Horizon Robotics CEO: Car Chips, Mind-Off Driving and China's Speed

Kai Yu (0:00)

In some sense, this is a terrible business. You know, a heavy investment, very slow return.

But in my view, sometimes a terrible business means a great business, because that's an entry barrier for all the other newcomers is extremely high.

Nicolai Tangen (0:28)

Hi everybody, I'm Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund. Ten years ago, we all assumed self-driving cars would come out of Silicon Valley. But today, the most advanced cars on the road are Chinese, and Western carmakers are going to China to buy the technology.

Nobody sits closer to the shift than my guest, Yu Kai, who is the founder and CEO of Horizon Robotics, which supplies the chips and software that let Chinese cars drive themselves. He's one of China's leading AI scientists before he became an entrepreneur, and few people can explain better how China got there, and where it goes next. So, Kai, welcome.

Kai Yu (1:06)

Hi, Nicolai.

Nicolai Tangen (1:09)

Let's just start with a simple question. What does Horizon Robotics do?

Kai Yu (1:14)

Well, essentially, what we are doing is the computing platform for all generic robots, including self-driving cars. But, of course, our current business is probably 95% or nearly 100% focusing on cars, passenger vehicles.

Nicolai Tangen (1:35)

So, if I sit in a car that you supply into, what does your chip do?

Kai Yu (1:42)

Well, essentially, it's running the software for all the way from camera perception to trajectory planning and control. So, essentially, it's kind of like brain for all the cars.

Nicolai Tangen (2:00)

Now, your chips run roughly one out of four cars in China. Just tell me about the…

Kai Yu (2:08)

One out of three, I think. That's our latest track record.

Thank you.

Nicolai Tangen (2:15)

Well done. Who are your customers?

Kai Yu (2:20)

Well, the major Chinese OEMs like BYD, CHILLI, CHERRY, CHANG'AN, Great Wall, and also some of the global OEMs like Volkswagen, Toyota, Suzuki, so quite some local, domestic and global players.

Nicolai Tangen (2:44)

Who do you compete with?

Kai Yu (2:47)

Oh, very good question. I think like Mobileye, you know, and also Huawei, and there are quite a few domestic players, like Black Sesame. I'm not sure if you ever heard of that. And Qualcomm Media, Texas Instruments, you know, Renaissance, NXPE. So actually a lot of global and China technology companies.

Nicolai Tangen (3:12)

Why are you the best?

Kai Yu (3:14)

Oh, well, a very good question. I think it's really because we are very focused. You know, we focus on this single one thing to to enable autonomous driving and all the way to robotics. We are not doing anything, nothing else. So I think the intensity of focus is one thing. The other thing I would say is fundamentally our vision and mission.

Because if you look at the name of our company, you know, 11 years ago, when we founded this company, we named our company Horizon Robotics. Right. Back to 11 years ago in China, there was even no such a business at all.

Yeah. And even EV business was just starting.

Right. And we had this vision, which was not an existing opportunity. So we envision in the future, the world will be full of all kinds of different robots, you know, working in the farming field, manufacturer assembly line and the logistic warehouse, you know, every house, home service and elderly care. And also, of course, self-driving cars. So we envision there should be a unified platform, just like, you know, Windows and Intel did for personal computing. And just like, you know, Arm and Android, what they are doing for mobile computing. So we envision in the future, they're going to be such a kind of like a computing platform, which is generic for all kind of, you know, robotics working in different, across different vertical domains.

Nicolai Tangen (5:12)

When did you, when exactly did the vision hit you? Well, that's a very good question. Were you in the shower or were you walking in the mountains or just what?

Kai Yu (5:23)

Well, that's a very good question. I think exactly you are right. I think the vision actually hit me, not I find this opportunity or this vision.

Well, I don't know, you know, I have been working in machine learning for over 30 years.

You know, since my early days as a junior student in college, and by chance, I read a book about machine learning. And I was so amazed that it's so fantastic to develop a computer algorithm. One day, it can be like a human brain, getting smarter and smarter over experience, yeah, by learning more and more from data. So then I decided to devote my whole career into this single subject, machine learning. Yeah, and that was for my thesis for my undergraduate, and my thesis for my master, and also for my PhD. And also for my first job back to my days in Siemens, and later to Silicon Valley, joined the NEC Labs in Silicon Valley, and then later joined Baidu, and then later funded Horizon Robotics. So I changed my locations, and I changed kind of different roles from individual researcher to team leader to head of research labs, and later become a founder of a technology company. So I changed my roles. But there's one thing remains never changed, which is my mission and my vision to develop machine learning algorithms to make machines getting smarter and smarter.