firm Data Grand announced that it has officially completed a 270 million yuan Series B+ round of financing led by Shenzhen Venture Capital, contributors include SAIF Partners China, Chenshan Capital, Zhongmi Capital and others. This round of financing will go towards investments in product technology development and market expansion, and improvements on the AI + RPA direction.

Earlier, in November 2018, Data Grand also received 160 million yuan in Series B financing led by Chenshan Capital.

About Data Grand

Data Grand was established in 2015. It’s specialty includes AI technologies such as NLP and optical character recognition. It has also established a complex text data collection, annotation, and training system.

In-memory computing firm MemVerge completes a $19 million strategic round with Intel and Cisco among investors

In-memory computing company MemVerge announced that it has raised $19 million in financing. The list of the company’s strategic investors includes Intel Capital as well as Cisco Investments, NetApp, Inc. and SK hynix, Inc. The company’s previous investors Gaorong Capital, Glory Ventures, Jerusalem Venture Partners, LDV Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Northern Light Venture Capital also took part in the round.

The investment will be used for the development of MemVerge’s Memory Machine software and to ramp up the company’s sales and marketing efforts.

About MemVerge

MemVergewas founded in 2017 and is headquartered in San Jose, California, USA, and has branches in Beijing and Shanghai, China. The firm’s founder Dr. Charles Fan, previously served as vice president at VMware senior. The company promotes the vision that every application should run in memory.