China’s aspiration to deploy 30 million autonomous vehicles within a decade is seeding a fledgling chip industry, with startups like Horizon Robotics emerging to build the brains behind those wheels, according to Bloomberg.
The Beijing-based company is taking aim at Nvidia and Mobileye just as the autonomous-driving business takes off and uncertainty looms over international trade. Annual revenue from the chips used in driverless vehicles globally should more than double to $5 billion by 2021, according to Gartner.
Horizon Robotics is an example of China’s resolve to move up the manufacturing value chain by focusing less on commodity smartphones and TVs, and more on sophisticated semiconductors and artificial intelligence that can help cars drive themselves or spaceships land on the moon. That industrial policy is meant to help China reduce its 1.75 trillion yuan ($276.4 billion) in annual chip imports, a value dwarfing its oil imports.
Overseers of the world’s largest car market, and electric-vehicle market, want to put Chinese-developed chips under those hoods and behind those dashboards. The government expects to have a manufacturing industry for parts such as sensors and embedded chips with a production value exceeding 100 billion yuan by 2020.
Horizon Robotics was founded in 2015 by Yu Kai, the former head of Baidu’s artificial-intelligence business called the Institute of Deep Learning. Its investors include Intel Capital, Shanghai-based Harvest Fund Management, Russian billionaire Yuri Milner and state-owned China Jianyin Investment. The company completed a $100 million funding round in December.
Horizon’s smaller-than-a-postage stamp circuit board is called “Journey 1.0,“ which was showcased inside a General Motors GMC Yukon XL at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January. The processor can detect as many as 200 targets, including pedestrians, vehicles and lane markings, in real time and help the driverless car avoid collisions.
With its Vivalytic analysis platform, Bosch has set itself the goal of making fast and highly precise diagnostics accessible at the point of care – and aims to use molecular diagnostics to become a leading provider in the market by 2030.
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