text | Zhou Youhui
edit | Wu Rui
On April 18, Industrial FULL (601138.SZ) issued an announcement, announcing the completion of its exclusive strategic investment in unicorn enterprise Siling Robot, with an investment of up to US$30 million. Together with the C round of follow-up investment in September last year, EMF has invested in it in a total of US$34.5 million. Foxconn Group is a subsidiary of Foxconn Group. In 2018, Foxconn Group was listed on A-share with popular concepts such as " Industrial Internet , 5G and smart manufacturing".
The annual report previously released by FU Lian Industrial showed that when Siling Robot raised US$220 million in Series C financing, its valuation had reached US$1 billion. According to LatePost, Siling began supplying robots to the world's largest mobile phone OEM manufacturer last year, which is an important reason why SoftBank Vision Fund finally decided to lead the C round of investment.
The latter's management partner Chen Xun commented at the time: "Siling robot deeply combines artificial intelligence technology with robot technology, solving many of the most challenging problems in the industry at present. Investment in Siling robots is also the latest developments in our continuous support for China's science and technology field."
Siling robot was established in 2018 and has set up dual headquarters in Munich, Germany and Beijing, China, focusing on AI intelligent robots. Its technology originated from the German Aerospace Center Robot Research Institute (DLR/RMC), and Germany is equivalent to NASA in Germany. Chen Zhaopeng, the founder of
, is a doctoral student in joint training between the De Aerospace Robot Research Institute and Harbin Institute of Technology. During his doctoral studies, he was responsible for the research and development of the robotics and robotic arms on Tiangong 2 . He served as deputy director of the laboratory of the German Aerospace Center Robot and Mechatronics Institute (DLR/RMC).
However, at that time in 2018, the industrial robot track targeted by Siling Robots was still a relatively slow-growing market surrounded by giants. At that time, the robot industry was also rapidly cooling due to the "bottleneck" of core components and the occurrence of some fraudulent subsidy incidents.
According to data from the International Federation of Robots (IFR), the global shipment of industrial robots in 2020 was 384,000 units, an increase of almost 0 year-on-year; in 2021, there were only 3 million industrial robots operating in global factories. On the other hand, the revenue share of the four major robot families (ABB, Kuka , Yaskawa , and Fanako) has gradually increased from 40% to 50% in recent years.
But 2020 is the prelude to the investment boom in the domestic robot industry. After the resumption of work and production in China, the booming demand for factory production expansion has made China the market with the highest growth rate of industrial robot shipments, reaching 168,000 units. It can be said that the prosperity of the domestic robot market " hedges " has caused the decline or shrinkage of other overseas markets.
Market changes are just one of the links in corporate competition. In such a battlefield where technology, capital and talents are still extremely dense, what variables can Siling robots bring?
Chen Zhaopeng's judgment is that the current traditional industrial robots are far from intelligent enough, and the industry has the opportunity for disruptive innovation. " first , traditional industrial robots have no brains; second , they have no nervous system; third , they do not have relatively flexible limbs. Siling robots are trying to change the intelligence level of industrial robots."
Traditional industrial robots mainly realize their work through programming, and are often only suitable for limited tasks with fixed trajectories, such as moving from point A to point B, performing linear work such as cutting, assembly and painting of parts. Therefore, it is impossible to face the manufacturing environment with changing production lines and workers. Chen Zhaopeng believes that this is the biggest constraint that industrial robots have never been able to break through from the automotive industry and develop into other emerging industries, such as 3C, the field of general manufacturing, medical care, etc.
Siling Robot’s two product lines - intelligent power control robots and intelligent robot operating systems, have concentrated on realizing the two functions of “environmental perception” and “self-learning and flexible deployment”.
In terms of sensitivity, Siling robot has installed sensors in each joint, which can perceive changes in power in real time and provide feedback.According to 36Kr , its robot product power perception sensitivity reaches 0.5N, with characteristics such as sensitivity, accuracy and flexibility, and can achieve fine operations that are difficult for various traditional robots to complete.
A representative example is that after installing a nail on the end of the Siling robot, if the nail touches the balloon, it can sense the status of the balloon without piercing the balloon. Currently, only Siling robots can do this accuracy.
(Siling Robot Balloon Strike Experiment)
In terms of learning ability and self-optimization, unlike the linear programming method of traditional robots, Siling Robot allows operators to teach the robot to do related actions. For example, if the operator picks up the robot arm and moves it to point A to grab the item, then moves the robot arm to point B to put down the item, the robot can learn this action and optimize the movement trajectory of the robot arm. This saves a lot of programming time.
Specifically for the actual industry, medical care, 3C manufacturing and agriculture are the main application areas of Siling robots. Diana Med in the operation has been suitable for different types of surgical robots such as neurosurgery, orthopedics, and laparoscopy; power control robots have been used in 3C consumer electronics, automobiles and upstream and downstream components.
It is worth noting that the resource injection of industrial capital is closely related to the business model of Siling Robot in different industries. So far, Siling Robot has received 6 rounds of financing, with an amount of more than 2 billion yuan.
In the medical field, the leading domestic orthopedic robot Tianzhihang participated in the Pre-A round; in terms of smart agriculture , New Hope Group participated in the B round. Not long ago, New Hope further strategically invested in Siling's main competitor Luoshi Robot 400 million yuan. In terms of 3C precision manufacturing, FIA's strategic financing of more than US$30 million will undoubtedly accelerate the commercialization of Siling Robots.
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