Drive.ai completes $50 million financing, Andrew Ng joins board of directors
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Drive.ai, a rather mysterious self-driving startup in Silicon Valley, announced the completion of a $50 million Series B financing. The veteran venture capital fund NEA (New Enterprise Associates) led this round, and other investors included GGV Capital and existing investor Northern Light Venture Partners. Carman Chang, partner and head of Asia at NEA, became a director of the company, and Jenny Lee, managing partner of GGV, became an independent director. Drive.ai was founded in Silicon Valley two years ago, using deep learning as a starting point to promote self-driving technology. Its technology has now been iterated to the fourth generation, reaching the L4 level, which is highly automated fully autonomous driving. The company's founding team members come from former researchers at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University, General Motors, Google's self-driving team and other top schools and companies in the industry. More interestingly, Andrew Ng, the former chief scientist who just resigned from Baidu and a celebrity in the artificial intelligence academic and industry, has also joined the Drive.ai board of directors. His wife Carol Reiley is one of the founders of the company, and the company's current CEO Sameep Tandon was his student at Stanford. Carol Reilry Previously, Reiley said in an interview that Andrew Ng would not join his company. But now, Andrew Ng, who has left Baidu, can freely take the path he wants. In a statement, Drive.ai said that the three new board members will help the company expand in the US and overseas markets. "The forefront of driverless driving is deep learning," Andrew Ng pointed out. "Some traditional autonomous driving companies have made progress in deep learning, but Drive.ai is a pioneer in using deep learning to promote autonomous driving. They are building a truly modern autonomous driving software stack solution." In March this year, PingWest Pinwan reporters visited Drive.ai's laboratory exclusively and took a test ride on its fourth-generation autonomous driving car on the urban roads in Silicon Valley. Drive.ai's solution has a more natural operating style, similar to human driving habits. For example, when you drive to an intersection and encounter a red light turning green, you will not stop first and then start, but will naturally reduce the acceleration and convert to pass the intersection. Several co-founders have emphasized to PingWest that Drive.ai is a company that "puts deep learning technology first", and there is an essential difference between it and the "rule-based" autonomous driving solutions of Waymo (formerly Google Autonomous Driving) and Tesla. Its deep learning system simulates brain recognition and has stronger recognition, judgment and classification capabilities for unstructured data such as images and voices. This way of developing and operating autonomous driving systems is more scalable and has lower development costs than rule-based methods. "As the advantages of deep learning are realized, more and more companies claim that their technology is based on deep learning, but in fact few people can really do this." Sameep Tandon told PingWest Andrew Ng. In addition, unlike Tesla and Waymo's sky-high customized sensors, Drive.ai uses low-cost hardware that can be found everywhere in the market. The company's autonomous vehicles have been tested on the road in Silicon Valley for more than a year, and no accidents have occurred so far. After two years of low-key research and development, Drive.ai has achieved primitive accumulation in L4 driverless research. Now they need to further find partners to implement the technology on the car and put it into production as soon as possible. Reiley told PingWest that they hope to start with commercial fleets, and try package delivery, food delivery, retail, etc. "We hope to work with partners to achieve L4 level first, improve positioning accuracy, collect data together, and then continue to expand outward, and eventually move towards consumer-grade L5 autonomous driving." 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. |
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