Recently, 36Kr learned that the UAV DaaS operation service platform Fuya Intelligent completed tens of millions of A2 rounds of financing, and this round of financing was invested by Zhonghuijin Group for several consecutive rounds, with Inspur Capital as the exclusive financial adviser. It is reported that this round of financing funds will be mainly used for the research and development of fully automatic flight systems and the deployment of DaaS operation service platforms. Previously, the company has received investment from ZhonghuiJin Group, Weisi Capital, Turing Venture Capital, Yonghui Capital and Guohong Jiaxin Capital.
Founded in 2017, Fuya Intelligent provides industrial UAV software and hardware systems and services with automatic flight algorithms as the core, serving patrol and inspection scenarios in multiple industries such as power grid, transportation, emergency, security, and water affairs.
With the gradual improvement of the low-altitude regulatory standard system, the application scenario of low-altitude flight of unmanned aerial vehicles has been rapidly opened. In the view of Cao Yabing, CEO of Fuya Intelligence, the application of industrial drones has gone through three stages, the hardware stage, the intelligent stage and the service stage, and the core competition of the drone has shifted from the parameter competition of the hardware to the automatic flight instead of manual control, and the automatic flight algorithm and application software of the in-depth scene meet the needs of the user scenario. The application of unmanned aerial vehicles has gradually returned to business value, and industry applications have developed in the direction of flight service.
In 2018, Fuya first proposed industrial drone 2.0 - replacing the pilot control and realizing the fully automated operation of the unmanned aerial vehicle system. On this basis, Fuya developed a fully automatic flight system for unmanned aerial vehicles. Fuya Intelligent's fully automatic flight system consists of four modules: automatic airport, automatic flight algorithm, intelligent analysis platform and cloud platform. Its automatic airport can realize the automatic operation of 24H UAVs, and the automatic airport and the UAV are scattered at the user site to improve the response speed when an event occurs.
At present, Fuya has served more than 10 patrol inspection scenes in the transportation, power grid, wind turbine, water conservancy, emergency and other industries, taking the traffic field as an example, the UAV can complete the task of finding abnormal road surface conditions and shooting illegal vehicle behavior during the patrol process. Fuya's autonomous flight unmanned aerial vehicle system has sold hundreds of sets, and the company's performance has achieved a 100% growth rate since its inception.
Multi-scene concept map
Unlike a large number of manufacturers competing for homogenization in UAV hardware, Fuya focuses on the research and development of automatic flight algorithms, in-depth application scenario data precipitation, and the construction of DaaS operation service platform.
Cao Yabing told 36Kr that Fuya's experience accumulated through years of automatic flight system sales has found that customers need business value, not drone hardware or systems. On the one hand, customers rarely train pilots, temporary pilots have higher operating costs and long commuting time, limited reaction speed, on the other hand, the UAV in the hands of customers has limited operating rate, there is a large vacancy, and the urban scene customer space is highly overlapping, urban sharing can bring opportunities for resource reuse, based on the above understanding, Fuya towards fully automatic flight and DaaS time-sharing leasing operation development.
In terms of automatic flight algorithm, Fuya can currently realize the autonomous inspection and patrol of unmanned aerial vehicles according to its self-developed core algorithm, and realize accurate positioning and tracking shooting of patrol inspection targets, that is, real-time perception and automatic positioning through AI algorithms. "Autopilot" without pilots, completing flight routes and shooting tasks. Up to now, Fuya has accumulated 1.5 million hours of work and 150,000 hours of flight operations after delivery, precipitating a large amount of scenario-based flight data, and continuously strengthening the automatic flight capability of its flight algorithm to cope with different scenarios.
Fuya divides the automatic flight capability of unmanned aerial vehicles into five flight levels: waypoint flight, auxiliary automatic flight, advanced auxiliary automatic flight, limited automatic flight and fully automatic flight (DL1-DL5). Most of the scenes in Fuya are currently in DL3-DL4 scenes, which can realize autonomous target tracking, SLAM visual path planning, illegal vehicle tracking, dynamic target following and other functions, which greatly improves the application scenario coverage and reaction ability of UAVs; in the future, with further in-depth scenes, precipitating algorithms and products, Fuya will develop towards the DL5 level, that is, autonomous flight in any case.
Drone airport
Based on its automatic flight capacity building, in 2021, Fuya took the lead in proposing the "UAV DaaS Operation Service Platform" in the industry, leading the industry from unmanned aerial vehicle system sales to automated operation services. Customers can rent drones to obtain flight services during a certain working hour, thereby reducing customer costs and increasing the utilization rate of drones. At present, Fuya has completed the batch deployment of three cities and achieved reuse, according to Cao Yabing, the cost of customer use has dropped by more than 50%, and the initial investment has dropped by more than 78%; regional deployment will increase the emergency by more than 3 times; the utilization rate of facilities has increased by more than 4 times; and the long tail scene has increased by more than 10 times. Based on the current accumulated business capabilities, Fuya will gradually deploy daaS platforms to more cities and expand daaS service business.
DaaS platform deployment diagram
In the background of the founding team, the company's founder and CEO Cao Yabing is an outstanding entrepreneurial youth in Shanghai, with more than 10 years of entrepreneurial and business operation experience; the company's CTO Cheng Liang is a doctor of Fudan University, with many years of rocket satellite control research and UAV flight control and algorithm development experience, has participated in the development of rocket, satellite, UAV control projects for many times; chief scientist Feng Hui is an associate professor of Fudan University, mainly researching machine vision, UAV AI applications, UAV automatic driving and other fields. There are many patents such as drones to determine the orientation of vehicles. At present, Fuya has a total of 120 employees, and R&D accounts for more than 40%. The company's R&D team has accumulated more algorithms such as automatic flight algorithms, perception, control, and decision-making.