Unpaid half a year wages did not pay, staff with water dispenser money! Another star intelligent driving unicorn burned more than 1 billion and left the field

Smart drive unicorn Hemulti-technology suspected dissolution, employees take water dispenser money

Recently, a number of netizens who are certified as employees of Heduotechnology broke the news on a social platform that the self-driving star unicorn Heduotechnology has embarked on the road of bankruptcy liquidation, and three or four hundred employees have not been paid for most of the year, which is likely to be more than half a year's work has become voluntary labor.

According to the netizen, because He Duo technology has not paid wages, even the office water fountain has been moved by employees to offset wages. The news was confirmed by a number of insiders, "The collapse of talks between He and GAC is equivalent to the last straw." A source told auto media Flying car said.

Heduotechnology, which won GAC's designated position in 2021, has provided intelligent driving solutions for GAC Aean, Trumpchi and other brands and models in recent years. In 2023, when the investment market of intelligent driving is depressed, GAC still invests more than two rounds in succession.

As early as March this year, there are Hedo technology employees broke the news that the company has suspended the payment of part of the salary, and the provident fund has been cut for 3 months, and the salary has been in arrears since January, only the social security has not been broken. At the end of March, He held a plenary meeting, and the senior management promised the staff that the salary of the current staff would be extended to April, but only a part of the salary was paid, and the salary of the departed staff would be paid in June. However, the salary has been delayed, and when the promised date is approaching, He Duo Technology has failed to deliver on its promise.

Hedo technology has come to the present point, there are already traces to follow.

On August 14, according to late Auto news, the restructuring plan of intelligent driving solution provider Heduo Technology and GAC Group encountered major variables, and the current financial situation of Heduo Technology has been very tight. Affected by this, Heduo Technology is dissolving most of the core departments such as data and research and development, and suspending research and development activities. This situation puts the future of Heduo technology in jeopardy.

According to people familiar with the matter, the beginning of the reorganization between Heduo Technology and GAC Group can be traced back to July this year, according to the plan at that time, Heduo Technology will set up a new enterprise, and the capital injection by GAC Group, the main task of the new company is to provide intelligent driving solutions for GAC's brands. In August, after the restructuring plan was not supported by all shareholders, the founder and CEO of Heduotech Ni Kai sent an internal letter to inform employees of the matter, and said that the company would not be able to pay the July salary and due back pay and provident fund.

Before things got worse, Ni Kai, the legal person of the company, also tried to save the company, and he has pledged his shares several times since last year in exchange for funds to save himself.

However, so far, GAC has only said that "it will respond to restructuring matters after evaluation", as for how long He Technology can survive, everything is unknown.

Living beyond our means has been a problem for a long time, and more technology is difficult to save itself

Founded in June 2017, Heduo Technology is committed to creating autonomous driving solutions based on cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology and automotive industry technology, with a complete layout from vehicle drive-by-wire, multi-sensor technology to the upper level of the core algorithm module of automatic driving, and is one of the few companies with full-stack autonomous driving research and development capabilities. Ni Kai, the founder of Heduo Technology, is an expert with rich experience and deep technical background in the field of automatic driving.

Ni Kai graduated from Tsinghua University and then went to Georgia Institute of Technology to study for a PhD in computer science, focusing on computer vision, robotics and other fields of research. He worked at Baidu Deep Learning Research Institute as a senior scientist, during which he created Baidu's driverless team, responsible for the development of driverless cars and some high-precision maps, and worked at Microsoft's Seattle headquarters in the United States, participating in the development of 3D maps and HoloLens VR glasses.

For business development, He Duo technology also invited in the automotive and autonomous driving industry for more than 20 years, former Bosch Group ADAS business unit China head Jiang Jingfang to join the management team, since Jiang Jingfang joined, He Duo Technology will be less than 10 people in Suzhou team, developed in Shanghai, Suzhou with nearly 200 employees of the mass production closed loop team. Some people familiar with the matter said that it was because of Jiang Jingfang that He technology was able to catch GAC.

With the support of star founders and well-known senior management talents, Heduo Technology has been quite favored in the capital market.

According to 36kr venture capital platform data show that since its establishment, Hedor Technology has received at least 7 rounds of financing, and the total financing has exceeded 1 billion yuan in the past three years alone.

In 2021, Heduo Technology announced the completion of C1 round of financing, although the specific amount of financing is not disclosed in detail, but the company will further develop and grow in the field of autonomous driving.

In 2022, GAC Group completed the C2 round of financing of Hedo Technology through GAC Capital, which totaled $100 million (about 670 million yuan), mainly for the innovative development and large-scale production of high-level autonomous driving technology.

In July 2023, Heduo Technology once again announced the completion of a new round of financing, the amount of 300 million yuan, led by Guangdong Yueke Financial Group and GAC Capital.

Even if so much money, but due to financing events buried hidden dangers, mass production projects are difficult to make a profit, the executive team poor decision-making and other reasons, He Duo technology still came to the end of the road.

According to the China Executive Information Disclosure website, Heduo Technology has been listed as the executioner by the courts of Haidian in Beijing, Suzhou in Jiangsu province and Huadu in Guangzhou, involving nearly 750,000 yuan. These legal problems aggravate the company's financial plight and make it face more severe survival pressure.

It is common for intelligent driving companies to fall before dawn

In fact, there are not a few intelligent driving companies that fall before the profit and volume. Because there's no denying the fact that companies that don't make money eventually run out of money and leave.

The most important competition in the autonomous driving space is the competition for scalable and sustainable business models. Whoever can actually make money by using self-driving cars to provide services will ultimately survive. Because only when you make money, you can start to scale up, without blindly seeking external blood transfusions. This expansion allows you to grow your brand, learn about your passengers and how to create value for them, and collect more data that allows you to improve your technology faster. Having a viable business is the beginning of a positive feedback loop that leads to sustainable growth and the possibility of profitability.

However, one of the biggest levers of profitability is the self-driving technology itself: the cost of developing a perfectly safe self-driving technology is very high! Because of this, many companies are focusing on developing the technology as a prerequisite for building a business. In short: First let the technology work, then let the business work. But this model is risky. What if the technology works but the economics are not good, the technology is too expensive and the market won't pay? But if you haven't tested your idea in the market, how do you know if you're making the right technology investment? It's like an endless cycle.

Therefore, many autonomous driving companies are stuck in this dead cycle, and they are walking on a dead road that runs out of funds and leads to extinction. The truth is, smaller companies run out of money a little faster than larger companies. Many small autonomous driving companies have gone through this process, leading to mergers and acquisition-style mergers.

But even big companies eventually run out of money. In 2022, Volkswagen and Ford decided to jointly invest in ArgoAI, which burned through $3.7 billion after 7 years of establishment. Just four months after receiving OpenAI's investment, GhostAutonomy announced it was shutting down its global operations and shutting down the company. Domestic Ali's Dharma Institute announced last year that it would abandon the research and development of autonomous driving technology, and the entire autonomous driving laboratory would be incorporated into Cainiao Group.

Uber ATG and Zoox went through consolidation and were unable to raise the funding needed to sustain their own research and development. Even companies like Waymo and Cruise have moved away from a single-investor model to a more diversified investor base, allowing each investor to limit their risk. For example: When Waymo brought in $2.5 billion in outside investment, Alphabet had more than $110 billion in cash. Most of these companies do not generate any revenue, which is a huge business risk.

Reference link:

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