Chinese self-driving startup WeRide plans a US initial public offering (IPO), an announcement from China's securities regulator shows.

WeRide plans to issue up to 159,045,000 shares of ordinary stock and list them on the New York Stock Exchange or the Nasdaq exchange.

WeRide submitted filings with the CSRC for an offshore listing, and if it does not complete the listing within 12 months from now, it will need to update those filings if it plans to move forward.

Founded in 2017 in Guangzhou, WeRide's products include Robotaxi, Mini Robobus, Robovan, Robo Street Sweeper and SAE L2-L4 solutions for high-level intelligent driving.

WeRide is now conducting autonomous driving tests and operations in 25 cities across five countries, the company announced earlier this year. It has a self-driving fleet of more than 500 vehicles and more than 16 million km of autonomous driving, WeRide said. On March 13, Bloomberg reported that WeRide had secretly filed for an initial public offering in the US and was looking to raise as much as $500 million.

On May 13, WeRide announced that it had closed a Series C round of funding at a post-investment valuation of $3.3 billion. This is the company's latest funding round, with no mention of the exact amount raised.