Alibaba has led investments worth more than $300 million into Chinese autonomous driving start-up DeepRoute.ai that makes self-driving systems for vehicles, runs a fleet of autonomous taxis with some operated by its partners, and is also developing technology for logistics.
Alibaba’s involvement in the funding round underscores the ambitions of China’s technology giants to get a foothold in the area of driverless cars. Most of the money is being spent to develop the technology and the rest is scale up the fleet size.