Horizon Robotics CEO: Car Chips, Mind-Off Driving and China's Speed

In some sense, this is terrible business, you know, heavy investment, very slow return. But in my view, sometimes terrible business means great business because that's an entry barrier for all the other newcomers is extremely high. Hi, everybody. I'm Nikola Tangin, the CEO of the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund. Ten years ago, we all assumed self driving cars would come out of Silicon Valley. But today, the most advanced cars on the road are Chinese and western carmakers are going to China to buy the technology. Nobody sits closer to the shift than my guest, Yu Kai, who is the founder and CEO of Horizon Robotics, which supplies the chips and software that let Chinese cars drive themselves. He was one of China's leading AI scientists before he became an entrepreneur, and few people can explain better how China got there and where it goes next. So Kai, welcome. Hi, Nikolai. Let's just start with a simple question. What does Horizon Robotics do? Well, essentially what we are doing is the computing platform for all generic robots, so including self driving cars. But of course, our current business is probably, you know, 95, nearly 100% focusing on cars, passenger vehicles. So if I so if I sit in a car that you that you supply into, what what does your chip do? Well, essentially, it's running the software for the all the way from camera perception to trajectory planning and control. So essentially, it's kind of like brain for older cars. Now your chips run roughly one out of four cars in China. Just tell me about the One one out of three, I think. That's our latest track record. Thank you. Well done. Who who are your customers? Well, you know, the major Chinese, OEMs like BYD, Chile, you know, Cherry, Chang'an, Great Wall, and also the global some of the global OEMs like Volkswagen, Toyota, Suzuki. So quite some local, domestic, and global players. Who do you compete with? Oh, very good question. I think, like, Mobileye, you know, and also Huawei, and there are quite a few domestic players like Black Sesame. I'm I'm not sure if you ever heard of that. And Qualcomm and Media, Texas Instrument, you know, Renesas, NXP. So actually a lot of global and China technology companies. Why are you why are you the best? Oh. Well, very good question. I think, it's really because, we are very focused. You know, we focus on this single, one thing, to, to enable autonomous driving and, all the way to, robotics. We are not doing anything, nothing else. So I think the intensity of focus is is one thing. The other thing I would say is fundamentally our vision and the mission. Because if you look at the name of our company, you know, eleven years ago when we founded this company, we named our company Horizon Robotics. Right? Back to eleven years ago in China, there was even no such a business …