Nvidia invests in TuSimple as part of a $20 million capital raising round

Nvidia, the graphics card maker, has invested in Chinese autonomous trucking startup TuSimple as part of a $20 million round led by Sina, the Chinese check giant behind Weibo, and it’s also providing TuSimple with Nvidia tech to power its self-driving platform, including NVIDIA GPUs, its Drive PX 2 autonomous computer, Jetson TX2 and more. The startup has research and development facilities in both Beijing and San Diego employing more than 100 employees. It has already run an SAE Level 4 (true self-driving) test ride between San Diego, California and Yuma, Arizona. That took place in June, spanning 200 miles and using camera data primarily to navigate the highway route.

TuSimple estimates that it can achieve “centimeter-level” accuracy for truck positioning, even when driving inside a tunnel, and its in-house decision-making machine intelligence makes for safe route navigation. The technology behind this accuracy includes extensive HD mapping of the routes driven, as well as three millimeter-wave radar units, in addition to the camera data from eight cameras and the resulting computer vision processing it does. Additionally, the startup is developing a car identification tool using its image recognition software. Once available, it’ll be able to identify car make and model with 97 percent accuracy from photos of vehicles uploaded to its site.