Momenta is a Chinese autonomous driving startup in Suzhou, founded by a former Microsoft research scientist who helped launch face recognition giant SenseTime. Momenta is the first autonomous driving company in China to reach a USD $1bn valuation, in 2018. It counts Daimler as a major investor, and is listed on Daimler’s “M&A Tech Invest” portfolio as deep learning software partner for perception in autonomous driving. Being Chinese, Momenta also benefits from state support with government-guided funds.
Momenta announced recently that its entire robotaxi fleet will operate without safety drivers in 2024, while some of its vehicles will already be driverless by 2022. Just this month, Momenta secured its first license to recruit passengers for its robotaxis running on chosen public roads in Suzhou.
The challenge is twofold: make it work safely and make it profitable. They procure core hardware parts from international and domestic vendors including NXP, Nvidia, and Texas Instruments, for example, as semiconductor suppliers.
On the technical side, as stated by their CEO in several recent interviews, “I’ve repeatedly told our R&D team that they are hired not as problem solvers but as architects. Why? Because Level 4 involves long-tail scenarios. You may be presented with millions of problems. Sure, we can solve 100 problems with 100 people, but we can’t hire one million engineers to answer one million questions… So, if you can build an automatic problem-solving system, automation will take care of a lot of the work for us.”
On the business model side, they have a franchising model in mind, like McDonald’s. They’ll have a set of operational standards and replicate them in other cities, where they will collaborate with the local government, taxi services, operational companies, and other stakeholder parties.
