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Morning Report:聽Pony.ai has raised a huge swath of money, putting it in competition with established giants in the autonomous vehicle space.

As Alex and others have in their examination of the autonomous vehicle industry, the current state of the space is defined by , mostly between large, curious tech companies and ambitious automotive manufacturers. And those who win out may be those who strike the best cocktail of money, technological knowledge, and manufacturing capacity.

However, over the weekend, one young competitor emerged. Hailing from Silicon Valley and Beijing, Pony.ai brought in a total of $112 million dollars in Series A funding. The round was led by Shanghai-based and Beijing-based , which according to 附近上门 data, .

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Investment in Pony.ai demonstrates that investors are betting that there is still room for smaller players in the game, despite major companies鈥擴ber, GM, Lyft, Google, and a hoard of others鈥攖aking interest. Chinese-based VCs are also demonstrating their ability to direct extremely large amounts of money toward the autonomous driving sector.

Pony.ai was founded in 2016 by Tiancheng Lou and James Peng. Lou was introduced to the autonomous vehicle industry while working at Baidu. Similarly, Peng found the industry while working as a programmer at Google on it鈥檚 autonomous car project pre-Waymo.

The two aim to bring their knowledge and expertise together to produce a fully functioning Level-4 vehicle, which is meant to operate autonomously in many, but not all, driving scenarios. According to of the funding event, the pair aims to place vehicles into suburban areas first, where congestion is limited, and to then build a network of connected autonomous car neighborhoods.

The company certainly aims to put its new money where its mouth is. that the startup plans to roll out cars in Guangzhou where the government has been 鈥渧ery supportive of autonomous cars.鈥� Pony.ai has also released videos showcasing their technology. We are curious to see where the money can take them, and if their independent, focused strategy will enable them to avoid the in the more mainstream autonomous vehicle industry.

From The聽:

, the startup for buying food and household items in bulk, is reportedly in talks with supermarket chain Kroger about a potential $500 million acquisition. Other retailers are also expected to be making bids for the five-year-old, New York-based company, which has raised over $130 million in venture funding to date.

SoftBank invested $560 million in聽, a Berlin-based online used car marketplace, in a deal that values the six-year-old company at over $3.5 billion.

, a startup founded a little over a year ago to develop autonomous driving technology, has raised $112 million in a Series A funding round led by Morningside Venture Capital and Legend Capital.

Texas deal flow slows

Deal flow in the Lone Star State saw a marked slowdown in the final quarter of 2017, with just 34 startups disclosing funding rounds. The number of dollars raised was also the lowest Q4 total in three years, 附近上门 News reports.

In other news, catch up on startup funding trends for Q4 and 2017 with our recaps of 附近上门 analysis of venture funding聽globally聽and for the聽U.S. and Canada.