Alliance Ventures closely monitors the Mobility innovation ecosystem – Autonomous Driving
Alliance Ventures’ 5 Innovation Territories
Alliance Ventures focuses its strategic investments over 5 Innovation Territories which have been closely tracked since 2018:
- New Mobility
- Autonomous Driving
- Electric Vehicle, Cleantech & Energy
- Connected Servicess
- Enterprise 2.0
Our insights on the Autonomous Driving Innovation Ecosystem
We would like to share our vision and analysis of each Innovation Territory, focusing now on Autonomous Driving in which we categorized Manufacturers, Perception sensors and algorithms, Mobility Many-Core Chip suppliers, AI for decision making, Incidentology, Explainable AI for ADAS and more. The results presented below have been found from our internal data, monitored from 2018 to 2021.
While investments in Autonomous Driving startups have been stable in number of fundraising rounds, they have been especially strong over the first semester of 2020, reaching $5.5B, almost half the investments recorded between January 2018 and June 2021. Within this ecosystem, startups from the United States have focused 64% of those amounts with Waymo raising $2.25B. As we have seen in the New Mobility sector, in Autonomous Driving China has the largest median raised money per Autonomous Driving startup ($100M) far ahead of the US ($17M).
We observed an interesting trend in the distribution of the series over the period. Seed and Series A were the most common in 2018 (over 80% of Series in Autonomous Driving. However since 2019, investments amounts have been starting to focus more and more on larger rounds with Series C+ now having all the money focused on them ($1.5B out of $1.7B in the first semester of 2021).
When we take an even closer look within Autonomous Driving which sub-categories get the largest focus, we found out that in the top 3 Manufacturers (67% in amount raised), Perception sensors and algorithms (24%) and Many-core chip suppliers (9%) have raised the most money
Included in these amounts are some major success stories like our portfolio startup Weride that raised a 257M€ Series C in May 2021 including 30M€ from Alliance Ventures, reaching a post-money valuation of close to 2.8B€. The American Autonomous Driving manufacturer Waymo also raised an astonishing $2.2B in 2020.
Sources: Pitchbook, Crunchbase, Axios, Strictky VC Newsletter, Trucks Newsletter
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