Jun 19, 2025

Share Executive churn and slow progress on deliveries leave Haomo.AI at risk of being folded into Great Wall Motor as rivals gain ground. Haomo.AI, the assisted driving company incubated by Great Wall Motor (GWM), is undergoing a wave of senior management departures. Multiple mid- and senior-level executives have left the company, signaling internal turbulence. According to sources familiar with the matter, chairman Zhang Kai has tendered his resignation, though his next move remains unknown. Vice president of technology Ai Rui and vice president of product Cai Na also exited the company in April. Founded in 2019, Haomo.AI was spun out from GWM’s assisted driving division under its technology center. In terms of corporate structure, GWM’s largest shareholder is Baoding Great Wall Holdings Group, which is ultimately controlled by GWM chairman Wei Jianjun. Haomo.AI’s core business is concentrated in two areas: assisted driving systems for passenger vehicles and low-speed autonomous delivery vehicles for last-mile logistics. However, some employees told 36Kr that both business lines have made minimal progress toward commercialization. In its passenger vehicle segment, Haomo.AI has only secured projects with two Hyundai models, offering features like memory-based driving and automated parking. Delivery for these features is scheduled for August, but development delays have cast doubt on whether that timeline is achievable. “The sales target for our low-speed delivery vehicle this year is only about 50 units,” one employee said. “The company isn’t developing new models or planning to scale sales. It’s basically trying to clear out existing inventory.” With weak momentum in commercialization, internal voices are speculating that Haomo.AI might follow the same path as Chery subsidiary ZDrive.ai, which was recently folded back into its corporate R&D structure. This year has seen aggressive restructuring moves by major Chinese automakers. Subsidiaries that lack competitive edge are being prioritized for consolidation. In late May, Chery merged ZDrive.ai and Lion Tech into its main headquarters, unifying them under a centralized intelligent tech hub to streamline operations. ZDrive.ai’s former general manager Gu Junli is expected to leave, while the R&D team is now led by Wu Xuebin, general manager of Lion Tech. Haomo.AI’s fate remains unclear, but whatever happens next will likely be a pivotal turning point for the company. As a spinoff backed by GWM, Haomo.AI was once flush with talent and resources, rivaling many of its startup peers. Chairman Zhang, who previously served as deputy chief engineer at GWM and led its assisted driving programs, was deeply embedded in the company’s key projects, working mostly out of GWM’s office in Baoding, Hebei. In 2021, Gu Weihao, former general manager of Baidu’s smart vehicle business, joined Haomo.AI as CEO. He was part of a more than 600-person team built from talent drawn from GWM, Baidu, Huawei, and other major tech firms. Haomo.AI was once a darling of the capital market. In late 2021, the company raised nearly RMB 1 billion (USD 140 million) in a Series A funding round, which pushed its post-money valuation past USD 1 billion, granting it unicorn status. Investors included Meituan, GL Ventures, and Qualcomm. GWM had allocated significant resources to Haomo.AI, which served as the main supplier for the automaker’s entry- and mid-level assisted driving systems. Over four years, Haomo.AI launched two production-ready advanced driver assistance solutions: map-free navigate-on-autopilot (NOA) for highway scenarios and memory-based driving and parking features. More than 20 vehicle models, including the older Mocha from Wey, the Tank 300 (city edition), and the Haval Shenshou were equipped with these systems. In September 2022, Zhang announced during a company event that Haomo.AI had been tasked with developing high-level assisted driving features for 34 upcoming GWM models that year, covering nearly 80% of its pipeline. But Haomo.AI struggled when it came to developing more advanced systems like city-level NOA. Under the original roadmap, the Wey Mocha was expected to debut with Haomo’s city NOA in 2023, becoming the first production model to integrate Qualcomm’s 8650 autonomous driving chip. The rollout didn’t go as planned. “It was initially scheduled for mid-2023, but got delayed to December—and even then, it wasn’t delivered. That pushed back GWM’s broader high-end assisted driving rollout by a full year,” one source said. Despite the setbacks, GWM at one point still considered doubling down on Haomo.AI. But the company also diversified its bets. In 2024, Pony.ai impressed GWM with its approach to assisted driving and end-to-end foundation models. Pony.ai’s solution has since been implemented in several Wey-branded models, including the Lanshan. On the capital side, GWM led Pony.ai’s Series C round with a USD 100 million investment. GWM has also been building out its own in-house capabilities. Its intelligent tech team now exceeds 5,000 people, with software developers accounting for 70% of the workforce. The Wey brand has established an independent smart R&D platform staffed by over 600 top-tier technical experts. To support the massive compute needs of next-gen assisted driving, Great Wall also launched its Jiuzhou supercomputing center, boasting cloud computing power of 1.64 exaflops. Backed by these internal resources, GWM debuted its end-to-end assisted driving foundation model in April 2023. By November, the company had reportedly achieved nationwide rollout of city-level NOA. As an externally incubated unit, Haomo.AI has operated with relative independence from its parent. And so far, the turmoil at Haomo hasn’t visibly disrupted GWM’s overarching smart driving ambitions. But the competition among top-tier assisted driving suppliers has reached fever pitch, matching the intensity of China’s EV price wars. The industry is showing increasingly clear signs of a winner-takes-all dynamic. As Momenta founder Cao Xudong once put it: “By 2026, we’ll know who the winners are.” For startups that fall behind in technology iteration and fail to make meaningful commercial breakthroughs, survival itself becomes the real challenge. For Haomo.AI, a unicorn born from GWM’s ecosystem, the glow of its early promise has dimmed. Now, survival may prove to be a far tougher test than becoming a unicorn ever was. KrASIA Connection features translated and adapted content that was originally published by 36Kr. This article was written by Li Anqi for 36Kr. Share