Alibaba Invests Strategically in Hello’s Robotaxi Business

With Alibaba’s entry into the game, it remains to be seen whether Hello can achieve the “latecomer surpassing the old-timers” effect.

On September 17, Hello Inc. announced that its Robotaxi business has received a strategic investment from Alibaba Group. The two parties will deepen their cooperation in the fields of intelligent driving large models, computing power platforms, and Robotaxi.

This marks another significant capital and technological support for Hello in the Level 4 autonomous driving sector, following its joint establishment of “ZaoFu Intelligence Technology Co., Ltd.” with Ant Group and CATL in June this year.

Alibaba’s strategic investment in Hello’s Robotaxi business is not merely a capital-level collaboration but also a deep integration of technological strategy and industrial vision.

According to the cooperation plan, Hello and Alibaba will jointly develop foundational large models for vision, speech, and language, as well as specialized models for smart cockpits, based on the actual operational scenarios of Robotaxi. They will also explore innovative applications of world models in the field of autonomous driving.

Alibaba Cloud will provide technical support to Hello to promote algorithm iteration, user experience optimization, and operational efficiency improvement.

Hello officially entered the Robotaxi sector in June 2025. In June of this year, Hello, Ant Group, and CATL jointly established “ZaoFu Intelligence Technology Co., Ltd.” through their investment entities, focusing on the research and development, safety application, and commercial implementation of L4-level autonomous driving technology. The three parties initially invested a total of over 3 billion yuan.

On September 11, Hello publicly released its Robotaxi strategic plan and unveiled its first pre-installed mass-production Robotaxi model, the HR1. According to the operational plan, Hello aims to achieve mass production and rollout by 2026 and deploy over 50,000 Robotaxi vehicles by 2027.

Currently, competition in China’s Robotaxi sector is intensifying. Baidu Apollo has achieved fully unmanned operations in Wuhan and Chongqing; Pony.ai is conducting regular paid operations in cities like Guangzhou and Shenzhen; while WeRide is collaborating with GAC to advance the implementation of pre-installed mass-production models.

With Alibaba’s entry into the game, it remains to be seen whether Hello can achieve the “latecomer surpassing the old-timers” effect.