Overview
QCraft (轻舟智航) was founded in Silicon Valley in March 2019 by a team previously at Waymo, Tesla, Nvidia and Facebook, with Yu Qian as CEO. It pursues a dual L2+ and L4 strategy built on a core architecture of world model plus reinforcement learning, is headquartered in Beijing, and has offices in Suzhou, Shanghai, Jinhua and Munich.
History
QCraft obtained a California autonomous driving road test permit in July 2019 and began operations in China that November. In 2020 it released its first autonomous driving solution, Driven-by-QCraft, and the Robobus solution "Longzhou ONE", and launched China's first regularly operating 5G unmanned bus in Suzhou. In 2022 it announced a "dual-engine strategy", formed a strategic partnership with Horizon Robotics and introduced the "QCraft Chengfeng" assisted driving solution for passenger cars; in 2023 it became a supplier to Li Auto, supporting NOA functions on Li Auto's AD Pro system.
Scale and business
QCraft's production solutions are built on Horizon Robotics' Journey series chips: it was first to release a NOA solution based on Journey 6 in April 2024 and an end-to-end urban NOA solution on a single Journey 6M chip in April 2025. The company announced that by January 2026 its assisted driving systems had been installed in more than one million vehicles. On the L4 side it works with Chery Commercial Vehicles on unmanned logistics, operates Robobus services in a number of Chinese cities, and plans a small-scale Robotaxi pilot in 2026. In April 2025 it raised US$100 million in strategic financing from Chery Holding and Luxshare.