Toyota Leads $500 Million Round For Chinese Auto Driving Startup Momenta

Momenta is now the recipient of a $500 million investment round led by Toyota in order to provide new technologies like automated HD mapping and updates through vision-based technologies, a company announcement says.

Both companies are looking to promote their new Toyota Automated Mapping platform for Chinese customers.

Momenta specializes in vision-based, or camera-based, HD mapping, which utilizes camera, GPS and IMU to automatically generate HD maps.

The maps are of a high quality through cutting-edge technologies like “deep-learning based perception, SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping), etc.,” and come with rich geometry features like traffic signs, poles, lane borders, traffic lights and road markings. In addition, the tech generates road-level and lane topology and semantic features.

According to the release, the tech has generalization capacity for various devices and is available for the larger-scale commercial opportunities. And because the data is processed via the automated mapping pipeline, the HD map is able to be updated with a high frequency and gives a “live” map for various different autonomous driving modules like localization, planning and control.

The announcement adds that both companies’ strengths will be utilized here, with Momenta looking at pursuing both mass-production passenger vehicles as well as full autonomy for mobility service vehicles and saying it was “confident” Toyota would play an important role in the process.

Last year it was reported that legislators were getting together to figure out laws on autonomous cars. The committee planned to listen to a number of trade groups from automakers and tech companies as well as the transit official from San Francisco and some safety advocates.

According to the PYMNTS report, lawmakers were looking at a way to move forward with autonomous vehicles operating freely on roads eventually, which has been a focus for companies like Amazon in recent months.

The law as it was discussed last year would supersede local laws setting their own standards.