Deng Simiao posted from the Copilot Temple
Intelligent Car Reference | Official Account: AI4Auto
A new capital agency group composed of Chinese capitals and led by Rockets Capital has surfaced. Its backers include Sequoia China, IDG Capital, GGV Capital, eGarden, and Wuyuan Capital, raising more than $200 million for its first round.
The most noteworthy part is that XPeng Motors is the most important contributor to this round of funding. Previously, XPeng Motors had established the investment and financing institution internally, and now, this institution seems to be more open, as many investors of XPeng Motors have gathered to promote the ecological strategy of the company.
The fund is named “Rockets Capital” and operates independently from XPeng Motors. It aims to invest in the upstream and downstream supply chain of electric vehicles, similar to the model of NIO Capital.
Moreover, on March 4, Ideal Motors also established a venture capital company with a registered capital of 600 million yuan.
Apparently, new automakers are no longer satisfied with just financing and hence have been increasingly adopting an approach of combining investment and financing activities. There is a trend of the “financialization” of the new automotive industry.
For more details, let’s take a closer look.
What is Rockets Capital?
The appearance of Rockets Capital is expected but reasonable.
Last September, it was reported that XPeng Motors had joined the VC fund and was independently raising funds, with President Gu Hongde leading the team. Top investment bankers from Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs formed the core team to create an investment layout for the upstream and downstream sectors of the industrial chain. The fund was said to be much larger in scale and nearly equivalent to NIO Capital in terms of investment scope.
This year, XPeng’s venture capital fund has surfaced: Rockets Capital. The fund mainly focuses on the electric vehicle industry chain, clean energy, and frontier technology fields. It targets start-up companies that are in the early or growth stages and have technological innovation and disruptive potential.
Public information shows that the co-founder of Rockets Capital is Yuan Bing, and the fund’s core investment team members come from well-known new energy vehicle battle departments, automobile industry funds, and top venture capital funds. They have a unique industry understanding of new energy vehicles and hard technology fields, and their previous investment records are excellent.
Moreover, from January to the present, this group has made several new moves.
What has XPeng Motors invested in recently?
XPeng Motors not only produces its own vehicles but also invests in start-ups along the chip, LiDAR, and battery supply chains.On January 10th of this year, XiaoPeng Motors led the investment in a LiDAR company called One LiDAR, with a financing scale of hundreds of millions of RMB, which can provide a MEMS LiDAR solution for automotive standards.
In February, Xinnengyuan Battery received a 2.4 billion yuan investment, which included three of China’s new automakers: Li Auto, NIO, and XiaoPeng Motors. The affiliated entity of Sky Top in the financing list is XiaoPeng Motors, which invested 400 million yuan and obtained a 3.21% share.
In addition, domestic silicon carbide chip manufacturer Zhanxin Electronics announced on February 16th that it had received exclusive investment from XiaoPeng Motors, which will be mainly used for market expansion, supplementary research and development, and operations while introducing outstanding talents.
It can be seen that China’s new automakers are “ambitious” in this industry chain-style strategy, ultimately for the purpose of forming a closed-loop industrial ecosystem that is more conducive to cost control and can grasp more say in the future.
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This article is a translation by ChatGPT of a Chinese report from 42HOW. If you have any questions about it, please email bd@42how.com.