Chinese autonomous driving startup DeepRoute.ai announced on Tuesday that it has completed a strategic series C1 funding round, raising $100 million from leading Chinese automotive original equipment manufacturers or OEMs.

The funding will enhance the research and development in end-to-end model, help scale global automakers' collaboration and explore future robotaxi business, and support the recruitment of more artificial intelligence talents, the company said.

"The strategic investment from automakers is a significant recognition for our technology and mass production capabilities," said Maxwell Zhou, CEO of DeepRoute.ai, adding that the company aims to expand its reach in global markets.

Since August, about 20,000 vehicles integrated with DeepRoute IO, the company's intelligent driving platform, have been delivered to customers. It plans to release more than 10 additional series models in collaboration with OEMs next year.

Its next-generation intelligent driving platform that utilizes vision language action model (VLA) is expected to be launched next year. VLA is a multi-modal model that integrates visual information and instructions to generate executable actions.

As current human-supervised smart driving cars continue to gather data, DeepRoute IO will continue to iterate towards achieving full autonomous driving capability without human oversight. This will enable the company to explore unsupervised robotaxis business in the future through partnerships with mobility platforms.

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