EACON Mining Technology recently completed A round of financing, resulting in both Pre-A round and A round of financing to be completed within six months, at a total amount of over 100 million yuan. This round of financing was jointly led by NIO Capital and Eight Roads Capital and will primarily be used to speed up the productisation progress of the autonomous system in open-pit mines, establish a Shanghai office, recruit talents, and prepare for the future expansion of overseas markets. 

NIO Capital focuses on important industries such as automobiles, energy, and logistics, and seeks disruptive technologies and business models. It manages RMB and US dollar dual-currency funds. NIO Capital has made a systematic deployment in the field of autonomous driving. Its invested projects include Momenta.ai, Inceptio Technology, Innovusion, Pony.ai, Mainline Technology, Black Sesame Smart Technology, among others.

Eight Roads Capital is a global self-funded investment institution backed by Fidelity Group. It was formerly known as Fidelity Growth Partners. It entered the Chinese market in 1996. As an early investor, it invested in Alibaba, iSoftStone along with 110 other Chinese companies. In the field of autonomous driving, Eight Roads invested in the A1 round of financing of Pony.ai, and continued to follow up in the financing of Pony.ai. At the same time, Fidelity is also an investor in Waymo and Nuro. In addition, Eight Roads Capital is also an investor in the Series A financing of Innovusion, a LiDAR manufacturer.

Zhu Yan, managing partner of NIO Capital, said, “Autonomous driving is one of NIO Capital’s key areas of deployment. We continue to be optimistic about the commercialisation of autonomous driving in China. As one of the easiest scenarios in the field of autonomous driving, mines have a huge market space and are easier to replicate globally. Through the commercial application of autonomous driving, autonomous driving will greatly improve production efficiency, create commercial value, and also create huge social value.”

Cai Yuanxun, senior partner of Eight Roads Capital, added, “EACON has industry-leading technology and operational capabilities, and can become a leading company in the field of autonomous driving in mining areas. Autonomous driving is a track that we have been focusing on for a long time, and we believe that autonomous technology will become an infrastructure in the future, and promote the implementation of applications in different subdivision scenarios.”

An important prerequisite for deep cultivation of autonomous operations in mine is to have an intuitive and deep understanding of mine operation scenarios, and to accumulate sufficient scene data before large-scale commercial implementation to serve technology implementation. The accumulation and application of scene data comes from our current technical practice and depends on our familiarity with the traditional mine business. For this reason, after the completion of the Pre-A round of financing, EACON established Ordos EACON Engineering Co Ltd in Inner Mongolia, and formed more than ten traditional mine haulage group to carry out traditional materials haulage in the mine, deeply involved in the haulage operations, with “understanding the scene”, “collecting data”, and “landing talents”, accumulate “engineering capabilities” for autonomous operations. As the technology solutions for autonomous driving become more mature, autonomous alternatives can be gradually carried out on the basis of traditional haulage.