Tag: Xiaomi

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China Roundup: Beijing takes aim at algorithm, Xiaomi automates electric cars

Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch’s China roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what they mean to people in the rest of the world.

The biggest news of the week again comes from Beijing’s ongoing effort to dampen the influence of the country’s tech giants. Regulators are now going after the exploitative use of algorithm-powered user recommendations. We also saw a few major acquisitions this week. Xiaomi is acquiring an autonomous vehicle startup called Deepmotion, and ByteDance is said to be buying virtual reality hardware startup Pico.

Algorithmic regulation

Beijing has unveiled the draft of a sweeping regulation to rein in how tech companies operating in China utilize algorithms, the engine of virtually all lucrative tech businesses today from short videos and news aggregation to ride-hailing, food delivery and e-commerce. My colleague Manish Singh wrote an overview of the policy, and here’s a closer look at the 30-point document proposed by China’s top cyberspace watchdog.

Beijing is clearly wary of how purely machine-recommended content can stray away from values propagated by the Communist Party and even lead to the detriment of national interests. In its mind, algorithms should strictly align with the interest of the nation:

Algorithmic recommendations should uphold mainstream values… and should not be used for endangering national security (Point 6).

Regulators want more transparency on companies’ algorithmic black boxes and are making them accountable for the consequences of their programming codes. For example:

Service providers should be responsible for the security of algorithms, create a system for… the review of published information, algorithmic mechanisms, security oversight… enact and publish relevant rules for algorithmic recommendations (Point 7). 

Service providers… should not create algorithmic models that entice users into addiction, high-value consumption, or other behavior that disrupts public orders (Point 8).

The government is also clamping down on discriminative algorithms and putting some autonomy back in the hands of consumers:

Service providers… should not use illegal or harmful information as user interests to recommend content or create sexist or biased user tags (Point 10).

Service providers should inform users of the logic, purpose, and mechanisms of the algorithms in use (Point 14).

Service providers… should allow users to turn off algorithmic features (Point 15).

The regulators don’t want internet giants to influence public thinking or opinions. Though not laid out in the document, censorship control will no doubt remain in the hands of the authorities.

Service providers should not… use algorithms to censor information, make excessive recommendations, manipulate rankings or search results that lead to preferential treatment and unfair competition, influence online opinions, or shun regulatory oversight (Point 13).

Like many other aspects of the tech business, certain algorithms are to obtain approval from the government. Tech firms must also hand over their algorithms to the police in case of investigations.

Service providers should file with the government if their recommendation algorithms can affect public opinions or mobilize civilians (Point 20).  

Service providers… should keep a record of their recommendation algorithms for at least six months and provide them to law enforcement departments for investigation purposes (Point 23). 

If passed, the law will shake up the fundamental business logic of Chinese tech companies that rely on algorithms to make money. Programmers need to pore over these rules and be able to parse their codes for regulators. The proposed law seems to have even gone beyond the scope of the European Union’s data rules, but how the Chinese one will be enforced remains to be seen.

Lei Jun bets on autonomous cars

In Xiaomi’s latest earnings call, the smartphone maker said it will acquire DeepMotion, a Beijing-based autonomous driving startup, to aid its autonomous driving endeavor. The deal will cost Xiaomi about $77.3 million, and “a lot of that will be in terms of stock” and “a lot of these payments will be deferred until certain milestones are hit,” said Wang Xiang, Xiaomi president on the call.

Xiaomi’s founder Lei Jun earlier hinted at the firm’s plan to enter the crowded space. On July 28, Lei announced on Weibo, China’s Twitter equivalent, that the company is recruiting 500 autonomous driving experts across China.

Automation has become a selling point for China’s new generation of electric vehicle makers, often with companies conflating advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) with Level 4 autonomous driving. Such overstatements in marketing material mislead consumers and make one question the real technical capability of these nascent EV players.

Xiaomi has similarly unveiled plans to manufacture electric cars through a separate car-making subsidiary. The ADAS capabilities brought by DeepMotion are naturally a nice complement to Xiaomi’s future cars. As Wang explained:

We believe that there’s a lot of synergies with [DeepMotion’s ADAS] technology with our EV initiatives. So I think it tells you a couple of points. Number one is, we will roll out EV business. And I said in our prepared remarks, we’ve been very focused on hiring the right team for the EV business at this point in time, formulating our strategy, formulating our product strategy, et cetera, et cetera. But at the same time, we are not afraid to apply it and integrate other teams if we find that those will help us accelerate our plan right.

It’s noteworthy that DeepMotion, founded by Microsoft veterans, specializes in perception technologies and high-precision mapping, which puts it in the vision-driven autonomous driving camp. A number of major Chinese EV makers rely on consumer-grade lidar to automate their cars.

ByteDance goes virtual

ByteDance is said to be buying Beijing-based VR hardware maker Pico for 5 billion yuan ($770 million), according to Chinese VR news site Vrtuoluo. ByteDance could not be immediately reached for comment.

Advanced VR headsets are often expensive due to the cost of high-end processors. Experts observe that most VR hardware makers are yet to enter the mass consumer market. They are hemorrhaging cash and living off generous venture money and corporate deals.

ByteDance might be buying a money-losing business, but Pico, one of the major VR makers in China, provides a fast track for the TikTok parent to enter VR manufacturing. As the world’s largest short video distributor and an aggressive newcomer to video games, ByteDance has no shortage of creative talent. We will see how it works on producing virtual content if the Pico deal goes through.

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Xiaomi reports record 64% revenue growth, acquires Deepmotion for $77.3 million

Xiaomi reported a second-quarter net income of $1.28 billion on revenue of $13.56 billion following the Chinese technology giant’s strong surge in smartphone market share globally.

During the quarter that ended in June, Xiaomi said it saw a 64% year-on-year growth in revenue, and its net income surged over 80% from the same time a year ago.

The Hong Kong-listed firm said its smartphone revenue grew to $9.1 billion, thanks to a just as impressive jump in its smartphone shipment to 52.9 million units in the quarter, in which it topped Apple to become the world’s second-largest smartphone vendor, according to market intelligence firm Canalys.

The U.S. government’s sanctions against Huawei, Xiaomi’s chief domestic rival, has helped the younger firm — along with some other manufacturers — gain market share domestically as well as globally.

Xiaomi’s revenue from Internet of Things and lifestyle products category also saw a 36% jump in revenue to $3.2 billion.

Shortly after reporting its earnings results, the company said it will buy the four-year-old autonomous driving technology startup Deepmotion for about $77.3 million. The investment follows Xiaomi’s bold plan to invest $10 billion over the next decade in the electric vehicles space.

Xiaomi is the latest Chinese tech company to enter the EV industry. Chinese search engine giant Baidu earlier this year announced that it would be making EVs with the help of automaker Geely. In November, Alibaba and Chinese state-owned carmaker SAIC Motor said they had joined hands to produce electric cars. Ride-share leader Didi and EV maker BYD are also co-designing a model for ride-hailing.

As my colleague Rita Liao reported earlier:

The internet behemoths are competing with a raft of more specialized EV startups such as Xpeng, Nio and Li Auto, which have already debuted multiple models and are often compared to Tesla. They strive to differentiate from each other by investing in functions from in-car entertainment to autonomous driving.

For Xiaomi, the obvious advantage in making cars is its vast retail network and international brand recognition. Some of its smart devices, such as smart speakers and air purifiers, could be easily incorporated into its vehicles as selling points. The real challenge, of course, is in manufacturing. Compared to phone making, the automotive industry is more capital-intensive with a long and complex supply chain. We will see if Xiaomi will pull it off.

Xiaomi said Wednesday its investment in Deepmotion will help the giant shorten the time to market for its products.

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Peer into the eyes of Cyberdog

When someone mentioned to me that Xiaomi was launching its own “robot dog,” my mind immediately went to Sony’s Aibo. And honestly, it would have been difficult to be more wrong. Now that the news has been out for a few days, the company’s heard all of your bad Black Mirror jokes, don’t worry.

And, honestly, the Chinese hardware maker didn’t do itself any favors with the design here. Boston Dynamics has done a lot to imbue its quadrupedal robots with personality, through design language and viral videos of Spot and company busting a move to the Dirty Dancing soundtrack.

With Cyberdog, however, Xiaomi’s design team clearly just leaned in and went full-on Robocop (and the Bladerunner pastiche doesn’t help) . I receive a deluge of Metalhead gifs every time I post something about Boston Dynamics — seriously, I’m using Cyberdog as the lead image on this post, just so you can see what I mean. Go check the replies on Twitter. I’ll wait.

Image Credits: Xiaomi

Xiaomi is, of course, far from the first company to release a Spot-like quadrupedal robot. There are a number of companies competing in that space, including ANYmal and Ghost Robotics. For its part, Xiaomi is looking to put a developer spin on the category. Per the Mi blog:

CyberDog is Xiaomi’s first foray into quadruped robotics for the open source community and developers worldwide. Robotics enthusiasts interested in CyberDog can compete or co-create with other like-minded Xiaomi Fans, together propelling the development and potential of quadruped robots.

Image Credits: Xiaomi

The robot is powered by Nvidia’s Jetson Xavier NX platform, coupled with 11-built in sensors, including cameras, touch, GPS and more. The company will be release 1,000 of the robots, price at roughly $1,540 — a fraction of the cost of the advanced Spot system. The robot is also a fraction of the size of Boston Dynamics’ quadruped. And while there are superficial similarities the project really couldn’t be more different.

Xiaomi’s entry into robotics is more about building hardware for Nvidia’s platform. It’s a (relatively) inexpensive way for people to get a hang of programming and, perhaps, protoyping robotics. The likely limited functionality — and availability — are pretty clear indications that that the company’s not trying to put a Cyberdog in every home just yet.

Bear Flag Robotics

A sizable acquisition this week, John Deere announced plans to buy Bear Flag Robotics for $250 million. We’ve been following Bear Flag since it was a member of the YC cohort. The deal seems like a good outcome for both parties. Bear Flag gets a lot of resources from an agricultural giant like John Deere and Deere gets to step another foot into the world of cutting-edge tech with an autonomous tractor startup.

Says co-founder and CEO Igino Cafiero:

One of the biggest challenges farmers face today is the availability of skilled labor to execute time-sensitive operations that impact farming outcomes. Autonomy offers a safe and productive alternative to address that challenge head on. Bear Flag’s mission to increase global food production and reduce the cost of growing food through machine automation is aligned with Deere’s and we’re excited to join the Deere team to bring autonomy to more farms.

John Deere buys autonomous tractor startup Bear Flag Robotics

Image Credits: Kiwibot

Another startup we’ve been following since its early days, Kiwibot is seeing expansion to a significant number of campuses. In spite of campus shutdowns last year, the Berkeley-based company is actually seeing something of a boom due to the pandemic. COO Diego Varela Prada tells TechCrunch:

We have a procedure to disinfect the bots between orders. If you’re a student and you don’t want to mix into large crowds, I think it’s much safer to order food through Kiwibot and have it delivered to the library or your dorm.

Kiwibot partners with hospitality giant Sodexo to bring food delivery robots to more college campuses

We’ve written about Lidar company Aeva a few times over the years, including last November, when it announced plans to go public via SPAC. This week, the company announced a deal with Nikon that takes it beyond its existing automotive applications. The company says there are a slew of potential applications, though the chip is still about four years away from production. Fields include, “consumer electronics, consumer health, industrial robotics, and security.”

A whole bunch of robots are making their way to Florida late next year, courtesy of Amazon. The company announced this week that it has chosen Tallahassee (birthplace of T-Pain and objectively the best Mountain Goats album) as the home of its next fulfillment center. The company plans to add to its massive arm of warehouse robots for the 630,000-square-foot space, along with 1,000 human jobs.

Image Credits: Berkshire Grey

FedEx, meanwhile, has implemented Berkshire Grey robotics at a shipping facility in Queens (the best borough). The systems will identity, pick, sort, collected and containerize primarily small packages like polybags, tubes and padded mailers. The systems are set to roll out to additional locations, including Las Vegas and Columbus, Ohio. Says B.G.,

This technology has been developed and installed as a direct response to the exponential growth of e-commerce, which has accelerated the demand for reliable automated solutions throughout all stages of the supply chain. FedEx Ground believes that continued innovation and automation will improve safety, efficiency, and productivity for its team members as they continue to keep the e-commerce supply chain moving.

Image Credits: Hyphen

Here’s a new company in the food space worth keeping an eye on. Formerly known as Ono Food Co. (then a food truck company), SF-based Hyphen has come out of stealth with the announcement of its Makeline automated meal platform. The company says the system is able to create up to 350 meals an hour, with the aid of a single staff member.

“[W]e really see ourselves like Shopify,” CEO Stephen Klein said in a release, “but instead of enabling merchants to compete with the likes of Amazon, we’re enabling restaurants to compete with the likes of DoorDash as well as other services and ghost kitchens that have decided to compete with their own customers by offering their own food brands.”

The platform is set to start rolling out this winter with plans for 300 locations in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle and Phoenix.

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Oh hey, Xiaomi has its own creepy robot dog now

Daniel Cooper Contributor
Daniel Cooper is a senior editor at Engadget.

Xiaomi has today announced the CyberDog, an open-source quadruped robot intended for developers to “build upon” and create applications for. The machine, which resembles a beefier version of Boston Dynamics’ Spot, is a showcase for Xiaomi’s engineering know-how, including its proprietary servo motors.

Xiaomi CyberDog
Xiaomi

Running the show is a version of NVIDIA’s Jetson Xavier NX, which has been dubbed the world’s smallest AI supercomputer. In terms of being able to experience the world, CyberDog has 11 sensors over its body, including touch and ultrasonic sensors, cameras and GPS to help it “interact with its environment.”

Xiaomi says that this technology is good enough to enable CyberDog to follow its owner and navigate around obstacles. It is also capable of identifying posture and tracking human faces, enabling it to pick out and track individuals in a group.

Render of the Xiaomi CyberDog in all of its terrifying glory.
Xiaomi

Rather than selling this as a general-sale product, the company is for now going to release 1,000 of these things to “Xiaomi fans, engineers and robotics enthusiasts to jointly explore the immense possibility of CyberDog.” This will be facilitated by an open-source community, hosted by Xiaomi, which may be followed by the construction of a robotics laboratory to lay a pathway for “future innovations.”

Of course, this thing isn’t cheap, and those folks willing to get involved will need to shell out 9,999 yuan or around $1,540 to get one of these for themselves.

Editor’s note: This post first appeared on Engadget.

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China Roundup: Kai-Fu Lee’s first Europe bet, WeRide buys a truck startup

Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch’s China Roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what they mean to people in the rest of the world.

Despite the geopolitical headwinds for foreign tech firms to enter China, many companies, especially those that find a dependable partner, are still forging ahead. For this week’s roundup, I’m including a conversation I had with Prophesee, a French vision technology startup, which recently got funding from Kai-Fu Lee and Xiaomi, along with the usual news digest.

Spotting opportunities in China

Like many companies working on futuristic, cutting-edge tech in Europe, Prophesee was a spinout from university research labs. Previously, I covered two such companies from Sweden: Imint, which improves smartphone video production through deep learning, and Dirac, an expert in sound optimization.

The three companies have two things in common: They are all in niche fields, and they have all found eager customers in China.

For Prophesee, they are production lines, automakers and smartphone companies in China looking for breakthroughs in perception technology, which will in turn improve how their robots respond to the environment. So it’s unsurprising that Xiaomi and Chinese chip-focused investment firm Inno-Chip backed Prophesee in its latest funding round, which was led by Sinovation Venture.

The funding size was undisclosed but TechCrunch learned it was in the range of “tens of million USD.” It was also the first investment that Kai-Fu Lee has made through Sinovation in Europe. As Prophesee CEO Luca Verre recalled:

I met Dr. Kai-Fu Lee three years ago during the World Economic Forum … and when I pitched to him about Prophesee, he got very intrigued. And then over the past three years, actually, we kept in touch and last year, given the growing traction we were having in China, particularly in the mobile and IoT industry, he decided to jump in. He said okay, it is now the right timing Prophesee becomes big.

The Paris-based company wasn’t actively seeking funding, but it believed having Chinese strategic investors could help it gain greater access to the complex market.

Rather than sending information collected by sensors and cameras to computing platforms, Prophesee fits that process inside a chip (fabricated by Sony) that mimics the human eyes, a technology that is built upon neuromorphic engineering.

The old method snaps a collection of fixed images so when information grows in volume, a tremendous amount of computing power is needed. In contrast, Prophesee’s sensors, which it describes as “event-based,” only pick up changes in the environment just as the photoreceptors in our eyes and can process information continuously and quickly.

Europe has been pioneering neuromorphic computing, but in recent years, Verre saw a surge in research coming from Chinese universities and tech firms, which reaffirmed his confidence in the market’s appetite.

We see Chinese OEMs (original equipment manufacturers), particularly Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo pushing the standard of quality of image quality to very, very high … They are very eager to adopt new technology to further differentiate in a way which is faster and more aggressive than Apple. Apple is a company with an attitude which to me looks more similar to Huawei. So maybe for some technology, it takes more time to see the technology mature and adopt, which is right very often but later. So I’m sure that Apple will come at certain point with some products integrating event-based technology. In fact, we see them moving. We see them filing patents in the space. I’m sure that will come, but maybe not the first.

Though China is striving for technological independence, Verre believed Prophesee’s addressable market is large enough — $20 billion by his estimate. Nonetheless, he admitted he’d be “naive to believe Prophesee will be the only one to capture” this opportunity.

WeRide bought a truck company

One of China’s most valuable robotaxi startups has just acquired an autonomous trucking company called MoonX. The size of the deal is undisclosed, but we know that MoonX raised “tens of millions RMB” 15 months ago in a Series A round.

While WeRide is focused on Level 4 self-driving technology, it is also finding new monetization avenues before its robotaxis can chauffeur people at scale. It’s done so by developing minibusses, and the MoonX acqui-hire, which brings the company’s founder and over 50 engineers to WeRide, will likely help diversify its revenue pool.

WeRide and MoonX have deep-rooted relationships. Their respective founders, Tony Han and Yang Qingxiong, worked side by side at Jingchi, which was later rebranded to WeRide. Han co-founded Jingchi and took the helm as CEO in March 2018 while Yang was assigned vice president of engineering. But Yang soon quit and started MoonX.

Han, a Baidu veteran, gave Yang a warm homecoming and put him in charge of the firm’s research institute and its new office in Shenzhen, home to MoonX. WeRide’s sprawling headquarters is just about an hour’s drive away in the adjacent city of Guangzhou.

AI surveillance giant Cloudwalk nears IPO

Cloudwalk belongs to a cohort of Chinese unicorns that flourished through the second half of the 2010s by selling computer vision technology to government agencies across China. Together, Cloudwalk and its rivals SenseTime, Megvii and Yitu were dubbed the “four AI dragons” for their fast ascending valuations and handsome funding rounds.

Of course, the term “AI dragon” is now a misnomer as AI application becomes so pervasive across industries. Investors soon realized these upstarts need to diversify revenue streams beyond smart city contracts, and they’ve been waiting anxiously for exits. Finally, here comes Cloudwalk, which will likely be the first in its cohort to go public.

Cloudwalk’s application to raise 3.75 billion yuan ($580 million) from an IPO on the Shanghai STAR board was approved this week, though it can still be months before it starts trading. The firm’s financials don’t look particularly rosy for investors, with net loss amounting to 720 million yuan in 2020.

Also in the news

  • Speaking of the torrent of news in autonomous driving, vehicle vision provider CalmCar said this week that it has raised $150 million in a Series C round. Founded by several overseas Chinese returnees in 2016, CalmCar uses deep learning to develop ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance System) used in automotive, industrial and surveillance scenarios. German auto parts maker ZF led the round.
  • Baby clothes direct-to-consumer brand PatPat said it has raised $510 million from Series C and D rounds. The D2C ecosystem leveraging China’s robust supply chains is increasingly gaining interest from venture capitalists. Brands like Shein, PatPat, Cider and Outer have all secured fundings from established VCs. Founded by three Carnegie Mellon grads, PatPat counts IDG Capital, General Atlantic, DST Global, GGV Capital, SIG China and Sequoia China among its investors.

Why Amazon should pay attention to Shein

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Cyber risk startup Safe Security lands $33M from UK telco BT

Safe Security, a Silicon Valley cyber risk management startup, has secured a $33 million investment from U.K. telco BT. 

Founded in 2012, Safe Security — formerly known as Lucideus — helps organizations to measure and mitigate enterprise-wide cyber risk using its security assessment framework for enterprises (SAFE) platform. The service, which is used by a number of companies including Facebook, Softbank and Xiaomi, helps businesses understand their likelihood of suffering a major cyberattack, calculates a financial cost to customers’ risks and provides actionable insight on the steps that can be taken to address them.

This funding round saw participation from Safe Security’s existing investors, including former Cisco chairman and chief executive John Chambers, and brings the total amount raised by Safe Security to $49.2 million.

BT said the investment, which is its first major third-party investment in cybersecurity since 2006, reflected its plans to grow rapidly in the sector. Philip Jansen, BT CEO said: “Cybersecurity is now at the top of the agenda for businesses and governments, who need to be able to trust that they’re protected against increasing levels of attack. 

“Already one of the world’s leading providers in a highly fragmented security market, this investment is a clear sign of BT’s ambition to grow further.”

The startup’s co-founder and chief executive Saket Modi said he was “delighted” to be working with BT.

“By aligning BT’s global reach and capabilities with SAFE’s ability to provide real-time visibility on cyber risk posture, we are going to fundamentally change how security is measured and managed across the globe,” he said.

As part of the investment, which will see Safe Security double its engineering team by the end of the year, BT will combine the SAFE platform with its managed security services, and gain exclusive rights to use and sell SAFE to businesses and public sector bodies in the UK. BT will also work collaboratively with Safe Security to develop future products, according to an announcement from the company.

Safe Security’s competitors include UpGuard, Exabeam, VisibleRisk.

It’s time to better identify the cost of cybersecurity risks in M&A deals

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Xiaomi global shipments push past Apple for No. 2 spot

A banner quarter for Xiaomi helped the Chinese mobile company snag the No. 2 spot in global smartphone shipments, according to newly posted Q2 numbers from research firm Canalys. It’s pretty stunning growth for the company, up 83% year-over-year for the quarter and capturing 17% of the global market.

The surge puts Xiaomi at No. 2, globally, behind only Samsung’s 19% by a relatively small margin. Apple is at third with 14% (after its own solid growth has slowed), while fellow Chinese manufacturers Oppo and Vivo round out the top five at 10% a piece.

Huawei, of course, is nowhere to be seen among the top companies. It’s a pretty massive drop, due in no small part to blacklisting that has both barred the company from certain markets (namely, the U.S.) and cut off access to U.S. mobile products, including Google’s Android and various apps.

Image Credits: Canalys

Canalys cites aggressive pricing as a big factor in Xiaomi’s success — particularly contrasted with premium priced offerings from Samsung and Apple.

“It is now transforming its business model from challenger to incumbent, with initiatives such as channel partner consolidation and more careful management of older stock in the open market,” the analyst firm’s Research Manager Ben Stanton said in a release. “It is still largely skewed toward the mass market, however, and compared with Samsung and Apple, its average selling price is around 40% and 75% cheaper respectively. So a major priority for Xiaomi this year is to grow sales of its high-end devices, such as the Mi 11 Ultra.”

The company certainly isn’t a household name in the States (the company has dealt with its own issues here), but of late it has found particular success in Latin America, Africa and Western Europe. It seems that there are still plenty of markets available to continue its expansion as it looks to take on Samsung, even as Oppo and Vivo hope to continue their own respective rapid global growth.

Smartphone shipments jumped 27% globally in Q1

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Google and Jio Platforms announce JioPhone Next, an affordable Android smartphone

Jio Platforms, run by India’s richest man (Mukesh Ambani), and Google on Thursday unveiled the JioPhone Next, an affordable Android smartphone, as the top Indian telecom operator makes further push to expand its reach in the world’s second largest internet market.

The Indian firm, which secured $4.5 billion investment from Google (and another $15.5 billion from Facebook and others) last year and shared plans to work on low-cost smartphones, said the JioPhone Next is aimed at helping roughly 300 million users in India who are still on 2G network upgrade their gadget to access faster networks.

The phone, which is “powered by extremely optimized Android” mobile operating system, will first launch in India on September 10 and will eventually be made available outside of the country, said Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries, at its annual general meeting Thursday.

The JioPhone Next will be the “most affordable smartphone” globally, claimed Ambani, though he didn’t reveal the price or the hardware specifications of the handset.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said Thursday the company has also entered into a 5G cloud partnership with Jio Platforms. “It will help more than a billion Indians connect to a faster and better internet, support businesses in their digital transformation, and help Jio build new services in sectors like health, education and more — laying a foundation for the next phase of India’s digitization,” said the chief executive of Google, which last year committed to invest $10 billion in India.

As part of the 5G cloud partnership, Google is also winning a major Google Cloud customer in Reliance, said Pichai.

“They will be able take advantage of Google’s AI and machine learning, e-commerce, and demand forecasting offerings. Harnessing the reliability and performance of Google Cloud will enable these businesses to scale up as needed to respond to customer demand,” he added.

Ambani unveils the JioPhone Next at Reliance’s Annual General Meeting on Thursday.

The JioPhone Next will ship with a range of features, including Read Aloud and Translate Now that will work with any text on the phone screen, including web pages, apps, messages, and even photos. It also features a “fast, high-quality camera” which will support HDR, and the JioPhone Next will be protected by latest Android releases and security updates, Google said, though it didn’t share the precise duration when this coverage will be offered. (Most smartphone vendors offer security and new Android software support for about two years after the launch.)

“We have worked closely with the Jio team on engineering and product development on useful voice-first features that enable these users to consume content and navigate the phone in their own language, deliver a great camera experience, and get the latest Android feature and security updates,” Google said in a statement.

Even as most smartphones that ship in India, the second largest market, are priced at $150 or less, customers looking for a smartphone priced under $100 are left with little choice. And that choice has further shrunk in recent years.

Research firm Counterpoint told TechCrunch that the sub-$100 smartphones accounted for just 12% of the Indian smartphone market, down from 18% in 2019 and 24% in 2018. Sub-$50 smartphones represented just 0.3% of the entire market in 2020, down from 4.3% in 2018.

Smartphone makers are aware of this whitespace in the market, but have found it incredibly challenging to meet this demand. Some, including Jio Platforms earlier explored a range of feature phones to reach small cities and towns of India. Jio Platforms’ KaiOS-powered feature phone, called JioPhone, had amassed 100 million customers as of late February this year.

In a recent report to clients, analysts at UBS said that after accounting the recent price surge of memory component, any smartphone priced at or under $50 is likely selling at cost.

“While this move by Jio will accelerate 2G to 4G migration, we evaluated how interesting this space would be for other smartphone manufacturers, especially key players like Xiaomi. Xiaomi, the unit market leader in smartphones in India, is unlikely to follow up with a $50 smartphone, in our view,” they wrote in the report, obtained by TechCrunch.

Google, too, has previously made several efforts — $100 Android One smartphones program in 2014 and low-resource intensive Android Go operating system in 2017 — to expand the reach of its handsets. The company has also backed KaiOS, which powers popular feature phones.

The JioPhone Next is a “momentous step in our Android mission for India, and is the first of many that our Android product and engineering teams will embark on in India,” Google said in a statement. “We are also actively expanding our engineering teams in India, as we continue to work on finding ways to answer the unique needs of India’s smartphone users.”

This is a developing story. More to follow…

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Chinese lidar maker Hesai lands $300M led by Hillhouse, Xiaomi, Meituan

The rush to back lidar companies continues as more automakers and robotaxi startups include the remote sensing method in their vehicles.

Latest to the investment boom is Hesai, a Shanghai-based lidar maker founded in 2014 with an office in Palo Alto. The company just raised over $300 million in a Series D funding round led by GL Ventures, the venture capital arm of storied private equity firm Hillhouse Capital, smartphone maker Xiaomi, on-demand services giant Meituan and CPE, the private equity platform of Citic.

Hesai said the new proceeds will be spent on mass-producing its hybrid solid-state lidar for its OEM customers, the construction of its smart manufacturing center, and research and development on automotive-grade lidar chips. The company said it has accumulated “several hundred million dollars” in funding to date.

Other participants in the round included Huatai Securities, Lightspeed China Partners and Lightspeed Venture Capital, as well as Qiming Venture Partners. Bosch, Baidu, and ON Semiconductor are also among its shareholders.

Another Chinese lidar startup Innovusion, a major supplier to electric vehicle startup Nio, raised a $64 million round led by Temasek in May. Livox is another emerging lidar maker that was an offshoot of DJI.

Lidar isn’t limited to powering robotaxis and passenger EVs, and that’s why Hesai got Xiaomi and Meituan onboard. Xiaomi makes hundreds of different connected devices through its manufacturing suppliers that could easily benefit from industrial automation, to which sensing technology is critical. But the phone maker also unveiled plans this year to make electric cars.

Meituan, delivering food to hundreds of millions of consumers in China, could similarly benefit from replacing human riders with lidar-enabled unmanned vans and drones.

Hesai, with a staff of over 500 employees, says its clients span 70 cities across 23 countries. The company touts Nuro, Bosch, Lyft, Navya, and Chinese robotaxi operators Baidu, WeRide and AutoX among its customers. Last year, it kickstarted a partnership with Scale AI, a data labeling company, to launch an open-source data set for training autonomous driving algorithms, with data collected using Hesai’s lidar in California. 

Last July, Hesai and lidar technology pioneer Velodyne entered a long-term licensing agreement as the two dismissed legal proceedings in the U.S., Germany and China.

Lidar startup Innovusion closes $64M round led by Temasek

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Global smartphone market continues rebound with 26% Q1 bump

More signs of the global market righting the ship after a disastrous 2020. New figures from Gartner point to 26% increase in global sales year over year for the first quarter of 2021. The overall increase is an impressive one, though it comes after a couple of years of market slow down, followed by a step drop amid the pandemic.

Manufacturers got hit from all sides last year. 2020 kicked things off with a manufacturing slowdown, as China and greater Asia were the first to be impacted by the effects of Covid-19. In the following months, global demand slowed, as shutdowns were instated and job loss and economic issues massively hampered sales.

Image Credits: Gartner

The new Gartner numbers maintain the same global top three manufacturers as this time last year. Samsung’s overall market share grew from 18.4- to 20.3%, courtesy of budget devices, returning to the number one spot.

Apple had managed to push its way to number one in Q4, on the strength of its belated 5G push. The company dropped down to number two for the first quarter – the same position it held this time last year. Overall, its market share is up around 2% y-o-y to 15.5, according to the figures. The top five are rounded out by three Chinese manufacturers — Xiaomi, Vivo and Oppo – as Huawei’s struggles continue.

Thus far, global chip shortages appear to have had little impact on shipments.