China-based autonomous driving start-up Momenta has received $500 million from Toyota, the state-owned SAIC Motor, and auto parts manufacturer Bosch.

The news comes as players in the space continue to receive large investments, fueled by the special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) boom.

Fellow Chinese autonomous vehicle start-ups Pony.ai and WeRide.ai have raised over $1 billion and over $500 million respectively in less than five years.

Momenta said other investors in the round included Daimler, Temasek, Yunfeng Capital, and Tencent, taking its total funding to date to $700 million.

The start-up did not disclose the valuation used, but it was valued at $5.3 billion in its latest fundraising round in November 2020.

Momenta was founded in September 2016 by chief executive Cao Xuedong, a former scientist at Microsoft Research and a director at Chinese facial recognition company SenseTime.

The company is currently testing autonomous cars in Beijing and Suzhou in eastern China, and is also conducting research in Stuttgart, Germany.

Momenta said it will use the money to make more hires and collect data needed to develop future technologies.

The news comes after the start-up partnered with Toyota in 2020 to create a high definition (HD) mapping platform for autonomous vehicles, which will help enable them to locate themselves.

“The auto industry needs to develop more advantages when confronting Tesla’s marketing today, so they are paying more attention to autonomous driving,” Momenta’s founder and chief executive Cao Xudong told TechCrunch.

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