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Text | Su Jianxun

36Kr learned that the space-time intelligent technology company "Qianxun Location Network Co., Ltd." (hereinafter referred to as "Qianxun Location") has completed a new round of strategic financing.

This round of financing was led by Beijing Information Industry Development Investment Fund, followed by Shanghai Shuyu Dingyuan Private Equity Investment Fund Partnership, Beijing Dongcheng District Science and Technology Innovation Industry Investment Fund, and Qingdao Zhonghe Xingyao Venture Capital Fund. The company's overall valuation has exceeded 16 billion yuan.

Qianxun Location was established in August 2015. Based on the basic positioning data of the Beidou satellite system (compatible with GPS, GLONASS, and Galileo), the company uses more than 5,000 GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) satellite-based/ground-based augmentation stations around the world, independently developed positioning algorithms, and large-scale Internet service platforms to provide users with centimeter-level positioning, millimeter-level perception, and nanosecond-level time-space intelligent services.

Judging from the specific shareholder information, this round of strategic financing of Qixun Location was mainly supported by the Beijing Municipal Government, forming a linkage between investment institutions at the capital city and district levels.

Among them, the Beijing Information Industry Development Fund has a scale of 10 billion yuan and is managed and operated by Beijing Jingguorui Equity Investment Fund Management Co., Ltd. It carries out direct equity investment around the strategic layout of the national and Beijing information industries, focusing on industrial Internet, network security and information innovation, Beidou, Internet 3.0 and other fields. It is an important indicator of the strategic direction of the development of Beijing's high-end industries.

The Beijing Dongcheng District Science and Technology Innovation Industry Investment Fund was approved by the Beijing Dongcheng District Government. It aims to promote the efficient use of state-owned assets in Dongcheng District, consolidate the dominant position of the new generation of information technology industry, focus on advantageous sub-sectors such as emerging software and new information services, and accelerate the gathering of high-end industrial links and leading enterprises.

In addition, as a company founded in Yangpu District, Shanghai, Qixun Location also received regional financial support from its founding place.

Shanghai Shuyu Dingyuan Investment Fund is a digital economy mother fund established by Yangpu District-level state-owned asset group Yangpu Science and Technology Innovation to build an innovative financial service platform development strategy system and better play the supporting and leading role of district-level capital in economic and social development. The mother fund's main investment directions are artificial intelligence, industrial Internet, cloud native, big data, digital health, digital green economy, etc.

1. In the era of big AI models, spatiotemporal intelligence applications are experiencing a huge explosion

The so-called "space-time intelligence" is to map the real world and the digital world with high precision and high dynamic accuracy through the effective connection of time and space.

This is also what Qixun Positioning has done. In 2015, Qixun Positioning brought cloud computing and big data capabilities into the satellite navigation industry and began to build and operate the National Beidou Ground-Based Augmentation System "One Network Nationwide", receiving Beidou satellite positioning signals from the sky, calculating satellite positioning errors in real time, and providing high-precision positioning services for hundreds of millions of users.Let Beidou's high-precision space-time intelligent services be used on demand like water, electricity and coal.

(For more popular science content about space-time intelligence, please refer to 36Kr’s past reports: 36Kr Exclusive Interview | Qianxun Location CEO Chen Jinpei: From Huawei mobile phones to student backpacks, "space-time intelligence" has become infrastructure)

With the tremendous progress made in AI big models in the past two years, the application of "space-time intelligence" has also blossomed in all walks of life.

Intense solar activity can cause abnormal activity in the Earth's ionosphere, thus affecting the global satellite positioning and navigation system. Space-time intelligence requires precise grasp of the whereabouts of these satellite positioning "disruptors" so that it can continue to provide highly available and high-precision space-time intelligence services even during periods of ionospheric disturbances.

Based on this demand, in June this year, Qixun Location released the industry's first "Atmosphere Inference Large Model", which adopts the advanced DiT architecture and combines a number of self-developed technological innovations to build an efficient atmospheric neural network base large model. It can monitor and infer the activity of atmospheric layers such as the ionosphere and troposphere in real time, and aims to provide services for research in related fields such as communications and satellite navigation and positioning.

Qixun Location has built an ionospheric monitoring network in Hainan to provide basic parameter support for the evolution of large models.

"Qianxun Atmospheric Enhancement Service" will be widely used in surveying and mapping, industrial drones, precision agriculture, autonomous driving and other fields. Currently, ecological partners can integrate "SDK supporting atmospheric enhancement service" to enable smart terminals to obtain atmospheric enhancement service without changing core components and algorithms, greatly improving access convenience.

In the field of autonomous driving, another core scenario of the AI ​​industry, Qixun Location is the only mature and mass-produced high-precision positioning service provider in China.

Taking into account the high service standards of intelligent driving, Qixun Location has created an "automotive high-precision positioning industrialization system", and is the first in the industry to clarify the solution content, product performance, service processes and standards for the industrialization of automotive high-precision positioning, including providing an "integrity" safety indicator with a risk as low as 10 to the power of -7/hour, and making real-time judgments on satellite positioning results.

According to the data released by Qixun Location, it has reached cooperation with more than 40 automobile manufacturers, including well-known German manufacturers, GAC, SAIC, Hongqi, Ideal, Xiaopeng, Zhiji, and Aion. It has mass-delivered more than 30 models, designated more than 100 models, served more than 1.6 million smart driving cars, and accumulated service time of nearly 2 billion hours.

2. After 9 years of establishment, Qianxun Location has scaled up "space-time intelligence"

In the nine years since its establishment, Qixun Location has insisted on refining and intelligentizing the navigation and positioning capabilities of Beidou satellites, turning them into commercial products that can be used by businesses and consumers on the ground.

For example, the capabilities provided by Beidou are like nature's spring water, and Qianxun Location is like a drinking water company that processes the original spring water into a variety of products such as mineral water and distilled water.

Scale is a brilliant report card that Qixun Location has been able to deliver so far.

6 million bicycles is the order of magnitude of the sub-meter positioning that shared bicycles such as Hello and Meituan, which are supported by Qixun Location, need to achieve in all scenarios.

By implanting the space-time intelligent chip module into the shared bicycle smart lock, Qianxun Location can improve the real-time positioning accuracy of the vehicle from 10 meters to within 1 meter. On the operation management platform, the operator can confirm the exact location of the vehicle in real time.

In terms of software support, Qixun Location uses digital twin technology to design corresponding electronic fence layers specifically for parking areas and no-parking areas required by urban management. Bicycles can only be parked within the electronic fence, solving the problem of illegal parking of shared bicycles from the source.

30 million is the shipment volume of mobile phones that support Qianxun Location Lane-Level Navigation, covering more than 20 best-selling models of mobile phone brands such as Huawei, Honor, Xiaomi, OPPO, and vivo.

Lane-level navigation is a service provided by mobile map apps that provides navigation information accurate to the lane level. When the driver needs to change lanes, such as when approaching a turning intersection or a highway ramp, lane-level navigation will provide more detailed lane-level action guidance.

Before the lane-level navigation function was born, Qixun Location worked with upstream and downstream industries to open up the entire Beidou space-time intelligence link for mobile phones, including upgrades to technical elements such as the mobile phone's positioning antenna, positioning algorithm, positioning chip, cost and power consumption.

To achieve this goal, Qixun Location has built a complete space-time intelligence technology stack and is the world's first space-time intelligence company to achieve a full-link closed loop from infrastructure, basic services, basic devices to basic software.

Image source: Qianxun Location

This "full link" refers to the four major underlying spatiotemporal intelligence capabilities of infrastructure, basic services, basic components and basic software, which include satellite ground-based augmentation systems, spatiotemporal enhancement algorithms, Beidou spatiotemporal intelligent chip modules, digital twin software capabilities, etc.

In the process of exploring the large-scale implementation of spatiotemporal intelligent applications, Qixun Location has gradually formed three underlying technical capabilities (referred to as the "three bodies"): "space-ground integration, cloud-core integration, and software-hardware integration."

Unlike a single service platform, hardware platform, and application platform, Qixun Location's "three bodies" deeply coordinate the three to provide users with better services and guarantees.

"In the past four or five years, we have developed our own chip modules, complete machine products and system-level products, which have enabled us to move from the cloud to the end, have the capabilities of the three bodies, complete the technical closed loop of space-time intelligence, and have more opportunities to interact with users from all walks of life through end perception. We will become a cloud computing and big data company with Beidou and space-time capabilities as its core. This is how we position ourselves today." said Chen Jinpei, CEO of Qixun Location.