Nvidia announced that it is investing in TuSimple, a Chinese autonomous driving startup.

This investment, made through the NVIDIA GPU Ventures program which supports promising startups around the world, is a group investment worth $20 million (22.828 billion KRW) led by China's largest social media company, Sina.com.

Founded in 2015, TuSimple is a startup focused on autonomous long-distance freight delivery technology, with over 100 employees at its research and development (R&D) centers located in Beijing, China and San Diego, California, USA.

TuSimple is developing an autonomous driving solution using NVIDIA GPUs, NVIDIA DRIVE™ PX 2, NVIDIA Jetson™ TX2, CUDA, TensorRT, and cuDNN. Last June, it successfully completed a Level 4 test run of a 200-mile (321.87 km) journey from San Diego, California to Yuma, Arizona, using NVIDIA GPUs and cameras as primary sensors.

“NVIDIA delivers unrivaled performance in the computing capabilities required for autonomous vehicles,” said Xiaodi Hou, Chief Technology Officer at TuSimple. “By combining NVIDIA technology with our expertise in computer vision and artificial intelligence, we are building a world-class platform that can bring radical innovation to the freight transportation industry.” “The strategic partnership with NVIDIA is a valuable asset to us,” he said.

NVIDIA is continuously expanding its investments in startups, adding nine companies from four countries to its portfolio of invested companies last year alone.


NVIDIA's new investment firms include ABEJA (a Tokyo-based startup specializing in AI-based retail analytics systems), Datalogue (a New York-based AI data mining platform founded by Cornell graduates), Deep Instinct (an Israeli cybersecurity startup), Element AI (a Montreal-based startup supporting the integration of AI capabilities for enterprises), Fastdata.io (a California-based startup providing streaming analytics software), Optimus Ride (a fully autonomous vehicle development startup founded by MIT graduates), SoundHound (a Silicon Valley-based startup building voice-centric AI solutions), TempoQuest (a Colorado-based startup specializing in GPU-accelerated weather forecasting), and Zebra Medical (an Israeli startup specializing in AI-based medical image processing).