Momenta Global Ltd, a Chinese mainland autonomous-driving firm, rose as much as 6.5 percent in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region on Wednesday after raising HK$5.9 billion ($752 million) in an initial public offering, according to Bloomberg.

The company sold shares at HK$295.60 each and attracted more than a dozen cornerstone investors — which get guaranteed allocation in exchange for holding the shares for a period of time — including Singapore wealth fund GIC Pte, asset managers Fidelity International Ltd and BlackRock Inc and carmaker Mercedes-Benz Group AG, which together subscribed for roughly half of the offering. 

The stock swung between a gain of 10 percent and a loss of 13 percent in gray-market trading before the debut.

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The Suzhou-based company, founded in 2016, counts customers like SAIC Motor Corp, General Motors Co and Mercedes-Benz among its key backers. Momenta supplies driver assistance systems to carmakers and develops fully autonomous driving technology that it uses for robotaxis. The company plans to spend around HK$2.25 billion, or nearly 40 percent, of the IPO proceeds on AI compute, in another example of the artificial intelligence investing rush.

“Momenta looks less like a robotaxi company and more like the Android of autonomous driving,” Gary Tan, a portfolio manager at Allspring Global Investments, told Bloomberg. “Its strongest appeal may be to investors seeking continued exposure to China’s fast-growing AI ecosystem while diversifying beyond semiconductors and LLMs.”

Momenta is following other self-driving firms, including Pony AI Inc and WeRide Inc, in tapping the HKSAR’s capital markets to support expansion. Rising adoption of smart-driving technology in mainland electric vehicles helped boost Momenta’s revenue 82 percent to 2.4 billion yuan ($353 million) last year, though it has yet to turn a profit, according to Bloomberg.

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The company also has the biggest share of externally provided urban navigation driver-assist systems, cornering about 65 percent of the market and counts 24 of the world’s leading automakers among its customers. Momenta also stands out as many of those global manufacturers are also among its shareholders, said Eugene Hsiao, a strategist at Macquarie Capital Ltd.

Part of the IPO proceeds will be used for research and development, scaling its robotaxi business, strengthening its mass-produced vehicles operations and funding working capital and general corporate purposes.

China International Capital Corp and Deutsche Bank AG are leading Momenta’s IPO.