Tianyancha shows that recently, the affiliated company of "Zhiyuan Robot" (Shanghai Zhiyuan Xinchuang Technology Co., Ltd.) has undergone industrial and commercial changes and completed the A4 round of financing, with the participation of Sequoia China, M31 Capital and SAIC Investment.
Zhiyuan Robot was registered and established in Shanghai Lingang in February 2023, is a company focusing on the development of general humanoid robots and embodied intelligence, currently has two R&D centers in Shanghai and Beijing, as well as a manufacturing base in Shanghai Lingang, with a registered capital of 69.39 million yuan, the company's legal representative and chairman Shu Yuanchun, and the founder "Zhihuijun" as a director.
The founder, "Zhihuijun" (formerly known as Peng Zhihui), previously joined Huawei in 2020 through Huawei's "Genius Youth" program, and was responsible for the full-stack research and development of Huawei's Ascend computing product line.
In August 2023, Zhiyuan Robot released its first product - "Expedition A1" Zhiyuan embodied intelligent robot, with a height of 175cm and a weight of 55kg, the overall humanoid shape, claimed to have 200TOPS computing power, equipped with RGBD camera, lidar, IMU, microphone array, etc., saying that the long-term goal of hardware cost control is within 200,000 yuan, which will be rapidly commercialized next year (2024), and will first be used for new energy manufacturing and 3C manufacturing, and has been docked with head enterprises.
As of its establishment in February 2023, Zhiyuan Robotics has completed 6 rounds of financing, and previous investors have included Hillhouse Ventures, Baidu, BYD, Lijing Innovation, etc. According to 36Kr's previous report, during the A3 round of financing in December 2023, the pre-investment valuation of Zhiyuan Robot was 3.5 billion yuan, and the pre-investment valuation of the new round of financing was 7 billion yuan.
According to Shanghai Lingang Group, in February 2024, Shanghai Lingang Group and Zhiyuan Robot held a signing ceremony for comprehensively deepening the strategic cooperation agreement, and organized the signing of Zhiyuan manufacturing plant, centralized signing of product procurement, Partner strategic signing and other links to promote Zhiyuan Robot from the first phase of the production and manufacturing base in Fengxian, Lingang, to start a new journey of commercial mass production, to become the first mass production factory of humanoid robots in Shanghai, at the same time, a number of subsidiaries of the group and Zhiyuan Robot reached an agreement of intent to purchase robot products. The Group's Industrial Investment Promotion Center and Zhiyuan Robotics signed a tripartite strategic cooperation memorandum with Shanghai Airport Group Big Data Center and China Telecom Shanghai Company's Industrial and Service Industry Key Account Department on matters such as "Humanoid Robot Service Airport Innovation Cooperation" and "Smart Factory (5G + AI + Robot)" respectively.
According to the news released by SAIC Finance, the funds of this round of financing participated by SAIC Venture Capital will be used to help Zhiyuan Robot accelerate the research and development and implementation of a new generation of commercial humanoid robots.
SAIC Venture Capital believes that the automobile industry and the humanoid robot industry have great synergy potential and advantages, firstly, the accumulated data of intelligent driving can be used to train humanoid robot algorithms, which plays an important role in the perception, decision-making and control of robots; Finally, the large-scale cost reduction ability of the automotive supply chain is outstanding, and the upstream and downstream of the automotive industry itself has good landing scenarios, which can accelerate the commercialization of humanoid robots.
It is worth mentioning that in the context of the market's expectation that AGI (general artificial intelligence) will be realized in the future, the humanoid robot track has continued to heat up in the past two years.
In March this year alone, UBTECH, founded in 2012, was successfully listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, known as the first stock of China's "humanoid robot"; Xia Heng and He Tao, the two co-founders of Xiaopeng Motors' core management team, were revealed to have also devoted themselves to entrepreneurship in the field of robotics; and Nvidia released the general basic model project of humanoid robots GR00T, which said it aims to further promote its breakthroughs in robotics and embodied intelligence, announced that it has signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Leju (Shenzhen) Robotics Technology Co., Ltd., saying that it aims to jointly explore the application scenarios of "Huawei Pangu large model + Kuafu humanoid robot", create a universal embodied intelligence solution, and build an open ecological platform of "humanoid robot +".
Tesla founder Elon Musk recently responded to a question from netizens in a comment on Twitter about "whether the manufacturing speed of humanoid robots can reach ten times that of car manufacturing", saying that the final cost will be less than half of the car.