In early July, it was rumored that Beixing completed a new round of financing.

The author confirmed the authenticity of the news from Beixing and learned that the investor has a state-owned background.

Beixing stated that this round of financing will be used to promote the research and development of laser radar technology and mass production applications.

Looking at the timeline, Beixing was founded in 2015 and obtained Series A financing from IDG Capital and Ecovacs in March 2016, followed by a Series A+ round in November.

From 2018 to 2024, Beixing almost secured financing every year.

After nine years, its valuation has soared, but the industry situation remains complex.

The latest research reports and public interviews point out that as an important link in industrial upgrading, the application of laser radar technology is of great significance to emerging industries such as advanced intelligent driving, drones, robots, and smart cities, and the industry is about to enter a period of rapid growth.

Currently, laser radar has boarded the fast train of intelligent driving dividends, but under the internal competition, the cost has plummeted, and the voices of losses from overseas giants are endless.

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Chinese companies that dominate the market are called "bitter victories."

A consensus in the industry is that laser radar is not only a functional part but also a safety part, which is crucial.

It is in the stage of front-loading installation in high-end passenger cars, and during this period, the focus is on the delivery and engineering implementation of the car companies, while gradually starting price competition.

The price war is difficult to end in the short term, but the focus of laser radar companies should not be on low prices, but on whether the product can provide more value to customers.

A healthy and technologically mature supplier can accompany customers for a long time and cross the industry cycle.

Where will Beixing use the funds after financing?

Will it participate in price wars?

How to achieve cost reduction and profit?

How to balance the business between vehicles and non-vehicles?

These are the points of concern to the outside world.

This article attempts to combine Beixing's new round of financing to analyze the value creation logic and development ideas behind it.

What supports another round of financing?

According to observations, under the capital winter, Beixing can complete a new round of financing, which is related to the changes in the capital market, the industry market space, and the company's financing methods.

Affected by the overall environment and the new "Nine Articles" and "Seventeen Articles of Venture Capital," the rules of the primary market have changed dramatically.

Some investors have shifted from a single capital return rate-driven "pick the top" logic to a multi-dimensional factor resource-driven "accurate matching" logic, choosing to focus on the industry, invest carefully, and try to stay at the table.

Currently, "hard technology" investment has become the mainstream, and state-owned capital has become the main source of water for investing early, investing in new industries, and cultivating local emerging industries.

And laser radar, as an emerging industry, has a broad development prospect and a huge market space.

On the one hand, in 2023, the penetration rate of laser radar in vehicles increased from less than 1% to more than 1%.

The breakthrough of the first 1% took nearly 10 years.

In the view of industry insiders, laser radar is expected to make the vision of "zero" accidents in future intelligent travel step by step become a reality.

But similar to the airbags in cars, the importance and value of in-vehicle laser radar still need time to be seen and recognized.

On the other hand, the development of laser radar technology is still in the early stage of the game, and the skill points need to be filled.

As the supply chain gradually matures, the penetration rate is expected to improve, and what companies need to do is to reflect the value.

The basic point of value investment is also intrinsic value.

In the view of Beixing's founder Li Yuan, the reason why Beixing can get capital support is not so much that investors are optimistic about Beixing, but more optimistic about the entire laser radar industry.

At the current stage of the laser radar industry, it is similar to photovoltaics around 2007 and 2008.

Both are ToB industries, and the products are relatively core components, focusing on research and development, and the volume is fast.

Although photovoltaic capacity has been over-supplied, demand has been growing.

At the same time, there are some differences between the two.

First, the Chinese photovoltaic industry has produced several "billionaire-level" figures and several companies with a market value of hundreds of billions of yuan in 20 years, but the laser radar industry has not.

Second, photovoltaics have become a strong industry in China, and although laser radar is not yet, it is being valued by the country as a core component of unmanned driving and low-altitude economy, and was listed as a core key technology by relevant departments a few years ago.

"Now is the first wave of Chinese laser radar," Li Yuan said.

The first wave of development of photovoltaics was in China, and the first wave of development of laser radar is overseas.

At present, the first wave of laser radar overseas has passed, and the first wave in China has not passed.

Compared with the photovoltaic industry, which has gone through three ups and downs, the laser radar industry wants to truly rise on this land, and at least one elimination and focus are needed.

In the "uncertainty," the gold is seen in the sand, which tests the true strength of corporate value creation and requires entrepreneurs to improve their financing methods and skills.

Beixing, which is directly pointed to, has its own set of financing methods.

Li Yuan summarized the way Beixing impresses investors as "three axes," getting on the car, disassembling the machine, and looking at the production line.

That is: by getting on the car, it shows the first priority of safety and long-termism; by disassembling the machine, it shows the balance of cost reduction and efficiency and the ability to make a profit; by looking at the production line, it allows investors to feel the height of mass production and urban manufacturing capabilities in the automated calibration and assembly line, and decides whether to finally join hands.

If customers cannot feel the value, even if a technology company's product performance is good, it cannot get long-term support.

For technology companies, the general positive cycle is: companies help customers improve efficiency through valuable products, customers recognize the value and are willing to pay more gross profit.

After obtaining the gross profit, the company continues to develop, and then expands the market through better products.

From a macro perspective, commercialization is an important driving force for technological development and is also a process of technology selection and optimization.

Beixing's path is to better understand market demand through commercialization, continuously find breakthroughs between technology and demand.

At the same time, by technology and products, it demonstrates the company's technical value and application value in the vehicle and non-vehicle fields in financing, proves that the value is recognized by customers, and has incremental space.

Both business and technology are important, how to create value?

It should be noted that with the large-scale mass production of laser radar and the maturity of the industrial chain, the price of in-vehicle laser radar continues to fall.

In this process of price reduction, the car price war has accelerated the speed of laser radar price reduction, and then evolved into a price war.

In order to maintain or expand market share, some laser radar manufacturers have become a means of exchanging volume for price.

However, blindly pursuing low prices is not conducive to the healthy development of the industry and puts pressure on the profitability of companies.

Public information shows that at the beginning of Beixing's establishment, it did not directly enter the passenger car field, but chose to do industrial laser radar and rail transit laser radar, and has rich experience in drones, robots, and smart transportation scenarios.

After achieving mass production in the transportation field, the company replicated its experience to the vehicle field and began to make a profit financially in 2020.

In terms of business model, Beixing's business mainly focuses on three major categories: vehicles, large transportation, and industrial sensing, covering more than 90 countries and regions worldwide, and has delivered more than one million laser radars.

In addition to the intensified internal competition in the field of in-vehicle laser radar, Beixing's laser radar has ranked first in the market share in the fields of large transportation and industrial sensing, and has also provided self-blood support.

At present, while the vehicle business maintains stable development, Beixing takes the overseas market as a growth point for performance, and insists on technological innovation and user-oriented, balancing the value creation and healthy development of the vehicle and non-vehicle fields.

Under the platform, the general design part can be reused efficiently, which is one of the ways in the industry to reduce R&D costs and improve production efficiency.

According to Li Yuan, Beixing's positioning is a full-category laser radar company, facing multiple directions such as vehicles, robots, and drones.

The way to expand business is usually to do a generation of platforms every two years, and then derive many segmented products based on the platform to serve various fields.

The company can absorb the capabilities in different field applications and transform them into iterative points shared by various fields, continuously accumulating learning to meet the requirements of the next time point.

For Beixing internally, there is a big difference between the business angles of laser radar products in the vehicle and non-vehicle fields.

However, there are no obvious boundaries between various fields from the perspective of technological iteration.

At the same time, the vehicle and non-vehicle businesses support each other.

The single customer traffic of in-vehicle laser radar is relatively large, and high reliability can be achieved based on low cost.

The non-vehicle field has very high performance requirements, and these performance requirements can be fed back to the in-vehicle laser radar business once they are passed.

Li Yuan said that commercial success is very important, and refining technology is also very important.

Only by improving technology and using less hardware to achieve the same performance can the cost be truly reduced.

There are still many points worth striving for in the industry, which is where the financing funds should be used.

What companies need to do is not blindly engage in price wars, but to create value, solve safety, efficiency, and cost issues, increase the breadth of customer acceptance by reducing costs, meet the in-depth needs of customers with innovation, and strive to popularize the dividends of technology to thousands of households.

And value creation requires the joint efforts of enterprises and customers, and efficiency improvement is the key.

As discussed in the industry: can customers really feel the product functions?

Can car companies reduce the accident rate, and are insurance companies recognized?

Can drone companies reduce crashes, and are drone companies recognized?

In the process of raising and solving problems, laser radar companies are required to strive to quantify efficiency improvement and transform product performance into value recognized by customers.

Bravely pioneering the uncharted territory of innovation, looking for that solution, the good news is that for the Chinese market, laser radar is playing a brand new story.

On the one hand, in the current rapid development of infrastructure, a group of companies aim to improve customer value, connect with products between the supply chain and customers, and similar cutting-edge innovation explorations are happening in various application fields of vehicles and non-vehicles.

On the other hand, in the industrialization of new technologies, some Chinese laser radar companies have stood at the forefront of the world, breaking into the "no man's land" of technological innovation.In the view of some, breakthrough innovation often meets two criteria.

First, such innovation must break through the existing ceiling to some extent, and every step forward requires a substantial accumulation of technology to bring exclusive value to the company.

Second, it must start from a real "pain point" when considering the research and development path and direction, so that the innovative technology has strong vitality.

For example, in the eyes of drone manufacturers, every 100 grams lighter the lidar is, the drone can have nearly 9 more minutes of cruising time.

This represents a significant increase in delivery efficiency and gives lidar suppliers an opportunity to compete for ultimate value.

At that time, there was already an excellent lidar product abroad.

Its official publicity weight was 20 grams, and the actual weight supplied to major customers was as light as a few tens of grams.

Li Yuan revealed that in 2017, Beisense launched the first generation of cargo drone-related products, with a weight of about 90 grams.

Based on this, to achieve a sharp weight reduction while maintaining the balance between weight, precision, and applicability, the difficulty and workload are no less than starting over.

During the new product development process, Beisense almost thought through all the creative ideas that could be used at the aviation level, including the use of domestically produced high-performance customized chips, and testing new materials with suppliers bit by bit, trying to reduce weight and improve performance at every link.

In the end, Beisense reduced the weight of the new product to 10 grams, increased the frequency to a maximum of 10,000 Hz, and passed the DO-160G aviation standard test at the beginning of 2024, becoming the first lidar company in the world to participate in the DO-160G certification.

Currently, the product's main advantage in the industry is not low price, but super high performance.

Lidar products mounted on drones Source/Beisense official website Looking at the entire industry, Beisense's lidar has always been known for its high performance and high line count.

Public information shows that in the field of rail transit, Beisense was the first to achieve unmanned driving in specific fields.

In the field of automotive lidar, in December 2022, Beisense released the industry's first 512-line automotive-grade lidar AD2, a number far exceeding the conventional 56-line lidar at the time.

At the beginning of 2023, Beisense and Jabil jointly created the world's first mass production line of 256-line automotive-grade lidar.

In April of the same year, Beisense and Didi Autonomous Driving jointly launched the first 2K image-level high-precision lidar "Beisense Beta" in China.

In Li Yuan's view, when there is nothing to copy, the company is proud on one hand and on the other hand, it is also feeling its way forward.

For corporate technological innovation, no model is perfect after completion and never needs to be changed.

It requires companies to slowly understand the real core issues of the next step in the process of communicating with customers.

"No one will tell you that answer, our responsibility now is to explore the front line ourselves, and bring engineers to create products to solve problems."

In this process, it is inevitable for high-tech companies to take the wrong path and fail.

While daring to take risks, it is also necessary to control risks, to find a scientific method to make mistakes efficiently, and to find that solution.

He often shares a saying with his team: Don't innovate casually, but innovate at key points.

Especially in core performance, innovation is a must.

"First, when objective conditions lead to insufficient cognition, but a decision must be made, you can guess, but you must control the cost of trial and error.

Second, as a leader, companies must take responsibility to protect intellectual property rights well, and once they can go through, they can spread the costs later.

Third, encourage the team to innovate and not be afraid of failure."

He added.