SAIC, Toyota, Bosch Back Chinese Autonomous Startup Momenta's $500M Funding Round

China’s autonomous driving start-up, Momenta, secured $500 million from SAIC Motor, Toyota Motor Corp TM, and auto parts supplier Bosch for an undisclosed valuation. The company has crossed over $700 million in total funding, marking an important step towards the firm’s international expansion, Reuters reports.

• Other investors in the funding round include Daimler AG DMLRY DDAIF, Temasek, Yunfeng Capital, and Tencent Holdings Ltd TCEHY. Momenta reportedly exceeded $1 billion in valuation in two years.
• Momenta’s Chinese rivals Pony.ai amassed over $1 billion within five years, and WeRide.ai raised over $500 million by capturing investments from big automakers. Pony.ai raked $5.3 billion in its November fundraising round.
• The former Microsoft Corp MSFT executive, Cao Xudong-led firm, tested autonomous cars in Beijing and Suzhou and owned a research center in Germany’s Stuttgart.
• Momenta worked with automakers to develop mass-production vehicles with self-driving functions to gather real-time data for fully autonomous driving technologies for future products.
• Momenta aimed reduction of billions of dollars in expenditure by crowdsourcing data from auto partners. 
• Momenta expected all of its vehicles to go driverless in 2024 by which it expects to significantly reduced labor costs and accomplish a positive operating margin per vehicle.
• Multiple customers are expected to commence mass-producing mid-to-high-end cars equipped with Momenta’s software by 2021 end. Momenta’s solutions could be powering millions of vehicles by 2024 or 2025.
• Toyota last year partnered with Momenta to develop a high definition (HD) mapping platform in China for autonomous driving vehicles.