(Yicai Global) March 1 -- EVAS Intelligence, a Chinese autonomous driving chip startup founded less than two months ago, has raised almost CNY200 million (USD31.7 million) in angel round financing led by private equity firms CTC Capital and Sunic Capital.

Other participants included GAC Capital and Suzhou Kington Capital, the Guangzhou-based company said yesterday.

The proceeds will be used to set up five research and development centers in China, in the cities of Guangzhou, Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu and Nanjing, as well as one in Japan’s Tokyo so as to become a leading autonomous driving chip company with global strengths, it said.

The self-driving industry is heading towards a scale of trillions of Chinese yuan, equivalent to hundreds of billions of US dollars, and there will be huge opportunities for Chinese startups, said Kong Lingguo, co-founder and co-manager of CTC Capital.

EVAS was set up in January to address key challenges in autonomous driving, such as foreseeing situations that the human brain is unable to predict, said founder and Chief Executive Officer Liu Hui.

Perception, decision-making and planning, prediction and location as well as 3D real-world rendering in autonomous driving involve complex computation, scheduling and communication coordination in chip application, said Liu, who has over 20 years’ experience in the semiconductor industry including a stint at Japanese system-on-a-chip maker Socionext.

Editor: Kim Taylor