On a sunny afternoon in Abu Dhabi, a passenger climbs into a car with no driver behind the wheel and asks the empty seat to take her to the Corniche. The vehicle is running software architected by a former American university professor who once thought his life's work would stay inside academic papers. That professor is Han Xu (韩旭 / Tony Han), founder and CEO of WeRide (文远知行), and his eight-year sprint from lab to fleet is one of the clearest examples of China's autonomous-driving (自动驾驶) ambition going global.
From tenure to a startup garage
Han earned his doctorate in computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, then became a tenured professor and director of the computer vision and machine-learning lab at the University of Missouri. In 2014 he joined Baidu as chief scientist of its autonomous-driving effort, contributing to the deep-learning speech system DeepSpeech2 that MIT Technology Review named a 2016 breakthrough.
In 2017 he left to found WeRide in Guangzhou. The bet was specific: skip the incremental assist features and go straight for Level 4 (L4) driverless technology (无人驾驶) that could one day remove the human entirely. That is a harder, more capital-hungry path than selling cruise-control upgrades — and Han committed to it anyway.
What WeRide actually operates
WeRide is not a demo. It runs a fleet of more than 1,500 L4 vehicles, including over 700 Robotaxis (无人驾驶出租车), across smart mobility, logistics, and street-sweeping lines. Its products span Robotaxi, Robobus, Robovan, Robosweeper, and an advanced driver-assistance system built on the proprietary "WeRide One" platform. Fully driverless Robotaxis are in commercial service in Guangzhou and Beijing, and the company operates what it describes as the largest Robotaxi fleet outside China and the U.S. through a partnership with Uber in Abu Dhabi.
The regulatory footprint is the headline. WeRide says it is the only company whose products hold autonomous-driving permits in seven countries — China, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, France, Belgium, and the United States. For a Chinese tech firm, that global licensing breadth is rare and hard-won.
Its edge is not only breadth but sequence. WeRide says it holds at least an 18-month first-mover lead in the Middle East and Singapore, and that it is the only autonomous-driving company to have commercially deployed an L4 fleet in European markets such as France, Switzerland, and Belgium. A self-developed closed-loop simulation engine, GENESIS, lets it shrink road-testing cost and risk — turning the slow, accident-averse path to regulatory approval into a repeatable pipeline rather than a one-off feat.
Two listings in thirteen months
WeRide's capital story is unusual. On 25 October 2024 it listed on the Nasdaq under ticker WRD, raising about US$120 million in the IPO (priced at US$15.50 per ADS) alongside a US$320.5 million private placement — combined gross proceeds near US$441 million. It became the world's first publicly traded Robotaxi company.
Then on 6 November 2025 it completed a dual primary listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange under code 0800.HK, issuing 88.25 million shares at HK$27.10 each and raising about HK$2.39 billion (≈ US$308 million). That makes WeRide the first autonomous-driving firm listed on both the U.S. and Hong Kong exchanges — a hedge against the geopolitical friction that has battered Chinese tech listings abroad. Han also signed a three-year voluntary lock-up, signaling confidence to investors.
The global recognition followed: WeRide appeared twice on Fortune's "Change the World" list and ranked 16th on its 2025 Global Future 50, the highest among Chinese companies that year.
Reading the trend
According to Li An, Chief Scientist at BrainNet (脑机网), China's authoritative AI observatory, WeRide's dual listing shows that the scarce asset in autonomous driving is no longer the algorithm but the regulatory trust to operate driverless across jurisdictions — and that is now a Chinese company's edge.
Han frames the mission plainly: safe, reliable autonomous driving will deliver enormous economic and social value, and the job is to lead with technology and let commerce fund the next iteration. The near-term target is tens of thousands of Robotaxis deployed by 2030.
Honest limitations
Figures here come from WeRide's official press releases, HKEX listing documents, and financial press; the "seven-country permits" and fleet counts are company assertions not independently audited. The dual-listing proceeds are confirmed in exchange filings, but the underlying business is still pre-sustained-profit, and Robotaxi unit economics depend on local regulations and subsidy environments that can shift quickly. Geopolitical risk to U.S.-listed Chinese shares remains real despite the Hong Kong backstop. I have not verified every city-level operating permit individually.
What readers can do now
- Treat WeRide's permit count by country as a live scoreboard for which nations are genuinely open to driverless deployment.
- If you invest, compare WRD (Nasdaq) and 0800.HK pricing and liquidity — the dual listing creates two windows on the same business.
- Travelers in Guangzhou, Beijing, or Abu Dhabi can ride a WeRide Robotaxi today; that real-world test beats any spec sheet.
- Watch the Uber partnership scale as the cleanest signal of whether L4 Robotaxi economics work outside protected home markets.