Deeproute raises $100m for selfdriving cars

Deeproute in China has raised $100m to develop its ADAS driver assistance system and self driving car AI software on the latest GPU technology from Nvidia.

Deeproute has been developing its AI o software on the Nvidia Orin system on chip and is now using the ARM-based Thor system on chip alongside a variant of the latest Blackwell GPU.

The Series C funding round was led by Great Wall Motors, which owns the Ora electric EV brand and has a joint venture to build the BMW Mini in China. Chinese e-commerce and cloud computing giant Alibaba led a $300 million investment round in Deeproute in 2021, giving it a valuation of more than $1bn.

DeepRoute.ai began conducting road tests of its end-to-end AI architecture on Orin, the predecessor to Drive Thor, back in August 2023, validating the viability of the model through significant testing and simulation. DeepRoute will be able transition current development efforts to DRIVE Thor for vehicles launched in 2025.

Unlike other autonomous driving software that separate into perception, prediction, planning and control modules etc., the end-to-end model integrates all of these modules into one neural network, allowing for no information loss. The model also learns from a vast repository of video clips that fosters insight into more nuanced driving behaviours says Deeproute. One example is the model’s capacity to understand courtesy and consideration toward pedestrians during heavy rain, adjusting its actions to take cues from the pedestrian’s behaviour. 

“The end-to-end model is revolutionary for autonomous driving, signalling the end of ‘rule-based’ AI and the dawn of a new era that is ‘learning-based’.” said Maxwell Zhou, CEO of Deeproute. “High performance SoCs like Thor with 1,000 teraflops of performance are crucial for future success of the end-to-end model. With this technology, we will achieve our goal of artificial general intelligence in robots by integrating smart driving cars with end-to-end model.”

“Lots of companies in China are competing on autonomous driving. It is actually a competition over AI,” he said.