Received nearly 1 billion yuan in financing The robot company founded by the post-90s generation was favored by Meituan
"Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily" on February 23 (Reporter Huang Xinyi) Hangzhou Unitree Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Unitree") completed the B2 round of financing before the Spring Festival in 2024, raising nearly 1 billion yuan.
It is understood that Unitree is an intelligent robot company, with two series of products: quadruped robots and general humanoid robots. Among them, quadruped robots include Go2, B2, Aliengo and other products, and general humanoid robots are the new business direction that the company will open in 2023.
At the 2023 WRC World Robot Conference, Unitree officially released the first general-purpose humanoid robot H1, priced within 90,000 US dollars, and achieved small-batch mass production and delivery in the second half of the same year, and then appeared at the "Science and Technology Spring Festival Gala" CES in Las Vegas, USA in January 2024.
The quadruped robot B2 for industry applications launched by Unitree Technology has been implemented in the fields of power inspection and fire rescue, including the inspection robot dog project of a power plant of the National Energy Group, the inspection robot dog project of a power grid 220kv substation, the inspection robot dog project of an ultra-high voltage 500kv substation, and the fire emergency robot dog project of a provincial fire and rescue corps.
"Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily" reporter learned from people familiar with the matter that Wang Xingxing, the founder of Unitree, is a post-90s entrepreneur, in 2013 to 2015 master's degree, Wang Xingxing from the underlying motor drive board, the mechanical structure of the whole machine to the motion control algorithm of the whole machine, etc., developed a quadruped robot XDog, different from the high-cost hydraulic drive technology route of Boston Dynamics robot at that time, XDog uses high-performance pure electric drive, and also creates a precedent for the world's low-cost high-performance foot-type robot technology solutions. After graduating in 2016, Wang Xingxing founded Unitree and officially started the road of entrepreneurship.
In the past year, large models and generative AI have been the biggest hot spots in the world. As an important carrier of general AI, general-purpose humanoid robots have also attracted special attention. At the end of 2023, The Robot Report, a well-known robotics website, sorted out the nine hot topics of the year in the North American robot market, more than half of which involve humanoid robots, and Unitree, as the only Chinese company, is among them.
An insider revealed to the "Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily" reporter that the current company scale of Unitree is about hundreds of people, and its global shipments account for at least 60% in the field of global high-performance quadruped robots.
(Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily reporter Huang Xinyi)