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Driverless Delivery Startup Whale Dynamic Targets US Market with Seed Funding

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Driverless Delivery Startup Whale Dynamic Targets US Market with Seed Funding

Whale Dynamic is a Shenzhen-based autonomous delivery startup, founded by Baidu veteran David Chang in 2018. Whale Dynamic is developing driverless delivery vans that are meant to do be fully autonomous, similar to Nuro. 

Whale Dynamic's main competitor is United Stated (US) is another startup - Nuro. Nuro announced $600 million Series D funding round in Q4 2021, led by Tiger Global Management and other investors. At the same time Nuro and BYD announced a partnership to begin producing the Nuro’s third-generation electric autonomous delivery vehicles. 

Whale Dynamic’s edge over Nuro lies in costs. Nuro assembles parts in the US while the complete production of Whale Dynamic’s vehicles, from manufacturing to assembling, happens in China. This gives Nuro a price advantage, where each unit is priced at around $20,000 each.

The seed round of about $2.5 million will enable Whale Dynamic to expand its team, explore product use cases in China and the US, with aims to have its first prototype car testing in some Chinese cities in May. In China, Whale Dynamic faces competition from likes of Meituan and JD.com, who started testing their own delivery vehicles last year.

Chang eventually wants to base his firm in the US and target express delivery services and supermarkets there. “You can test things much more quickly at lower costs in China,” Chang explains why he started out in China.

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