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Photo credit: https://www.weride.ai/wuhan-test-cn/
WeRide.ai, one of China’s most-funded robotaxi operators, has confidentially filed for a U.S. IPO, Bloomberg reported Monday. The company declined to comment when reached by TechCrunch.
China’s autonomous driving startups have made heavy investments in recent years to fuel their technology development and fleet deployment, which can account for a large portion of their costs. Their valuations have also skyrocketed as self-driving remains one of the few sectors that excites startup investors, even though the technology is far from mature and large-scale commercialization.
WeRide’s valuation rose to $3.3 billion when the company raised its Series C round nearly two years ago. It reportedly drew a new round in March 2022, increasing its valuation to $4.4 billion. Its nemesis Pony.ai reached an even higher valuation a year ago – $8.5 billion.
At some point, however, these capital-intensive robotaxi operators will need to tap the public market for capital, as not many investors are able or willing to sign the big checks supporting their late-stage expansion. According to Bloomberg, WeRide aims to raise up to $500 million.
But in recent years, the odds have been stacked against them and other Chinese tech companies seeking U.S. IPOs. As geopolitical tensions mounted, Chinese companies listed in the US came under increasing scrutiny from Washington, particularly over their accounting practices. Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, was one of a handful of companies placed on the US government’s delisting watch list.
Meanwhile, China increased regulatory oversight over foreign-listed companies that could pose a national security risk in their cross-border data transfers. Ride-hailing giant Didi, for example, was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange under pressure from Beijing.
WeRide saw its competitor Pony’s IPO efforts fall through. In 2021, Pony was looking to go public in the US at a valuation of $12 billion through a SPAC merger, but later shelved the plan as it struggled to get assurances from Beijing that it wouldn’t Lawrence Steyn, a former executive at JP Morgan, joined Pony in 2021 as chief financial officer but left the company in March, according to his LinkedIn page.
There are signs that the wave of US-linked IPOs in China is slowly picking up again. In February, Chinese lidar maker Hesai was listed on Nasdaq in what became the largest Chinese IPO in the US since Didi’s debut in 2021.
Sensor hardware is supposedly not as sensitive as a ride-hailing or robotaxi service that owns seas of user mobility data. But WeRide seems to have solved the data security problem. Bloomberg, citing sources, reported that the company “will outsource data collection to a company that will not be part of the proposed US listing.”
WeRide has raised over $1.4 billion so far from investors including Bosch and China’s state-owned automaker Guangzhou Automobile Group.
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