Horizon Robotics
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Horizon Robotics (Chinese: 地平线; pinyin: Dipingxian) is a Chinese designer of energy-efficient artificial-intelligence computing platforms for smart and automated vehicles, principally for advanced driver assistance and autonomous driving. [1] Founded in 2015 by machine-learning researcher Yu Kai, the company builds the Journey (Chinese: 征程, Zhengcheng) series of automotive systems-on-a-chip around an in-house neural-network accelerator it calls the BPU (Brain Processing Unit), and pairs that silicon with a full-stack assisted-driving solution branded Horizon SuperDrive (HSD). [2] Headquartered in Beijing, Horizon listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in October 2024 in the largest technology IPO in Hong Kong that year, raising about HK$5.4 billion (roughly US$696 million). [3]
Horizon Robotics is a supplier of AI chips and software for the automotive market. Rather than competing in consumer or data-center silicon, it focuses on automotive-grade processors that run perception and planning algorithms inside cars. Its flagship products are the Journey series of automotive SoCs, built around its proprietary BPU neural-network accelerator, together with supporting software toolchains, perception algorithms, reference designs, and the Horizon SuperDrive assisted-driving stack. [1][2] By the company's own accounting, citing the research firm China Insights Consultancy, it was the second-largest provider of ADAS and autonomous-driving solutions to Chinese carmakers in 2023 and held more than 40 percent of the Chinese OEM ADAS solutions market by the end of 2024. [1][12]
Horizon Robotics was founded in July 2015 by Yu Kai together with co-founders Huang Chang and Tao Feiwen. [1] Yu Kai is a machine-learning researcher who, from 2012 to 2015, was executive head of Baidu's Institute of Deep Learning (IDL), the first dedicated AI research lab inside a major Chinese internet company. While at Baidu he also helped establish the company's autonomous-driving team and its PaddlePaddle deep-learning framework. [4] Earlier in his career he had directed the media analytics laboratory at NEC Labs America, an early center of work on convolutional neural networks, and he holds a doctorate from the University of Munich. [4]
Yu Kai's stated thesis in leaving Baidu was that AI algorithms and the silicon that runs them should be co-designed, a "software and hardware combined" approach that became Horizon's organizing principle. [4] From the outset the company chose automotive-grade chips, a harder and more tightly regulated target than consumer silicon, as its primary direction, though its early products also reached smart-camera and edge-AI markets. [1]
Horizon raised capital across several large private rounds before its public listing. Intel Capital led a roughly US$100 million Series A-plus round in 2017. [5] In February 2019 the company raised about US$600 million in a Series B round led by SK China and the semiconductor unit SK Hynix, with participation from a number of Chinese automakers and their funds; that round valued Horizon at around US$3 billion. [5][6] Other backers over time included Hillhouse, HongShan (the former Sequoia China), Yunfeng Capital, and several automotive groups such as BYD, Chery and CATL. [1]
The Journey line is Horizon's core product. The first generation, Journey 2, reached mass production in 2019 and delivered more than 4 TOPS (tera-operations per second) of AI compute on a TSMC 28 nm process, aimed at entry-level L2 driver assistance. [1][7] Journey 3, launched in 2020, offered about 5 TOPS on a 16 nm process and targeted highway driving assistance. [1][7] Journey 5, announced in 2021, was a much larger step: it provided 128 TOPS and was built for vision-plus-LiDAR perception in higher-level assisted driving, debuting in the Li Auto L8 Pro in 2022. [7][8]
The current generation, the Journey 6 family, was unveiled at Horizon's product launch event in Beijing on 24 April 2024. [2] It spans a wide range of compute tiers from a single architecture so that one chip family can serve everything from a front-camera ADAS module to full urban navigation-on-pilot. The entry Journey 6B provides 18 TOPS, the mid-range 6E and 6M provide 80 and 128 TOPS, and the flagship Journey 6P provides 560 TOPS. [2][9] The 6P contains about 37 billion transistors on TSMC's 7 nm process, pairs an 18-core CPU rated at roughly 410,000 DMIPS with four Nash BPU cores, and is intended for all-scenario assisted driving; its mass production was scheduled for the third quarter of 2025. [9]
| Chip | Year announced | AI compute | BPU architecture | Process node | Primary use |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Journey 2 | 2019 | 4 TOPS | Bernoulli (1st gen) | TSMC 28 nm | Entry L2 ADAS |
| Journey 3 | 2020 | 5 TOPS | Bernoulli (2nd gen) | TSMC 16 nm | Highway assist |
| Journey 5 | 2021 | 128 TOPS | Bayes | TSMC 16 nm | Vision and LiDAR perception |
| Journey 6B | 2024 | 18 TOPS | Nash | N/A | Front-camera ADAS |
| Journey 6E | 2024 | 80 TOPS | Nash | N/A | Highway NOA |
| Journey 6M | 2024 | 128 TOPS | Nash | N/A | Urban and highway NOA |
| Journey 6P | 2024 | 560 TOPS | Nash | TSMC 7 nm | Full-scenario NOA |
Cumulative shipments of Journey chips reached about 7.7 million product solutions by 31 December 2024, and Horizon set a target of shipping more than 10 million chips during 2025. [12] In the first half of 2025 the company shipped about 1.98 million Journey processors, roughly double the prior-year period, of which nearly half (about 980,000 units) enabled highway-grade assisted driving, a roughly sixfold increase year on year. [17]
The BPU is Horizon's proprietary neural-network accelerator, conceived as a domain-specific processor for deep-learning inference rather than a general-purpose GPU. [1] Horizon names successive BPU microarchitectures after scientists and mathematicians. The first generation was Bernoulli, used in Journey 2 and (in a second iteration) Journey 3. [7] Journey 5 introduced the Bayes architecture, oriented toward camera and LiDAR perception. [7][8] The Journey 6 series uses the fourth-generation BPU, named Nash, which Horizon designed specifically to run transformer neural networks efficiently, reflecting the shift in autonomous-driving perception toward transformer-based and "BEV" (bird's-eye-view) models. [2][9]
Alongside the silicon, Horizon supplies the software toolchain, perception algorithms and reference designs that let automakers deploy its chips, consistent with the co-design philosophy. [2] At the April 2024 event the company introduced Horizon SuperDrive (HSD), a full-stack assisted-driving system meant to handle urban, highway and parking scenarios, covering the range from active-safety ADAS up to all-scenario navigate-on-pilot. [2] HSD is built on the Journey 6 hardware and an end-to-end neural architecture. [10] Horizon stated that SuperDrive would reach its first mass-produced vehicle in the third quarter of 2025; the company and Chery Automobile said the system would make its production debut on a Chery Exeed model around September 2025. [10][11] Horizon also markets parts of its product range under a "Halo" branding aimed at lower-cost ADAS tiers. [1]
Horizon supplies a large number of Chinese and international automakers. Its Journey chips and solutions have been adopted by brands including Li Auto, BYD, GAC, Chery, Geely, SAIC, Changan and others. [1] As of 31 December 2024 the company reported design wins across more than 310 vehicle models and had delivered roughly 7.7 million product solutions cumulatively. [12] In January 2025 it set a target of shipping more than 10 million chips during 2025. [12]
The most prominent international tie is with the Volkswagen Group. In October 2022 Volkswagen's automotive-software unit CARIAD agreed to form a joint venture with Horizon, with Volkswagen planning to invest about EUR 2.4 billion for roughly a 60 percent stake. [13] The joint venture, named CARIZON (a contraction of CARIAD and Horizon), was formally established in December 2023 and is headquartered in Beijing. [14] CARIZON develops full-stack assisted-driving software built on Horizon's Journey computing platform, targeted at Volkswagen Group battery-electric vehicles for the Chinese market. [13][14]
Horizon Robotics listed on the Main Board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on 24 October 2024 under the stock code 9660. [3] It priced its shares at HK$3.99, the top of the marketed range, raising about HK$5.4 billion (roughly US$696 million) before any over-allotment. [3][15] Cornerstone investors subscribed for a combined US$220 million of stock, among them units of Alibaba and Baidu, a fund linked to the Ningbo city government, and a French family office. [3] The offering was heavily oversubscribed, with the retail tranche covered about 33.8 times. [3] On its debut the shares opened at HK$5.12, up about 28 percent, before closing the day at HK$4.10 amid a broad pullback in Hong Kong technology stocks. [3] The deal was the largest technology IPO in Hong Kong in 2024 and the city's second-largest listing of the year overall, after the US$4.6 billion offering by appliance maker Midea Group. [3][15]
At the listing ceremony, founder Yu Kai said: "After nine years of effort, we have become the preferred partner for numerous OEMs in China, and a major force in advancing the transformation towards smarter automotive technology. The successful listing in Hong Kong marks a critical step towards our international market expansion." [18] The debut briefly lifted Yu Kai's paper fortune above US$1 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. [19]
In its IPO disclosures and subsequent reporting, Horizon described itself, citing the research firm China Insights Consultancy, as one of the leading suppliers of ADAS and autonomous-driving solutions to Chinese carmakers; it was ranked the second-largest such provider to Chinese OEMs in 2023, with its share rising substantially into 2024. [1][12] By the end of 2024 it held more than 40 percent of the Chinese OEM ADAS solutions market by the company's accounting. [12] These figures measure assisted-driving solutions supplied to domestic automakers rather than the global automotive-chip market, where companies such as NVIDIA, Mobileye and Qualcomm remain major competitors. [16] In the narrower high-end smart-driving computing-platform segment, Horizon reported a 2025 share of about 14.4 percent, close behind Huawei's 15.2 percent. [17]
Horizon's revenue has grown rapidly: it rose about 53.6 percent in 2024 to roughly RMB 2.38 billion, and about 57.7 percent in 2025 to roughly RMB 3.76 billion, driven by chip and solution shipments. [16][17] On its core operations, however, the company has remained loss-making, reporting an adjusted operating loss of about RMB 1.5 billion in 2024 as it continued heavy spending on research and development. [16]
Horizon's headline net result requires care to interpret, because it is dominated by non-operating, non-cash accounting movements rather than the underlying business. Under IFRS, the company's pre-IPO preferred shares were carried as financial liabilities measured at fair value, so changes in their estimated value flow through profit and loss. In 2024 Horizon recorded a gain on fair value changes of preferred shares and other financial liabilities of about RMB 4,676.7 million, which turned the year's reported result into a net profit of about RMB 2.35 billion even though operations lost money. [20] In 2025 the same line reversed into a loss of about RMB 6,664 million, the single largest component of a reported net loss of about RMB 10.47 billion for that year. [17][21] In other words, Horizon's reported "profit" in 2024 was an accounting gain on preferred-share revaluation, not operating profit, and its swing to a large reported loss in 2025 was driven mainly by the reversal of that same fair-value item rather than by deteriorating operations. The company's broad strategy positions it as a domestic alternative to foreign autonomous-driving chip suppliers within China's automotive industry. [16]