Sonatus raises 2nd round funding led by Foxconn towards EV software innovation
American automotive software company Sonatus has raised $75 million in a second round of funding. Global technology company Hon Hai Technology Group (Foxconn) led the fundraising round. Combined with the earlier Series A round, the company has raised over $110 million from venture capital, strategic partners and customers.
Sonatus is focused on delivering foundational technologies and solution stacks that empower customers and partners to transition to software-defined vehicles (SDV) faster and support them to deliver their own differentiated solutions.
By employing these key building blocks from Sonatus, automotive companies and their ecosystems can deploy innovations to market faster, at lower cost, with more reliability, and frequency than current approaches, which is critical in a competitive market, according to the company.
"Foxconn's vision is expanding into the EV market where we intend to produce brand agnostic automotive solutions as we have successfully done in other industries from PCs to mobile phones," said Eric Yeh, Senior Director, Software Development Center, Foxconn.
"Sonatus has an impressive track record of delivering in-vehicle and cloud software solutions into volume production, and is a strategic partner with the right synergy to provide seamless integration between automotive software and hardware", he added.
Sonatus' software platform is in production in Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis vehicles, including multiple Genesis car and SUV models. It is also used in the Hyundai Ioniq 6, and others, and will be in millions of cars by 2023.
Further, the company has grown its team significantly and has expanded its presence in France, Italy, Japan and China to focus on further growth and deployment of Sonatus products and solutions into additional applications, regions, partner projects and end customers.
"We are thrilled with the progress Sonatus has achieved in the past year and a half, meeting and exceeding our plans and growth targets and delivering on the milestones we committed to our partners and customers," said Jeffrey Chou, co-founder and CEO, Sonatus.
"With this new fundraising round, we have the resources to significantly expand our growth and mission to deploy software-defined vehicle technologies into new markets and additional customers. The potential benefits of dynamic software in cars is only just beginning and Sonatus is ideally positioned to accelerate vehicle software innovation into the future", he added.
At CES 2023, Sonatus will have a significant presence to demonstrate a wide range of technologies and solutions including those in production with vehicles from Hyundai Motor Group brands Hyundai, Kia and Genesis.
Additionally, it will demonstrate next-generation software solutions, built on advanced automotive gateway reference designs from semiconductor and Tier 1 suppliers, that will enable car manufacturers to digitally transform vehicle architectures.
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