"National Intelligent Vehicle Control" has obtained hundreds of millions of yuan in Series A+ financing and has been designated by multiple leading vehicle manufacturers. | HardcoreTech First Release

Author｜Huang Nan

Editor｜Yuan Silai

HardcoreTech has learned that Guoche Intelligent Control (Beijing) Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Guoche Intelligent Control") has recently completed several hundred million yuan in Series A+ financing. The funds will be used to increase investment in technological research and development and accelerate the efficient delivery and implementation of products.

"Guoche Intelligent Control" was established in July 2020. It is an intelligent connected vehicle high-tech platform company initiated by the National Intelligent Connected Vehicle Innovation Center in conjunction with industry leading units, key market capital, and important government funds. The company focuses on the research and development of intelligent vehicle computing basic platform products and the construction of the industrial ecosystem. Its main product is the intelligent vehicle computing basic platform and development system (CBDES), which belongs to the third-generation automotive electronic control system technology and provides an efficient computing base for the intelligent development of the entire vehicle for independent brand OEMs.

In recent years, the intelligent connected vehicle industry has been accelerating its development. The intelligent connected vehicle is mainly composed of perception systems, decision-making systems, execution systems, and communication systems, and its key technologies are inseparable from automotive sensors, high-precision maps, high-performance chips, V2X communication, network cloud platforms, MEC (Multi-Access Edge Computing), information security, etc.

According to data from the China Commerce Industry Research Institute, the market size of China's intelligent connected vehicles in 2023 was 161.3 billion yuan, and it is expected to reach 215.2 billion yuan in 2024. The Forward-looking Industry Research Institute predicts that by 2030, the market size of China's intelligent connected vehicles is expected to exceed 5 trillion yuan, and the related market size of "vehicle-road-cloud integration" will exceed 14 trillion yuan.

Among them, the computing basic platform with the integrated software and hardware of the intelligent vehicle OS, as the most core new component of the intelligent vehicle, currently has a strong market demand, high research and development requirements, and a rapid technological iteration speed.

Unlike the traditional automotive electronics industry chain of OEM, Tier 1, and Tier 2, "Guoche Intelligent Control" focuses on the computing basic platform products in the field of automotive intelligent driving. It is oriented towards intelligent driving scenarios at L2 level and above, and is positioned as Tier 1.5, with great flexibility and compatibility. On the one hand, it can support OEMs to carry out efficient and differentiated customized development of intelligent driving applications; on the other hand, it can effectively integrate and consolidate the resources of Tier 2, adapt to the mainstream chips and hardware platforms of the entire series, and achieve the optimal allocation of resources.

"Guoche Intelligent Control" provides multi-level product solutions according to customer needs, such as the operating system and the integrated software and hardware platform solution including the operating system, hardware, and algorithm development tools. Its core product, the intelligent vehicle computing basic platform and development system (CBDES), consists of three core parts: domain control hardware, autonomous driving operating system, and graphical development tools.

The domain control hardware part is equipped with AI chips and MCU chips to provide support for the upper-level system, ensuring the smooth operation of the underlying architecture and functional enhancements. Based on the self-developed heterogeneous distribution technology of "Guoche Intelligent Control", it can flexibly adapt to different chip selections. The mainstream chip manufacturers include Horizon Robotics, BSTI, Huawei, etc.

The autonomous driving operating system is divided into system software and functional software. Among them, the functional software is the autonomous driving application development service framework pioneered by "Guoche Intelligent Control" based on the service-oriented architecture design concept, by extracting the core common needs of autonomous driving.

This product redefines the relationship between the application algorithm and the operating system by defining standardized service interfaces, and decomposes the intelligent driving application into thousands of functional software modules that can be reused in layers, including BEV perception fusion, map positioning, decision-making planning, control, etc.; it covers the entire closed loop of the intelligent driving development module, and conducts disassembly and analysis for different hardware architectures to achieve the transplantation of functional software across vehicle models and platforms, improving the development efficiency of autonomous driving functions. This not only lays a solid foundation for the subsequent end-to-end development and the application of AI large models, but also provides favorable conditions for the improvement of intelligent driving in terms of safety, real-time performance, and easy scalability.

For the developer side, "Guoche Intelligent Control" embeds the software modules and the underlying operating system into the graphical development tools on the PC. Developers only need to complete convenient engineering modeling by dragging and dropping the algorithm modules in the graphical interface, and deploy it to the domain control for loading into the vehicle with one click, thus completing the construction of a new self-driving application without the need to write code from scratch, effectively shortening the development and application cycle.

Unlike the common in-vehicle operating systems on the market, the operating system ICVOS product of "Guoche Intelligent Control" as a third-party operating system manufacturer can access the system kernels and hardware of various manufacturers according to the requirements of the OEM, achieving decoupling between the hardware and the software and software modules.

The advantage of this model is that the OEM has the flexible space to independently choose chips and software modules. The intelligent vehicle computing basic platform of "Guoche Intelligent Control" can carry the software and hardware modules of different manufacturers. The OEM can define each software module by customizing the product architecture, and even disassemble it, and have it provided by different suppliers, solving the problems they have long worried about, such as bottleneck technologies and the dominance of a single supplier.

HardcoreTech has learned that the computing basic platform and its development system products of "Guoche Intelligent Control" can currently support self-driving functions from L2 to L4 levels, and its main customers include two major categories: passenger vehicles and commercial vehicles. For passenger vehicles, it provides domain control, some software modules or the operating system plus some algorithm modules, tool chains, etc.; for commercial vehicles, it provides a complete set of autonomous driving function solutions, including the development of software, hardware, and autonomous driving functions.

At the same time, as a part of the vehicle side in the vehicle-road-cloud integration, its products can widely support the implementation of a variety of vehicle-road-cloud integration scenarios, including high-level vehicle-road-cloud for passenger vehicles, high-level vehicle-road-cloud for commercial vehicles, and high-level vehicle-road-cloud for special vehicles. At the same time, driven by the vehicle-side perception data under the vehicle-road-cloud collaborative system, it provides the cloud with high-quality and generalizable intelligent driving data sets to accelerate the construction of new infrastructure for intelligent connected vehicles.

In terms of implementation, "Guoche Intelligent Control" has reached mass production cooperation with domestic mainstream passenger vehicle and commercial vehicle benchmarking customers for CBDES, and it is expected to achieve large-scale mass production in 2025.