Chinese autonomous vehicle startup Neolix announced the completion of more than $600 million in Series D financing, marking the largest private fundraising round in China’s autonomous driving sector and one of the country’s largest private deals this year.

The round was led by UAE-based Stone Venture, with joint participation from Gaorong Capital, Shincheron Capital (CITIC Capital’s private equity arm), CDH VGC, Zhaoxi Capital, and the Beijing Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund.

“After closing this $600 million round, to be honest, our team only celebrated for an hour and a half because we immediately felt an even greater pressure ahead,” said Yu Enyuan, founder and CEO of Neolix’s autonomous vehicle division, during a media briefing.

Yu highlighted that the company had spent seven years quietly developing its technology and has now demonstrated that L4-level autonomous driving can be commercially deployed at scale in both unmanned delivery and urban RoboVan operations, a milestone the company claims is a global first.

Looking ahead, Yu said autonomous delivery vehicles are likely to become the first sector within the AI field to see explosive growth. By 2027, domestic and overseas demand is expected to surpass 100,000 units, with major Chinese cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou each operating thousands of autonomous delivery vehicles. Industrywide, the total fleet could reach several hundred thousand vehicles.

Before this funding, China’s autonomous driving sector had faced a severe “capital winter.” From 2022 to 2023, many startups that relied on high-definition maps combined with LiDAR sensors struggled to secure continued investment. Maintaining these maps required costly updates, frequent collection, and expensive hardware, making L4-level deployment difficult. Moreover, reliance on HD maps limited vehicles’ ability to operate in unmapped areas or where map data was outdated, causing numerous startups to exit the market.