Recently, Qianxun has completed a new round of strategic financing, with an overall valuation exceeding 16 billion yuan. The investors are led by Beijing Information Industry Development Investment Fund, followed by Shanghai Shuyu Dingyuan Investment Fund, Beijing Dongcheng District Science and Technology Innovation Industry Investment Fund, and Qingdao Zhonghe Xingyao Entrepreneurship Investment Fund.
According to the data from the venture capital channel of the Associated Press of Finance - Zhizhong, Qianxun Location was founded in 2015, jointly sponsored by China North Industries Group and Alibaba Group. It focuses on "Internet plus Location (Beidou)", and builds a location service cloud platform through the integration and construction of the Beidou Foundation One Network to meet the demand of the country, industry and mass market for accurate location services.
Chen Jinpei, CEO of Qianxun, comes from the Alibaba Group and has been working at Alibaba for over 10 years. Prior to that, he served as the General Manager of Alibaba Cloud Computing Business.
16 billion unicorns attract state-owned assets from Beijing and Shanghai to join the market
The investment team of Qianxun position this time is quite strong. Among the four funds that have been invested, three are Beijing Shanghai state-owned assets, namely the Beijing Information Industry Development Investment Fund that leads the investment, the Shanghai Shuyu Dingyuan Investment Fund that follows, and the Beijing Dongcheng District Science and Technology Innovation Industry Investment Fund.
The Beijing Information Industry Development Investment Fund is a high-precision and cutting-edge industry development fund established during the 14th Five Year Plan period in Beijing, with a target scale of 10 billion yuan. The subscribed capital of the Beijing Municipal Government Investment Guidance Fund does not exceed 3 billion yuan.
The fund focuses on industrial Internet, network security, and ICT, Beidou, and Internet 3.0, focusing on the two tracks of "industrial transformation and upgrading" and "transformation and development".
The other two state-owned assets in Beijing and Shanghai are the Shanghai Shuyu Dingyuan Investment Fund and the Dongcheng District Science and Technology Innovation Industry Investment Fund. Equity penetration shows that the largest shareholder of the former is the National Supervisory Commission of Yangpu District, Shanghai; The latter was approved by the Dongcheng District Government of Beijing to consolidate the gathering of the new generation information technology industry.
The actions of the three major state-owned assets in Beijing and Shanghai demonstrate Qianxun's unique industry position and market recognition. According to the official website of China Ordnance Industry Group, in 2015, the State Administration for Industry and Commerce approved the name of China Location "Qianxun Location Network Co., Ltd." and established it in Yangpu District, Shanghai, marking an important step forward in the application of the Beidou satellite navigation system.
At its establishment, Qianxun Position had a registered capital of 2 billion yuan, with China Ordnance Industry Group and Alibaba Group each holding 50% of the equity; In October 2019, Qianxun Position completed a 1 billion yuan Series A financing, with Shanghai International Group Asset Management Company, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China Financial Asset Investment Company, and China State owned Capital Venture Capital Fund among others making investments.
After the completion of this round of financing, Qianxun's valuation exceeded 10 billion yuan, reaching 12.5 billion yuan, and it became an industry unicorn in one fell swoop.
The "Alibaba series" gene is obvious, and the two shareholders have achieved a small exit
As a company personally cultivated by Alibaba, Qianxun has a close relationship with Alibaba.
Equity penetration shows that as of now, Hangzhou Alibaba Weitou Information Technology Co., Ltd. (referred to as Alibaba Weitou) is the largest shareholder of Qianxun, with a shareholding ratio of 41.96%; Zhongbing Beidou Application Research Institute is the second largest shareholder with a shareholding ratio of 34.27%; The third largest shareholder is Hangzhou Chengyun Network Technology Co., Ltd. (referred to as Chengyun Network), with a shareholding ratio of 5.50%.
Among them, the largest shareholder "Alibaba Weitou" and the third largest shareholder "Chengyun Network" have the same actual controller, Hangzhou Xinzhan Chuangtu Network Technology Co., Ltd. (referred to as Xinzhan Chuangtu), which is jointly held by Shao Xiaofeng and Wen Jia.
Wen Jia and Shao Xiaofeng are important figures in the Alibaba Group. According to the list of partners of Alibaba in 2024, Wen Jia is the President of Public Affairs of Alibaba Group and a director of Alibaba Entertainment Group; Shao Xiaofeng is the Executive Vice President of Alibaba Group and the Chairman of Alibaba Group's Risk Management Committee.
According to his resume, Shao Xiaofeng was the captain of the Criminal Investigation Brigade of Hangzhou Public Security Bureau in his early years. He joined Alibaba in March 2005 and served as the director of the Alibaba Group's Network Security Department; Afterwards, he was promoted all the way. According to Alibaba's 2022 annual report, Shao Xiaofeng was one of the 28 Alibaba partners on the list.
Wen Jia initially worked in the Shanghai media circle as a KOL in the food industry, sharing food experience through his personal official account "Igor is full", and was labeled by the outside world as a "literary young woman growing up by the West Lake".
It is worth mentioning that the Zhongbing Beidou Application Research Institute, which originally held 50% of the shares, completed a small exit in February this year. According to the Beijing Property Rights Exchange, the 7.7% equity held by Beidou Application Research Institute has a listed transfer price of 1.307 billion yuan; On April 9, 2024, the transfer price was adjusted to 1.208 billion yuan, corresponding to a post investment valuation of 15.7 billion yuan.
The "Beidou" unicorn enters the field of autonomous driving
Based on the "Beidou+application", Qianxun Location has laid out areas such as intelligent driving, smart water conservancy, smart mining, digital agriculture, smart cities, and smart transportation.
Chen Jinpei, CEO of Qianxun Positions, stated that Qianxun Positions is fully integrating with Alibaba's big model "Tongyi Qianwen", and plans to gradually establish a dedicated big model in the field of spatiotemporal intelligence based on the general big model. It will be gradually opened to partners in the future.
An investor said in an interview with the Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily that Alibaba has promoted the application of the Beidou satellite navigation system by jointly establishing Qianxun Location. Although there is not much difference in technology between Beidou and GPS, there is still a lot of room for development of the Beidou system in the fields of high-precision maps and autonomous driving
At present, the intelligent driving application scenarios of the "Beidou" unicorn Qianxun position include autonomous driving, V2X vehicle road coordination, and intelligent cockpit. In the field of autonomous driving, a reporter from the Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily noticed that Alibaba has made multiple moves: in 2021, Alibaba invested 1.3 billion yuan in the autonomous driving unicorn "Yuanrong Qixing"; Recently, Momenta, an intelligent autonomous driving company that went public in the United States, also has Alibaba's presence.
In terms of intelligent cockpit, Alibaba and SAIC Group jointly established "Zebra Intelligent Driving", and its first intelligent cockpit OS was launched in 2021.
The above-mentioned investors told reporters from the Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily that the high-precision positioning service provided by the Beidou system is crucial for intelligent driving and can achieve centimeter level positioning accuracy.
Technically speaking, the basic components upstream of the Beidou industry chain, including key technologies such as chips and antennas, have achieved 100% autonomous controllability, providing strong support for high-precision positioning services, ground-based enhancement systems, integrated positioning solutions, and other services. In the future, with the integration of emerging technologies such as 5G, artificial intelligence, and big data, the Beidou system will also generate new models and formats
As for Alibaba itself, in addition to investment, it has made certain breakthroughs in the development of intelligent driving internally. For example, its artificial intelligence team iDST has achieved breakthroughs in two specific scenario tasks in autonomous driving technology, namely rural lanes and multi lane driving. However, its Damo Institute autonomous driving team has merged into Cainiao Group, which is seen by the outside world as a business need to "enter" scenarios and seek commercialization.
As of now, Alibaba has established partnerships with more than 40 car manufacturers, including GAC, SAIC, Hongqi, Ideal, Xiaopeng, Zhiji, Huawei, and others, to support 6 million shared bicycles to achieve full scene sub meter positioning, as well as 30 million mobile phones that support lane level navigation.