Xiaomi acquires autonomous driving company for 500 million yuan, absorbs Microsoft talents, and accelerates its pace of car manufacturing

Lei Jun, known as a "model worker", took Xiaomi from a start-up to a Fortune 500 company in just 10 years. Earlier this year, Lei Jun said he was willing to stake his entire reputation on Xiaomi Auto, which would be his last major entrepreneurial project in his life.

At present, Xiaomi’s car manufacturing plan is on the right track.

Recently, Xiaomi announced that it had spent 77.37 million US dollars (about 500 million RMB) to acquire Deepmotion, an autonomous driving technology company. Xiaomi President Wang Xiang responded that autonomous driving technology is the most important basic technology for smart electric vehicles, and Deepmotion has deep technical accumulation and implementation experience in this field. Xiaomi hopes to accelerate the development of Xiaomi's autonomous driving technology through this acquisition.

On the other hand, Xiaomi co-founder Lin Bin recently posted on Weibo that several old colleagues from Microsoft have joined Xiaomi, saying that he is "particularly happy that several old colleagues from Microsoft have joined Xiaomi to build cars."

According to information, Lin Bin worked at Microsoft from 1995 to 2006. Microsoft Asia Research Institute was founded by Lin Bin in 2003 with the assistance of Zhang Hongjiang and Zhang Yaqin.

Lei Jun once emphasized that Xiaomi is not the Xiaomi of 10 years ago. Now Xiaomi has 108 billion yuan in cash flow and can afford to lose money. But in fact, Xiaomi's current car-making strategy is very similar to the concept of building Xiaomi mobile phones 10 years ago. Although it is a "newcomer" in the industry, it has attracted top talents in related software, hardware, and Internet industries.

In the early days of Xiaomi, most of the company's talents came from Microsoft, Google, Motorola and Kingsoft Software. Now that Xiaomi has a lot of money, it has once again attracted many top talents to jointly build smart cars. As the only ecological enterprise besides Apple and Huawei that owns mobile phones, tablets, and smart home AIoT platforms, Xiaomi's story around cars is not difficult to tell.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.