The company was founded in August 2014 in Guangzhou by two former GAC engineers, Xia Heng and He Tao. Its name came from a third man: He Xiaopeng, creator of the UCWeb browser and a former Alibaba executive, who backed the project early on and later became chairman. Among the first investors was Lei Jun, founder of Xiaomi — a decade before Xiaomi began building cars of its own. Alibaba, Foxconn and IDG Capital also put money in.

The first production car was the compact G3 SUV, built from 2018 to 2023. What really put the brand on the map was the model that followed: the P7 sedan of 2020, whose low fastback silhouette and full-width light bar became a house style the later cars inherited. That August the company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, raised 1.5 billion dollars, and saw its shares climb more than forty percent on the first day of trading.

What sets the marque apart from most rivals is how much of the electronics and software it writes itself instead of buying in. The XNGP driver assistance system is its own work, and this was one of the first Chinese brands to put lidar on production cars. The approach shifted in 2025, though: refreshed models moved to a new sensor package and the lidars came off.

In the autumn of 2023 the company bought the autonomous driving division of the ride-hailing service DiDi, paying with 744 million dollars worth of its own shares. That deal grew into the more affordable MONA line, whose first car — the M03 liftback of 2024 — quickly became one of the brand best sellers. Around the same time Volkswagen Group became a strategic shareholder and a partner in developing new models.

Flying vehicles are a story of their own. Since 2020 the company has owned AeroHT, which builds electric vertical take-off craft; their prototypes are displayed in showrooms right alongside the cars.

In 2025 the company sold 429,445 vehicles and posted revenue of 76.7 billion yuan with a workforce of almost twenty thousand. Roughly one car in ten went abroad. The current range covers the P7 and P7+ sedans, the G6, G7 and G9 SUVs, the full-size X9 minivan, the flagship GX and a growing MONA line. At its own AI day in 2025 management announced a turn toward embodied intelligence: alongside the cars it showed a robotaxi and a humanoid robot called IRON.