New Energy Truck Firm DeepWay Bags $67M in Round-A Financing

DeepWay, a smart new energy truck company, announced on August 23 that it has secured 460 million yuan ($67.19 million) in Series A financing. This is the first round of external financing for DeepWay, setting a record for the largest financing scale of a fresh entrant to the field of smart new energy trucks.

The financing was led by Qiming Venture Partners, joined by Lenovo Capital and Incubator Group, VLight Capital, CCB Trust, EDU Capital, Empowertech Capital, BOCOM International and Huagai Capital. CICC acted as the exclusive financial consultant.

With the capital support, DeepWay says it will further promote the R&D, production and manufacturing of intelligent new energy heavy duty trucks, and improve the iteration and improvement of automated driving technology in high-speed heavy duty truck scenarios.

DeepWay was established in December 2020 as a joint venture between Baidu, a leader in autonomous driving technology, and Lionbridge, a leading internet company in the highway trunk logistics industry. Baidu has given DeepWay a high starting point of full-stack autonomous driving R&D capabilities through a white-box license. Lionbridge, as the largest trunk logistics company in China, provides DeepWay with support for truck definition, scenario implementation and data accumulation.

DeepWay Xingchen, the first product of DeepWay, gives full play to the advantages of new energy and automotive intelligence, adopting new concepts and structures such as distributed drive, streamlined body with ultra-low wind resistance, battery-chassis integration and modular design of the same platform of hydrogen and electricity. It makes full use of the advantages of new energy in power chains and aerodynamic gas.

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Equipped with DeepWay’s self-developed HIS system, this model meets the demand for large-scale commercial mass production of L3 autonomous driving, and it can amass data for iteration to L4.

According to DeepWay’s R&D plan, in December 2022, the firm will put Xingchen into trial operations on the open road. In June 2023, it will start mass production and hopes to deliver 1,000 units of intelligent new energy heavy trucks in the year.