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Source: Venture Capital Exchange

Another humanoid robot company received financing!

A Securities Times reporter recently learned from Zhuji Power, a humanoid robot startup, that it has recently completed its Series A financing, led by China Merchants Venture Capital and Shangqi Capital, a private equity investment platform under SAIC Motor, but the amount of financing was not disclosed.

It is reported that the company has completed a round of strategic financing in May this year. Hangzhou Haoyue Enterprise Management Co., Ltd., an investment platform under Alibaba, participated in this round of investment. Industrial and commercial registration information shows that after this round of investment, Hangzhou Haoyue’s shareholding in Zhuji Power reached approximately 18.8%. This is the first time that Alibaba has invested in a humanoid robot company.

As the artificial intelligence track is heating up, humanoid robots in the sub-track are also shining. According to Enniu data, 13 humanoid robot companies have received financing so far this year. It is worth noting that there are many industrial capitals among the investors of humanoid robots. With the acceleration of the commercialization of humanoid robots and the demands of industry giants to find new technical points of focus, the two are staging a two-way race of technology and scenarios.

Embracing industrial capital

Zhuji Power was founded in 2022. Its founder, Zhang Wei, is a tenured professor at the Southern University of Science and Technology. In November 2023, Zhang Li, the former COO of WeRide, a self-driving startup, joined Zhuji Power as co-founder and COO.

In just two months, Zhuji Power completed two rounds of financing, and received the favor of 6 top institutions, including 3 from industry lead investors, covering multiple strategic application scenarios such as AI, automobile manufacturing, logistics and urban integrated services. This not only brought rich financial support for Zhuji Power's research and development, but also brought it unique industrial resources, helping it to go deep into the scene and promote the implementation of technology. "We locked in industrial investors from the beginning of our A round of financing, because the scene is time, money, and technology. The AI ​​era of general humanoid robots requires technology companies to understand the scene even more." Zhang Wei, founder of Zhuji Power, said.

The reporter sorted out the investment and financing situation of the humanoid robot track this year and found that many companies that received financing were backed by industrial capital. Among them, the most frequent investor is BAIC Capital, a subsidiary of BAIC Group. It is behind start-ups such as Pasini Perception Technology, Galaxy Robotics, and Zhiyuan Robotics that received financing this year. In addition, Meituan, Alibaba, iFlytek Venture Capital, Shunwei Capital, Shangqi Capital under SAIC Group, and China Merchants Venture Capital have also participated in the investment in this track this year.

The investment team of China Merchants Venture Capital said: AI is one of the important directions of China Merchants Group's "third entrepreneurship" strategic emerging industry layout. Universal robots, as an important physical carrier of AI technology, will enter thousands of industries in the future. China Merchants Group, as a comprehensive central enterprise, has a wealth of application scenarios in the fields of transportation and logistics, comprehensive finance, and comprehensive development of cities and parks. The investment in Zhuji Power is an important step for the group in the layout of industrial artificial intelligence innovation.

As early as the 2020 annual report conference call, Meituan founder Wang Xing expressed his optimism and heavy investment in the robotics field: "Robotics is one of the key vertical areas of investment for Meituan."

It can be seen that with the resource empowerment of industrial capital, robots equipped with AI brains are "more powerful" and quickly put into practice. At the Huawei Developer Conference held in June, Zhang Pingan, Huawei's executive director and CEO of Huawei Cloud, showed the audience the generalization potential of the Leju Kuafu humanoid robot equipped with the Pangu embodied intelligent large model in industrial and home scenarios, which attracted widespread attention. It is reported that since Huawei Cloud and Leju Robot signed a strategic cooperation in March 2024, the two parties have fully communicated on the technical route of "Pangu embodied intelligent large model + Kuafu humanoid robot". This demonstration is the phased result of the strategic cooperation between Leju Robot and Huawei Cloud.

Li Feng, founding partner of Frees Capital, said that the general robot industry is in a stage of rapid iteration of technology research and development, and its future commercialization process needs to be coordinated with specific scenarios to improve the generalization and reliability of robot body design and embodied intelligence. Scenario data engineering and the construction of a large robot basic model are the core elements that drive general robots to achieve multi-scenario generalization.

Started working in automobile factories

Among multiple application scenarios, entering automobile factories seems to be a common choice for humanoid robots. Since the beginning of this year, the technical products of many humanoid robot innovation companies have entered automobile factories.

For example, in May this year, a video of the progress of the humanoid robot Optimus released by Tesla attracted attention. In the video, the Optimus robot was "working" in Tesla's own factory and was packing 4680 battery packs, demonstrating its ability to sort batteries, walk, and perform factory tasks. In addition, in July this year, the humanoid robot company FigureAI signed a commercial cooperation agreement with the German automaker BMW. According to the agreement, FigureAI will provide general-purpose humanoid robots for BMW's automobile production line.

Back in China, on July 1, UBTECH Robotics Beijing reached a cooperation agreement with FAW-Volkswagen. The two parties will jointly explore the in-depth application of humanoid robots in industrial scenarios at FAW-Volkswagen's national intelligent manufacturing demonstration factory in Qingdao, and build highly intelligent and flexible production lines and super unmanned automobile factories. In this cooperation, UBTECH's industrial version of the humanoid robot Walker S will carry out tasks such as bolt tightening, parts installation, and parts transfer in the automobile manufacturing process.

In addition, there have been recent reports that the Kuafu humanoid robot is being tested and verified in factories such as NIO and Jiangsu Hengtong Group, and has demonstrated excellent performance and stability.

The "Guiding Opinions on the Innovation and Development of Humanoid Robots" released in October last year gave clear guidance on the implementation scenarios of humanoid robots:

One is for special environments such as civil explosions and rescue operations, strengthening the humanoid robot's body safety protection capabilities, complex task intelligence generation and high-precision operation capabilities, and reducing the danger to operators. The other scenario is to focus on key manufacturing fields such as 3C and automobiles, and build humanoid robot demonstration production lines and factories.

Some analysts pointed out that humanoid robot technology is similar to automobile manufacturing technology. When car factories are unable to solve the scattered nonlinear and flexible scenes in the workshop, and the labor costs of car factories are high and it is difficult to recruit workers, humanoid robots can be introduced into car factories as a good choice to improve production efficiency to a certain extent. CITIC Securities Research Report also pointed out that in the future, the humanoid robot industry chain is expected to make full use of the advantages of the automobile industry chain to achieve category expansion and spillover of competitiveness.

Editor: Ye Shuyun

Proofreading: Li Lingfeng

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