The conference began in 2009 and has been held for 15 consecutive years. Many outstanding listed companies, unicorns, future unicorn enterprises, investment institutions, ** and academic representatives gathered at the end of the year to keep watch and move forward. Every year, the "Entrepreneur 100 Future Unicorn List" is grandly released at the conference site to gather the most dazzling future new business leaders in the venture capital circle. In the past 14 years, a total of 1,093 high-growth companies have been selected, and according to Smartbeast analysis data, 87 companies have been successfully listed, 65 companies have been merged, and 143 have become unicorn companies.
With the theme of "Towards the New", this conference continued to announce the "2023 Venture State 100 Future Unicorn List" and "2023 Venture Capital Figures", and released the "2023 Hard Technology Changemakers List" for the first time. Through keynote speeches, focus dialogues, award ceremonies, enterprise matchmaking meetings, exchange banquets, innovation achievements exhibitions and other forms, the conference collided ideas and stimulated cooperation
In the "Power of Enterprise Evolution - Future Unicorn Innovation Forum" of the conference, Dr. Wei Junqing, CEO of Carl Power, delivered a keynote speech, and the wonderful views are as follows:
1.The technological breakthrough of AI not only supports the short-term evolution of the autonomous driving industry, but also raises the "ceiling" of the entire industry higher.
2.There are several factors for a good opportunity: technological breakthroughs and closed commercial loops, and the track needs to be large enough.
The following is the content of Wei Junqing's speech, which was compiled by Entrepreneur:
AI technology breakthroughs have been raised
The "ceiling" of the autonomous driving industry
As an entrepreneur, I always keep an eye on the progress of the industry. Although the current global capital environment has encountered many challenges, it has also seen the progress of many core technologies. Overall, I think there are two changes:
First, the technological breakthrough of AI not only supports short-term evolution, but also raises the "ceiling" of the entire autonomous driving industry higher. For example, it is difficult for traditional AI to determine what an object falls on the road, but through the large model of Transformer, we can better understand these scenarios in the cloud. More and more companies are not only using data-driven in the perception of the environment in autonomous driving, but also in the best decisions about driving behavior.
Second, we also have a very favorable policy in the domestic market environment, in the past month, we have also paid attention to two very important good news, one is that the four ministries and commissions have issued L3 L4 level intelligent networked vehicle access and pilot guidance policies, for the first time to truly unmanned driving as a policy to land, so that everyone has rules to follow, and really from the current assisted driving slowly step by step to unmanned driving. Under the guidance of the policy, many autonomous driving companies such as Didi Autonomous Driving have also begun to accelerate the deployment of autonomous driving demonstration operations without safety personnel or without full vehicle in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and many other places across the country.
Where are the new opportunities for autonomous driving?
In my opinion, a good entrepreneurial opportunity needs to meet several factors: technological breakthroughs, closed business loops, and the track must be large enough.
At present, the freight scale of the entire Chinese market is 6 trillion yuan. Although we are not very sure that we will be able to achieve large-scale unmanned in the next year or two, for the 10-year and 15-year cycle, when we gradually innovate the freight track, through autonomous driving and unmanned, there will be a market of nearly 2 trillion yuan per year that can support the upstream and downstream and many enterprises in the blue ocean to succeed and grow into super enterprises. From the very beginning, Carl Power wanted to seize this opportunity.
Kargobot is a combination of Kargo and Robot, and we want to transport goods in the way of AI robots. There are two accelerators behind Carl Power: first, it is incubated by Didi's autonomous driving, so that we can use all the R&D results of Didi's autonomous driving in the past seven years to accelerate commercialization and landing.
In addition, we have received strong support from Ordos Group in the development process, especially the injection of logistics team and operational capabilities by Ordos Group, which allows us to have both AI technology and operational and business development capabilities at the beginning, which can accelerate the implementation of this matter.
Hybrid intelligence solutions in a trillion-dollar market
For the trillion-dollar market, we have done three things: hybrid intelligent autonomous driving systemkargodrive, next-generation autonomous driving hardware and vehicle platformskargoplatformand a hybrid capacity scheduling cloud platformkargocloud
In the logistics industry, there are a lot of challenges with a completely unmanned transporter. For example, the police should check the cargo of the vehicle and direct the vehicle to weigh itIf the vehicle breaks down, it is necessary to put up a warning sign in accordance with traffic regulations. To this end, we have proposed a new product concept, KargoDrive, to solve this problem with hybrid intelligence. A single driver drives a vehicle with a high-level driver assistance system and leads multiple unmanned vehicles.
In this way, where there is no GPS and no 4G signal, the convoy can pass smoothly. If there is a car accident ahead, there is an icy road, the driver can use his experience to bring the convoy to a safer state;The real-time V2X communication between the front and rear vehicles can also keep the two vehicles in close proximity, which can greatly reduce energy consumption and reduce the impact on other vehicles on the road.
Through such a hybrid intelligence approach,In the past two years, Carl Power has successfully broken through the technical bottleneck faced by the entire L4 industry, and the takeover rate and safety indicators have been improved by nearly two orders of magnitude. On this basis, two years ago, we began to really do unmanned testing, with a driver in the front car and no driver in the rear car, and unmanned testing and operation in a closed park of dozens of kilometers in the form of formation. The fleet can flexibly handle a wide variety of situations such as dirt roads, road repairs, and traffic lights. At present, this product has been implemented in some closed parks, which is also the significance of choosing a good product solution for a company.
The second step is to implement AI technology on the next-generation vehicle platform, Kargoplatform. We have worked with leading domestic OEMs, leading chip companies, sensor companies and trailer manufacturers to create an unmanned vehicle platform that requires front-loading and mass production, and we have iterated for three generations in the past two years. Now more than 100 vehicles have been put into testing and operation, and have passed the announcement of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and it is an unmanned model that can be mass-produced in front of the army.
Finally, we have launched KargoCloud, a hybrid capacity scheduling platform in Inner Mongolia and other places, which can dispatch both autonomous vehicles and driver-driven vehicles. This system achieves the online demand for charging piles, all vehicles and factory needs, so that drivers can reduce the time of waiting for loading and unloading at the factory end, reduce the time they spend queuing for charging at the charging pile, reduce the congestion on the road, and greatly improve the overall operational efficiency.
Combining these three products, our autonomous driving technology helps reduce labor costs by 50%-80%.The new vehicle platform helps reduce the total life cycle cost of the entire vehicle by 20%;The dispatching platform can help improve the efficiency of vehicle operation by 10%. Over the past 24 months, we have been actively promoting the implementation of these productsAt present, Carl Power has more than 150 autonomous driving formation vehicles, accumulated more than 3 million kilometers of mileage in demonstration operation, accumulated more than 100 million yuan of autonomous driving logistics revenue, and transported more than 2.5 million tons of goods. The mixed capacity scheduling platform is now dispatching 700 vehicles, and there will be more than 400 million mixed capacity scheduling revenue every year.
The future of autonomous freight
Carl Power already has the longest formation L4 operating mileage in the country, ranking first in the world in terms of autonomous driving revenue, and we have the verification of unmanned driving technology two years ago, and have normalized operation. In 2026, we hope that the company will operate more than 5,000 autonomous vehicles, which can reduce labor costs by 50%-80%, and can support a company from technology research and development to the closed loop of technology, and achieve company profitability.
In my opinion, in the next 10 years, autonomous cargo vehicles will change from fuel to pure electric form, to cabless form, and finally to a skateboard chassis form. These vehicles will still be dispatched through a vehicle-energy-road-cloud integrated dispatching platform, carrying different goods, forming a formation on the trunk network, and transporting them in an efficient and minimal road footprint. When passing through the toll booth, each vehicle has L4 autonomous driving technology, which does not affect the social traffic flow, and automatically goes to its respective destination, replenishes energy, and recharges.
Carl Power's mission is:"Let transport have no borders and make the future a reality".。We also believe that there are many companies in the market that share our mission and vision, and whether the market is good or bad, they can generate very large social value. We also hope that more such companies will really put their products into practice and make very meaningful and breakthrough products for the society together.