Having raked in nearly one billion US dollars in a single year, why has Neolithic become the new rising star that is wildly sought after by capital in the unmanned delivery track?
Capital Bets on the Inflection Point of Unmanned Delivery
Nearly $1 billion in financing within a year has pushed Neolix into the heavy-capital competition for unmanned delivery. The 30,000 vehicles prove its scale, but what capital cares more about is: when will this capacity network generate stable profits?
Further Financing Boost
On October 20, Neolix Huitong Technology Co., Ltd. (referred to as Neolix) announced the completion of a nearly $400 million Series E financing. This is the largest single financing in China's domestic autonomous driving sector in 2026.
Combined with the over $600 million Series D financing completed in 2025, Neolix has raised nearly $1 billion within a year, with total accumulated financing exceeding 10 billion RMB.
This round of financing is jointly led by Boyu Capital and a state-level fund, with participation from institutions including Alibaba AEFNextGen Hong Kong Fund, GGV Capital, VertexGrowth under Temasek, and GAC Capital. Many existing shareholders continue to follow on the investment, while Gaohe Capital acts as the exclusive financial advisor.
It is worth noting that Neolix has not announced the valuation of this round, nor has it officially disclosed the specific identity of the state-level fund.
Market sources say that the state-level fund leading the joint investment is the National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund, which will mark the fund's first entry into the autonomous driving and unmanned logistics track. However, before the official list is finalized, this information should still be regarded as a market statement.
What is more thought-provoking than the financing figure is the change in the shareholder lineup. Tencent entered in the Series D round, and Alibaba joined in this round, making Neolix gather two internet giants, while obtaining support from state-level institutions, local state-owned assets, automotive industrial capital and overseas funds.
What these investors bet on is not just a single unmanned vehicle.
Tencent and Alibaba connect order sources and logistics scenarios, GAC Capital is close to the complete vehicle supply chain, local state-owned assets can assist in the implementation of road access rights and production capacity, and overseas funds provide resources for the Middle East and European markets. What Neolix really wants to build is an unmanned capacity network covering manufacturing, scheduling, operation and after-sales service.
Capital has provided funds, but it has also raised the pressure of scale expansion to a higher level.
After 30,000 Units
Founded in 2018, Neolix started its business from express delivery in the early stage, and its current products and services cover scenarios such as express delivery, fresh food, pharmaceuticals, group meals, auto parts, factory and building materials transportation. Mainstream express enterprises including SF Express, JD.com, China Post, "Three Links and One Delivery" and J&T Express have all entered its list of customers or partners.
According to Neolix's disclosure, the company has currently deployed more than 30,000 L4-level unmanned delivery vehicles worldwide, covering nearly 20 countries and more than 300 cities; the total cumulative autonomous driving operation mileage exceeds 260 million kilometers, with more than 1 million kilometers of new mileage added every day. In cities such as Qingdao, Linyi and Hangzhou, the deployment scale in a single city has exceeded 1,000 units.
The significance of 30,000 vehicles is not just "a large number of vehicles".
The most difficult threshold for the unmanned delivery industry to cross in the past was whether vehicles could move from demonstration projects to normal operation. A thousand vehicles in a single city means that scheduling, energy replenishment, maintenance, remote takeover and road right coordination have begun to form a city-level system, rather than a technical display of dozens of vehicles.
Night delivery in Shenzhen is a more intuitive sample.
Neolix disclosed that 437 night routes have been expanded locally, and related operating costs have dropped by about 30%. Idle road resources at night, insufficient driver supply and high route repetition just amplify the advantages of unmanned vehicles operating around the clock. For customers, what is really attractive is not the concept of "unmanned driving", but how much money can be saved per order and whether the vehicles can arrive on time.
Technically, Neolix adopts a vision-based end-to-end route, and carries out collaborative iteration through models on the cloud side, edge side and vehicle side. The more vehicles there are, the richer the accumulated complex road conditions and abnormal scenarios will be; data in turn improves the model's capability, and a stable model can open up more routes.
The premise for this model to work is that the operation data is sufficiently clean, the remote takeover rate continues to decline, and the revenue brought by new mileage can cover the costs of computing power, depreciation and operation and maintenance.
However, although Neolix has currently disclosed the size of its fleet, operation mileage and number of covered cities, it has not yet made public core financial indicators such as revenue, gross profit margin, vehicle utilization rate per unit and operating cash flow.
The scale is already visible, but the profit quality is still hidden under the surface.
The Race Point Lies in Profitability
Unmanned delivery is ushering in a dual inflection point of policy and cost.
In August 2026, the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Transport issued the *Implementation Plan for the Construction of the Logistics Network*, proposing to standardize the pilot application of equipment such as unmanned driving trucks and unmanned express delivery vehicles; in September, nine departments including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released the 15th Five-Year Plan for the industry, clearly promoting the application pilot of functional unmanned vehicles. Road access rights are gradually moving from local exploration to institutionalization.
At the same time, the prices of sensors, computing platforms and steer-by-wire chassis continue to decline, and industry competition has also shifted from "whether it can run" to "whether it can run cheaply and stably".
According to data from iResearch, the national sales volume in 2025 was about 22,000 units, and the ownership reached 30,000 units. It is expected that by 2030, the sales volume of China's urban unmanned delivery vehicles is expected to be close to 1.5 million units, and the ownership will exceed 3.5 million units.
The largest future increment is not only the end of express delivery, but also instant retail, night restocking, pharmaceutical cold chain and industrial park transportation.
However, policy liberalization does not mean that profits will emerge naturally.
Taking Trunk Technology, which also belongs to the L4 logistics track, as a reference, its Hong Kong stock prospectus shows that its revenue from 2023 to 2025 was 134 million yuan, 254 million yuan and 345 million yuan respectively, with corresponding losses of 213 million yuan, 187 million yuan and 171 million yuan in the same period.
Although the sample is biased towards autonomous driving trucks, it illustrates the common problem of the industry: delivery growth can be very fast, while R&D, operation and maintenance and market expansion also consume huge amounts of capital.
Up to now, Neolix has not officially submitted its prospectus, so its revenue structure, customer concentration, ownership of vehicle assets and real loss level cannot be verified. These data will also determine whether the 10 billion yuan of financing has brought commercial barriers or heavier capital expenditure.
After this round of financing, Neolix will invest funds in the global service network and end-to-end model training, which is not an unexpected direction. Middle East operation licenses, European road tests and Asian market landing have opened up overseas increments for it. But every time it enters a country, it has to re-handle regulations, insurance, after-sales and localized operations.
Unmanned delivery has moved from conceptual stories to real streets. The next contest will not only depend on who raises more financing and has the largest number of vehicles, but also on who can make each vehicle run longer, reduce the cost per kilometer to a lower level, and turn the huge operation network into sustainable cash flow.
After the 30,000-vehicle milestone, what Neolix really needs to deliver is a financial report that can stand the test of the market.
This article is from the WeChat official account "Insight IPO" (ID: dongcha-ipo), written by Yang Licheng, and authorized for release by 36Kr.