Major strategic investors and key early-stage financial investors hold a high degree of optimism about the long-term development of Horizon Robotics.

Author: Stone Jin | Original article from IPO Early Know | WeChat official account: ipozaozhidao

According to IPO Early Know, Dr. Yu Kai, founder and CEO of Horizon Robotics and a long-standing strategic partner of SAIC Motor, recently attended the "2025 SAIC Night" event and delivered a keynote speech.

In his speech, Dr. Yu Kai emphasized that the partnership between Horizon Robotics and SAIC Motor exemplifies cooperation between domestic automotive groups and technology innovation companies. "Throughout its development, Horizon Robotics has not only received investment and financing support from SAIC Motor but has also collaborated to leverage its innovative strengths, fostering deep open collaboration and capacity-building across the entire industry chain. With the unveiling of SAIC's 2025 intelligence strategy, Horizon Robotics' latest Journey 6 series computing solution will continue to provide foundational support for SAIC Motor's vehicle models, contributing to high-level intelligent driving solutions across all scenarios and enabling equal rights for intelligent driving everywhere. Looking ahead, Horizon Robotics will harness its technological innovation advantages in software-hardware integration to further deepen cooperation with SAIC Motor and jointly propel the high-quality development of the automotive industry."

Further deepening strategic cooperation with top industrial investors

Since the initiation of strategic cooperation in 2017, multiple SAIC models, including Roewe, MG, and Maxus, have been equipped with Horizon Robotics' Journey family solutions. Moving forward, SAIC Motor's passenger vehicle brands such as Roewe and MG will also adopt Horizon Robotics' new-generation Journey 6 series in-vehicle intelligent computing solutions, with multiple cooperative models anticipated to be launched within the year.

Notably, SAIC Motor is Horizon Robotics' largest external investor and the largest industrial institutional investor. Following Horizon Robotics' successful listing in Hong Kong, SAIC Motor still holds approximately 8% of its shares.

Also this week, Horizon Robotics officially announced with the Volkswagen Group that they will further collaborate in advanced fields based on Horizon Robotics' full-scenario intelligent driving solution HSD (Horizon SuperDrive™). HSD will expedite research and development through the joint venture CARIZON, established by CARIAD and Horizon Robotics, and will be implemented in Volkswagen Group models.

It is worth mentioning that the Volkswagen Group and Horizon Robotics formally established cooperation in 2022, thereby creating a precedent of "joint venture + deep cooperation" between an international automaker and a Chinese intelligent driving technology company. Like SAIC Motor, the Volkswagen Group is also Horizon Robotics' second-largest industrial institutional investor.

To some extent, the rapid deepening of strategic cooperation relationships with key strategic partners and major shareholders who have collaborated for many years reaffirms the value of Horizon Robotics to leading automakers and the automotive industry as a whole.

Simultaneous robust growth in production scale and commercial revenue

On March 21, Horizon Robotics released its full-year 2024 financial results, marking its first financial report since listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on October 24, 2024. As a domestic intelligent driving technology enterprise that has pioneered and achieved the largest-scale mass production of intelligent driving solutions, Horizon Robotics delivered approximately 2.9 million intelligent driving product solutions in 2024, representing a year-on-year increase of 38%; cumulative deliveries reached approximately 7.7 million, ranking first domestically in terms of delivery scale.

In 2025, the cumulative shipments of the Horizon Robotics Journey family will surpass 10 million, making it the first intelligent driving technology enterprise in China to achieve 10 million deliveries. To date, Horizon Robotics' products have been adopted by 27 OEMs (42 OEM brands), with all of China's top ten OEMs having chosen Horizon Robotics' intelligent driving solutions.

Particularly, since the launch of the Journey 6 series in 2024, it has collaborated with over 20 automaker OEM brands and will enable the launch of over 100 mid-to-high-level intelligent driving models. With the mass production and launch of related models, Horizon Robotics' Journey 6E/M computing solutions are projected to reach million-level shipments in 2025.

Furthermore, as revealed by Dr. Yu Kai at the recently held 2025 China EV100 Forum, the flagship version of the Journey 6 series, the Journey 6P with industry-leading computing performance, has officially completed tape-out and real-vehicle validation within 100 hours. Meanwhile, the Horizon SuperDrive™ full-scenario intelligent driving solution based on the Journey 6P is also anticipated to achieve the delivery of the first mass-produced cooperative model in the third quarter of 2025.

It is worth mentioning that in the Chinese OEM advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) solution market, Horizon Robotics' share increased further to over 40% in 2024, ranking first; among domestic independent brand passenger vehicle intelligent driving computing solution providers in 2024, Horizon Robotics also ranked first with a market share of 33.97%, achieving "one out of every three Chinese intelligent driving vehicles is equipped with a Horizon Robotics solution." In 2024, Horizon Robotics' revenue grew by 53.6% year-on-year to RMB 2.384 billion, marking simultaneous robust growth in production scale and commercial revenue.

"Self-development + third-party" parallelism is the optimal solution in the era of intelligent driving

Additionally, Dr. Yu Kai presented a viewpoint at the 2025 China EV100 Forum: autonomous driving is the infrastructure of the smart car era and the most important functional value point, but it is challenging to differentiate.

In Dr. Yu Kai's view, all automakers and innovative enterprises strive to provide users with standardized "functional values" such as safety, convenience, and comfort. The core competitiveness of "functional value" products lies in "beating the slow with speed and the low with height" – on the one hand, new technologies and paradigms emerge continuously, software performance iterates rapidly, and large computing power declines; on the other hand, there are extremely high demands for R&D funding and talent investment. Regardless of the model adopted, accelerating R&D efficiency and keeping pace with technological iteration are critical topics.

Regarding the product logic of intelligent driving, Dr. Yu Kai believes that compared to the internet logic centered on traffic being king and user preferences, intelligent driving needs to be grounded in truly effective data to achieve a level beyond human driving.

"The core of the internet era is 'gaining insight into human life,' while the core of the intelligent era is 'approaching the truth of the world.' The future of intelligent driving is not a simple imitation of human driving behavior but rather the pursuit of surpassing human levels, truly making travel safer, more convenient, and enriching people's lives," said Dr. Yu Kai.

As intelligent driving places increasingly higher demands on both automakers and intelligent driving innovation enterprises, Dr. Yu Kai emphasized that "self-development + third-party" parallelism is the safest choice during the rapid industry transformation period as the inflection point of intelligence arrives. Since only a handful of automakers possess "full-stack self-development" capabilities in terms of funds, talent, technology, and data, open cooperation will become the mainstream in the future, and "20% self-development and 80% cooperation will become the stable state and ultimate outcome of the intelligent driving track."

This signifies that Horizon Robotics, which has long adhered to the ecological philosophy of "all-dimensional openness and public altruism," will continue to collaborate with more upstream and downstream industries to drive the large-scale application of high-level intelligent driving.

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