Autonomous Driving Startup Pony.ai Raises $112M
Summary
James Peng, co-founder and CEO, was previously Chief Architect at Baidu, where he oversaw the technical direction of the autonomous driving division and other key areas such as big data and monetization platforms. Pony.ai established its second headquarter office in the city last October, and began testing its fleet of autonomous driving vehicles on public roads this past December. The future market will be completely different from the traditional one we know today—business models and customer preferences will be redefined,” remarks Wenji Jin, Managing Director of Legend Capital. Pony.ai is one of the very few companies we’ve seen that possesses the critical success factors: a team with a proven track record and extremely well-rounded technical expertise from both research and industry backgrounds. I believe Pony.ai holds the most promise in delivering L4 technology to the mass market.” “We greatly admire both James and Tiancheng, and the talented world-class engineering team that they lead,” says Fisher (Fei) Zhang, Partner of Morningside Ventures.