Local automotive chip enterprises attack: Xinchi Technology has received nearly 1 billion yuan in round B financing and continued heavy positions in the Ningde era.

On July 26th, a reporter from Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily learned that Nanjing Xinchi Semiconductor Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as: Xichi Technology) announced the completion of nearly 1 billion yuan B round financing.

It is reported that this round of financing is jointly led by General Capital's State Development equipment Fund and Yunhui Capital, followed by new shareholders such as Bank of China International, Shanghai Science and Technology Fund, Zhang Jiang Hao Heng, and other old shareholders such as Matrix Partners China, Holi Capital and Xiangfeng Investment.

It is worth noting that the Ningde era also continued to place heavy bets through Morningway Capital. Invest in the capital and van Zhuo capital to act as the financial adviser to the round of financing.

Local automotive chip enterprises "attack"

In terms of financing use, Xichi Technology responded to Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily that "this round of financing will mainly be used for the research and development of more advanced process chips."

At the same time, Zhang Qiang, chairman of Xichi Technology, told Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily that "chip research and development with more advanced processes can achieve better performance and power consumption while ensuring reliability first." promote the faster landing of intelligent driving business application scenarios. "

In terms of the financing process, a reporter from Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily noted that the financing rhythm of Xichi technology is quite rapid and stable, the amount of financing is increasing year by year, and the scale of the investor team is relatively large.

Tianyan check information shows that Xichi technology has received four rounds of financing since its establishment. It is worth noting that Matrix Partners China, Lenovo Venture Capital, Sequoia Capital China and so on participated in the financing of core technology for many times.

The process of science and technology financing; source: Tianyan Cha, Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily reporter's drawing

According to public data, Xichi Technology, a local automotive chip company, was founded in 2018, mainly researching and developing vehicle specification-level chips, covering intelligent cockpit, central gateway, self-driving and so on. Its customers include FAW, FAW Chuangzhi and other domestic mainstream local car companies, joint ventures and Tier1.

According to reports, in 2019, Xichi Technology became the first semiconductor enterprise in China to pass the ISO26262 safety certification of Rheinland in Germany.

In terms of products, in 2020, Xichi Technology released 9 series of large-scale regional vehicle gauge chips, and in April 2021, the company released an upgrade of the whole series of vehicle gauge chips to further improve its performance. At the World artificial Intelligence Conference in July this year, Xichi Technology launched a fully open autopilot platform "UniDrive", which can quickly import the whole system design based on V9 series chips and provide platform support for the landing of intelligent driving business scenes.

In addition, Xinchi Technology told Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily that in March 2021, the company fulfilled an order of one million tablets per year.

Chip manufacturers "move forward" in the scuffle

China International Capital Corporation research newspaper believes that the two signs of the trend of automobile intelligence are intelligent cockpit and self-driving, which have brought an order of magnitude improvement to the intelligent architecture and algorithmic computing power of cars, and promoted the rapid evolution of automotive chips from traditional automotive chip (MCU) to system-level chip (SoC).

In terms of market size, Guohai Securities Research said that thanks to the trend of electric, intelligent and connected cars, the rapid development of automotive chips has increased the global market size from US $32.1 billion in 2016 to US $45 billion in 2020.

Qingtong Capital research shows that in the era of smart cars, the value of software and chips has been magnified, and the trend of OTA to upgrade vehicle software is obvious. At the same time, with the reshaping of the automobile industry chain, the status of chip manufacturers has been enhanced.

From the perspective of domestic competition, at present, many new players have poured into the track. On the one hand, consumer electronics giants and car companies accelerate their entry, such as Huawei, Lailai, DJI, etc.; on the other hand, consumer and industrial chip manufacturers also extend to the automotive field, such as Datang Telecom, Ziguang Guowei, Weir shares and so on. In addition, many start-ups are constantly breaking through, such as Horizon, Black Sesame, Xinchi Technology and so on.

From the perspective of industry financing, since the beginning of this year, many automotive chip manufacturers have obtained financing one after another, and the amount of financing is larger. Such as: check information shows that since 2021, smart car chip company horizon has received a total of six rounds of financing. Among them, the C6 round financing is more than 300 million US dollars, and the C7 round financing is 1.5 billion US dollars. It has also been revealed that Horizon is considering landing on the Kechuang board in the second half of this year.

In the capital market, the concept of automotive chips rose quite rapidly. Among them, since the beginning of this year, Ziguang Guowei's share price has risen 32.81%, and Weier's share price has risen 25.01%.

In Yunhui Capital founding partner Xiong Niancong's view, "Automotive Semiconductor is a long slope and thick snow track, in the general trend of intelligent development of cars, the importance of on-board chips is self-evident."

However, there are still many problems in the localization of automotive chips. "the difficulty of vehicle specification-level certification and the compatibility with the development architecture of the whole vehicle factory all need to be overcome. At the same time, the automotive chip customer certification cycle is long, high reliability requirements, in the capital, talent and other aspects need more long-term investment. " Some people in the industry analyzed and said to the reporter of Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily.

According to the judgment of Sinochem, the lack of core in the automobile industry is likely to be alleviated gradually after the second half of 2021. In this regard, Guangfa Securities research believes that if this prediction can be effectively fulfilled, OEM and the core enterprises of the automobile supply chain (especially tier1 hardware suppliers) are expected to have higher performance growth in 2022.