There’s a certain appealing symmetry about founding a tech company on a handshake. Yet that’s exactly what happened at the 2014 Paris Motor Show when Martin Leach and William Li shook hands on a deal to start NextEV, an electric vehicle startup.

It had also become the first Chinese company to take out any top-line drivers’ championship in racing, Nelson Piquet Jr winning Formula E in 2015. It had even built a fully production-ready seven-seat electric SUV, the NIO ES8. Then there was the NIO EVE, an autonomous concept that is slated for production. Just as it looked as if NIO was an unstoppable force, Martin Leach died, aged 59, having fought illness for a few months.

On the tech side, there’s former CTO of Cisco and Motorola and current Microsoft board member, the gloriously named Padmasree Warrior, who heads up the company’s US division. “When I was looking at a startup, I asked what would be the spaces that would interest me,” she said. “I narrowed it down to transport and education. Those were the two areas where I felt that technology was still on the periphery.

But where Tesla has identified itself as a tech company, keeping the dirty old auto industry at arm’s length, NextEV hasn’t been so stand-offish, attempting to fuse the best car industry brains with Silicon Valley smarts. With its Shanghai nerve centre in China and R&D and design centres in multiple countries, including the USA, Germany and the UK, NextEV has just over 2000 employees and growing fast. Just check out the vast list of available positions on its website. Its US arm has been issued an Autonomous Vehicle Testing Permit by Californian authorities and plans to begin testing driverless cars on public roads in the near future.