Basic Situation

TuSimple was founded in September 2015 and obtained the first public road test license for autonomous trucks in Shanghai in October 2018. It currently has a fleet of more than 50 driverless trucks worldwide.

Tucson's partner team has experts in artificial intelligence, computer vision, high-performance computing, vehicle engineering, hardware development and other fields. The team is comprehensive. It has China's largest independent data collection and calibration platform. On average, thousands of hours of various driving data are stored in the database every month, and an average of 20,000 pictures are processed by the manual calibration platform every day. Tucson has won 10 world firsts in the evaluation of KITTI and CityScapes , the two most authoritative data sets in the world in the field of autonomous driving , and won the world first in the 300W and AFLW evaluations in the field of face recognition.

Technical Introduction

TuSimple's independently developed L4 autonomous truck solution is mainly based on cameras and integrates lidar and millimeter-wave radar. It has core autonomous driving functions such as perception, positioning, decision-making, high-precision maps, and vehicle control. It can realize fully autonomous driving of freight trucks in trunk logistics scenarios and semi-closed hub scenarios.

Currently, TuSimple has started trial operations in Beijing, Shanghai, Hebei, California and Arizona in the United States.

About the Team

TuSimple has established two R&D centers in Beijing and San Diego, California. The Beijing technical team is mainly composed of returned overseas PhDs represented by Chief Scientist Wang Naiyan, COO Hao Jianan, and Autonomous Driving R&D Director Wu Nan. The team members come from famous Asian universities such as the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the University of Hong Kong, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Nanyang Technological University, Waseda University, and the University of Tokyo. There are 4 PhDs from Nanyang Technological University in the team alone . They are either classmates during their doctoral studies or brothers in the same laboratory. The California technical team is mainly composed of masters and doctoral students from famous North American universities such as California Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, and UCSD . Among them, the California team has 3 senior researchers and R&D engineers from Carnegie Mellon University, a famous American driverless school. They joined the company in its early days and are early members of the TuSimple California team. The MRSD group of the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University also designated TuSimple as a designated internship company.

Financing

In April 2016 , TuSimple received a RMB 50 million Series A investment from Sina.

On August 3, 2017 , it announced that it had received investment from global chip giant NVIDIA . After this investment, NVIDIA held a 3% stake in TuSimple, and the investment amount was not disclosed.

In November 2017 , TuSimple announced again that it had recently completed a US$ 55 million Series C financing round led by Compound Capital, followed by Sina and Zhiping Capital.

In June 2019 , TuSimple completed a $ 200 million financing round, with investors including CDH Investments and Sina Capital, each contributing $ 100 million. This round of financing also belongs to the D round, and the $ 200 million includes the $ 95 million led by Sina Capital announced in February 2019 .

On September 17, 2019 , autonomous driving startup TuSimple announced that it had received $ 120 million in Series D2 investment, completing a total of $ 215 million in Series D financing. In addition to the previously announced UPS (United Parcel Express), TuSimple's Series D2 investors also include new investor CDH Capital and Tier 1 supplier Mando Corporation .

Development History

In September 2015 , the company's predecessor, Beijing Tucson Internet Technology Co., Ltd., was established, with two R&D centers in Beijing, China and San Diego, the United States, and announced that it had received RMB 50 million in Series A financing.

In March 2016 , Tucson's headquarters moved from Yingdu Building in Haidian District to the World Trade Center Business Building in Beijing's CBD , and fully transformed into autonomous driving.

In August 2016 , Tucson signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Beiben to jointly develop the third-generation unmanned military vehicle;

In September 2016 , it won 10 world firsts in the world-renowned autonomous driving algorithm evaluation datasets KITTI and Cityscapes ;

In November 2016 , Director Guo Hong of the Zhongguancun Management Committee and his team visited Tucson headquarters;

In December 2016 , it signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Tangshan Caofeidian Industrial Park to jointly build the Caofeidian autonomous driving truck test base, automated logistics and transportation commercial operation base, and automated logistics demonstration zone.

In January 2017 , it was renamed Beijing TuSimple Technology Co., Ltd.

At the end of April 2017 , Tucson's L2 -class truck, developed in cooperation with a domestic heavy-duty automobile manufacturer, was tested at the Chang'an University Automotive Field.

In May 2017 , Tucson signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Shanghai International Automobile City to carry out research and development and promotion of technologies related to autonomous driving of logistics trucks.

On June 15, 2017 , TuSimple, a Chinese startup focused on the development of autonomous truck technology, announced that it had obtained the 33rd driverless road test license issued by the California Department of Motor Vehicles ( DMV ) . This means that TuSimple has become one of the companies that can legally put driverless cars on the road in California, following Google, Mercedes-Benz, NIO, Baidu, Apple, etc.

In May 2018 , TuSimple established its China headquarters in Lingang, Shanghai.

In August 2018 , TuSimple earned its first revenue from driverless container truck transportation, truly realizing the practical operation of driverless container trucks.

References

• 1. TuSimple, empowering the trillion-dollar logistics and transportation market with driverless trucks: Sohu [cited on 2019-08-08T16:00:00.000Z]