Sino-German company NISAR, which is developing driving platform based tools and basic automotive software, has completed an angel financing round. The round resulted in a multi million dollar investment from Chengwei Capital.

NISAR is focusing on an intelligence-driven integration platform, with headquarters and R&D centres in both Germany and China. The company has over ten years of front-line R&D experience in the German automotive and peripheral industries. The core team is working on creating an integrated flexible real-time operating system for intelligent vehicle development, a collaborative SaaS-based developer platform, and a toolchain for artificial intelligence (AI) and automation.

The round of fundraising will be mainly used to open up the existing tool chain development market, expand the company’s core R&D team in Germany and China, test and validate closed-loop solutions, and take advantage of industrial resources to advance its R&D shift from tools to functions and from business stacks to operating systems. The company will help OEMs to gradually realise the hardware-software separation from functional software, to basic software, and then to hardware from a top-level design perspective.

The SaaS-based developer platform, which is built upon the real-time operating system, allows system architects and developers to tailor their designs with widgets based on application scenarios.

The Company is aiming at using its self-driving tool platform as a starting point to support partners quickly realise small-scale production of self-driving functions. The platform combines traditional AutoSar architecture and new middleware into a plug-in system software package for different forms of domain control hardware, to create an integrated and flexible real-time operating system ecology by expanding its footprint into vehicle Ethernet applications from business stacks.

Dr Zhu Ke, CEO of NISAR, said, “Our strong team has long been committed to cutting-edge mass production projects alongside forward-looking scientific research efforts, in line with our love and passion for intelligent and automated technologies. We are aware that the development process requires a high level of openness and business continuity. From this standpoint, the platform is imperfect whether in China or in Germany. We are currently launching such a revolutionary product for the development and deployment of intelligent software systems that it will enable customers to get access to autonomous driving features, including personalised and customised functions, in a very short period of time.”

Dr Zhu said that a new intelligent software system has placed higher demands on existing tools and system software throughout the overall development process, whether in terms of the complexity of the architecture and the algorithm, the frequency of scenario data iteration, or the diversity of integration and optimisation. It’s not enough to meet the future market needs by simply improving or using a range of similar alternatives.

NISAR’s real-time operating system is designed with a set of functions, including the disassembly, design, description, debugging and integrated deployment of both systems and modules, under a unified platform where several functions can be activated at the same time. It can make business stack information integrated, data and object convection automated, and middleware operating systems open and compatible, along with the combination of compatible open source algorithms and AI-aided design and automation.

According to Dr Zhu, NISAR’s integrated platform can help developers greatly enhance the efficiency of their R&D and deployments regardless of project life-cycle and team size. Dr Zhu instances Audi’s zFAS development, where the German car maker took two to three months to finish planning and enter into mass production. Using NISAR’s integrated platform, such a project can be completed within a matter of days, according to Dr Zhu.

NISAR was established in both China and Germany in 2021. Dr Zhu, the founder, graduated from The Technical University of Munich, Germany. He has been engaged in big data analysis and parallel processing research at the German Aerospace Centre for many years, and worked as a first-line core leader in German OEMs including Audi, Continental and TÜV SÜD as well as several Tier 1 suppliers for more than ten years.

The Company’s core team members have, for the most part, previously held important positions at Volkswagen and Continental, with four having received their doctorates in engineering from the top universities in Germany and the United States. Over the past decade, they have both led and been deeply involved in multiple aspects of German automotive engineering especially the development of core functionalities in vehicle systems and in sensor technologies. The team also includes several veterans from the communications and IoT sectors.