Little Giant | Soft robot Gao Shaolong: Abandon the cult of scale, but don't be too "specialized"

Economic Observer reporter Shen Yiran In August 2021, Beijing Soft Robot Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Soft Robot") led by Gao Shaolong entered the list of the third batch of specialized new small giant enterprises of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, but looking back at the turning point of his life and entrepreneurship, the two most critical turns were precisely because there was no "specialty", one was from a teacher to a businessman, and the other time was when doing the production line of the insulated cup, in order to solve the bottleneck of the inner tank damage, he needed to invent an industrial software for the soft body claw. In order to design software, he specially learned software knowledge and expanded a software team to allow the company to resolve the crisis to this day.

Gao Shaolong is the CEO of soft robots, the company's "unique skill" is to do an industrial soft gripper, intuitively, is made of silicone material "claw", it is installed on the mechanical arm, based on the principle of electric air compression, used to grasp vulnerable, easily deformed items on the assembly line. In essence, it can replace the hands of workers, a new thing that grew up in the trend of machine generations.

Gao Shaolong's entrepreneurship began in 2015 with the first batch of chinese researchers starting a business, he and the founders came from China's first software robot laboratory, and there are only two companies in the world that industrialize this technology.

Today, the company has served more than 20 manufacturing industries, nearly 400 leading industrial customers, including Foxconn, Delta, Schneider, BYD, CATL, KFC, Yasui Food and so on. To some extent, the transformation of this soft gripper from the laboratory to the industry has been verified, and it has the possibility of horizontal expansion and replication.

In the interview, Gao Shaolong told reporters that the essence of "specialization" is to do a thing fine and thoroughly, Gao Shaolong's team is the first on the market to do soft claws, and later found that a single "claw" can not meet customer needs, there is no suitable software on the market, is to give up orders, or invest in greater research and development, cross-border software, Gao Shaolong's choice is the latter. He believes that this is not a kind of scale worship and blind pluralism, which comes from a kind of "wolf nature" of technology management, that is, "I believe I can do anything."

Scientific researchers start a business

Gao Shaolong's entrepreneurship began in 2015, which is the ebb and flow of the Internet and O2O, but it is the beginning of the ideal era of technological innovation, the direction of national double creation began to turn into the field of hard science and technology, scientific research institutes around the world encouraged scientific research university talents to go to the sea to start a business, and investors in the primary market also began to imitate Silicon Valley and seek new technologies among Chinese universities.

At that time, Gao Shaolong was an ordinary teacher at the Robotics Institute of Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, which had just established a "bionic soft robot laboratory". "Sensing the changes in the outside world in many ways, the mentality at that time was that I didn't want to live like this for a lifetime, and decided to take a risk," Gao Shaolong recalled.

From the perspective of technology itself, the flexibility of soft robots is a subversion and impact on traditional rigid robot technology, and it is at a relatively marginal position in the research system. Gao Shaolong said, "The first pioneering article on soft robotics was published in 2009 and did not become a discipline until 2017. But so far no book has been able to systematically describe soft robotics, and all of it relies on word of mouth accumulated in the laboratory.

Gao Shaolong said that in theory, as long as the manufacturing industry uses human hands, it needs soft robots. But in fact, for industries such as semiconductors, which have a very high degree of automation, they have formed a fully automated production line, and only individual scenarios need to be replaced by hand. For heavy industries such as steel and coal mines, the degree of informatization itself is not high, and there are fewer vulnerable items, and the demand for this piece still needs to be cultivated by the market. In contrast, the consumption and clothing light industry in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai have sensed the ebb and flow of labor, the cost has risen, and there is a certain degree of acceptance of the machine generation, at the same time, the slowdown of the growth space of the industry has given them more motivation to improve the yield rate while saving manpower.

In 2017-2018, the soft robot had a period of low, Gao Shaolong said, the most typical problem at that time was that the quality of the "claw" on the production line was unstable, often ruptured, and complained by customers, because once the "claw" was broken, almost the entire assembly line had to be stopped, and the customer had to bear the loss of hundreds of thousands of yuan a day.

To this end, the CTO of the soft robot has been conducting in-depth factory research for a whole year and found that to a large extent, some general workers use extensively, and the hands in the process are shaky or heavy, causing damage to the machine. However, these short-term general workers' operation behavior can not be standardized one by one, so the Gao Shaolong team spent more than a year and invested money to make the machine one-time stereotyped, more robust, and more convenient to install.

Gao Shaolong said that there are many uncertainties in the process of technology being verified. In this field, the real working conditions are complex, at the same time, industrial technology is very customized, different scenarios have different needs, and each time an industry is won, a large amount of sinking and research work is required in the early stage.

The confusion of financing

At present, the soft robot has been integrated into the B round, and the capital side is mainly financial, and there are also a few institutions with technical backgrounds. Gao Shaolong said that the company's annual R & D investment is equivalent to the income of the past few years, even if it has formed a stable sales revenue and customer base, the company's annual R & D investment is very large, still in a state of loss.

But overall, such small and specialized companies are often ignored by the primary market, because the secondary market cannot understand them. However, the soft robot can be integrated into the B round in the six years of its establishment, which is still relatively lucky compared to many companies that have obtained the first financing in the first ten years of entrepreneurship.

At present, there are two ways to finance the soft robot, the science and technology innovation board or the ChiNext board, the soft robot has the attribute of science and technology, but the semiconductor and biomedical companies on the science and technology innovation board are more popular; the ChiNext board may be easier to understand the company's business, but the requirements for the net profit of the listing are not low. The Shanghai and Shenzhen exchanges have some hidden thresholds, such as a minimum market value of 1 billion.

But the reality is that companies that focus on a segment and have a separate track have one thing in common: high profit margins, low revenue scale, and low market capitalization.

Gao Shaolong said that in the past few years, he has seen some small and specialized companies expand in order to go public, or seek acquisitions of some listed companies, and eventually deviate from core capabilities. He is very much looking forward to the fact that the company can be close to the profession without distraction, be a "small and beautiful" enterprise, and maintain a lean state to go public.

In 2017 and 2018, the stock market was relatively good, and the environment in the primary market was relatively relaxed. Gao Shaolong perceived that since the beginning of 2019, the funds in the market have begun to shrink, institutions have become more cautious, and some anxiety and confusion have begun to surround him.

For the development path of "specialized and specialized" enterprises, Gao Shaolong's understanding is that the key to specialized and new enterprises lies in "specialization", but the market also has a question about the new enterprises, that is, the lack of growth caused by long-term focus on subdivisions.

In this regard, Gao Shaolong said that small and medium-sized enterprises cannot engage in scale worship, but they should not be "specialized" for a long time and excessively, because this is a performance of staying in the comfort zone. The entrepreneurship of the scientific research population always has a common problem, always like to shrink the scope of technology indefinitely, constantly attach restrictions to technology, and make it smaller and smaller, so that it is infinitely close to the world's first, which makes no sense. The advantage of this group's entrepreneurship lies in "specialization", and the difficulty lies in "cross-border".