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The intelligent driving industry has entered a period of elimination and integration.

Text丨Zhang Jiahao

Edited by Cheng Manqi

Smart driving solution provider HoloMatic andGAC GroupThe restructuring plan has encountered some changes. Hodo's capital chain is already very tight. As a result, it is disbanding most of its core departments such as data and R&D, and suspending R&D activities.

The China Enforcement Information Disclosure Network shows that Heduo has been listed as the person to be executed by the courts in Beijing Haidian, Jiangsu Suzhou, Guangzhou Huadu, etc., involving an amount of nearly 750,000 yuan.

HoloMatic was founded in June 2017 and has raised more than 1 billion RMB in total. Investors include IDG, Sequoia China, Guangdong Science and Technology Finance, GAC Group and NavInfo. HoloMatic founder Ni Kai was a senior scientist at Baidu Deep Learning Institute and an important technical leader in the early days of Baidu's autonomous driving business.

It is understood that Hodo held shareholders' meetings in Beijing and Guangzhou last week regarding the restructuring of GAC, but the restructuring plan did not receive the support of all shareholders.

Ni Kai then sent an internal letter to inform employees that the restructuring had encountered obstacles, and said that the company would not be able to pay July wages and overdue unpaid wages and provident funds.

On Monday (August 12), Hoduo held an online meeting to inform employees to pack up and leave the office, and that they could apply for voluntary resignation later. Some employees who had not received their unpaid wages moved the company's water dispensers.

Hodo has suspended the payment of some salaries since the beginning of this year. Hodo founder Ni Kai said at a staff meeting at the end of March that Hodo will continue to shrink to around 180 people, and GAC may continue to invest in Hodo afterwards.

It is understood that in July this year, GAC's plan to reorganize Hodo was close to being finalized. The plan at the time was that Hodo would set up a new company, with GAC injecting capital, and Hodo would mainly provide intelligent driving solutions for GAC's brands.

Ni Kai expressed a tenacious desire to survive in an internal letter on Friday: He mentioned that GAC will give a response on the restructuring after research and analysis, and Hodo will also maintain a minimized operating team, on the one hand looking for new opportunities, on the other hand maintaining the most basic functional work, "no matter how difficult it is, there can be no chaos."

Currently, Hoduo still has about 150 employees. For most of the employees, the new opportunities at Hoduo are no longer relevant to them. Headhunters received a number of resumes from Hoduo employees this week.

One employee said that they, the old employees, have been waiting for so long but there has been no good result and they don’t see any hope.

Map provider NavInfo has invested in Hodo several times, and its 2023 annual report mentioned that they have included 18.96 million yuan in "loss in other comprehensive income" for their investment in Hodo Technology.

According to the same annual report, the accounts payable of RMB 1.46 million owed by Heduo to NavInfo was also expected to be 100% unrecoverable.

Huayun Jindian (Zibo) Big Data Technology Co., Ltd. is the data annotation supplier of Hoduo. It has been cooperating with Hoduo since the second half of last year. Currently, Hoduo has accumulated about 2 million yuan in overdue accounts payable to Huayun Jindian. On the weekend after Ni Kai’s internal letter was released, Huayun Jindian received active contact from Hoduo Business, asking them to be mentally prepared for not receiving the payment.

Backed by GAC, Hodo was once considered to have entered the intelligent driving safety circle and was a benchmark case of in-depth cooperation between automobile companies and suppliers.

Hodo reached a cooperation with GAC in 2021 and received three rounds of investment from GAC. After the C+ round of financing in July last year, GAC held approximately 13% of Hodo's shares, making it the largest external shareholder.

Since 2022, Hodo's intelligent driving solutions (including parking and driving) have been launched inGAC Aion、Trumpchi、HaoboThe number of employees at Hodo also quickly doubled from more than 300 to nearly 600 around 2022.

However, in terms of delivering projects to its major customer GAC and expanding into other customers, Hoduo's subsequent development was not as good as expected.

At the beginning of this year, Hodo, which began to shrink, willCheryThe project was sold to another smart driving supplier, Zhixing Technology. Jiang Jingfang, the former head of Bosch's ADAS business in China, who joined in 2021, also led the Hodo project team to join Zhixing. We learned that the scale of this transaction was tens of millions of RMB.

The intelligent driving industry has entered a period of rapid elimination and integration. On the one hand, strong alliances are emerging, such asBYDEquation LeopardIt plans to be equipped with Huawei's intelligent driving solution. On the one hand, companies that are still in the market continue to raise funds or rush to go public. For example, Jianzhi Robotics, Qingzhou Zhihang, Haomo Zhixing, etc. have successively obtained new financing this year, and companies such as Momenta and WeRide have submitted IPO prospectuses. On the other hand, companies that have failed to successfully deliver to major customers have fallen into trouble.