Baidu Announces $1.5B Autonomous Driving Fund

Chinese tech giant Baidu recently announced a $1.5 billion fund aimed at supporting around 100 autonomous driving tech companies over the next three years.

Baidu also announced major updates to Apollo, their self-driving car platform this week, adding five core capabilities: obstacle perception, planning, cloud simulation, HD maps and end-to-end deep learning.

The company has recently made big investments in autonomous driving: they are testing autonomous vehicles in both China and the U.S. and earlier this year made Apollo available for free to the auto industry. The free platform quickly gained big-name industry partners such as Hyundai, Bosch, Continental, Nvidia, Microsoft Cloud, Velodyne, TomTom and Grab.

Read the full article on TechCrunch here.