On March the 27th, Mooe Robot (木蚁机器人), warehouse logistics robot manufacturer, announced the acquisition of tens of millions of RMB from a pre-A round of financing. The investment was led by Starting Capital.
The financing will be mainly used in the mass production of products, the expansion of Mooe Robot in 3C electronic manufacturing, and increasing the market share of unmanned transport industry.
Mooe Robot is mainly applied in the industrial scene such as 3C electronic manufacturing, etc. At the present stage, the product is mainly two mass production robots with weight bearing levels of 100kg and 500kg respectively and moving speed up to 1.5m/s.
A set of distributed resource scheduling systems are used to coordinate the usage of robots in the workshop. Compared with the centralized system, the distributed scheduling is more suitable for non-standard scenes in the manufacturing industry. It requires each robot to have certain degree of computing power. After the assignation of task by the server, the robot can compute the path independently and obtain the execution license from the server. In this way, the server pressure can be reduced, while more robots can be scheduled on the same hardware basis, at the same time increasing the stability of running the system.
“At present, a robot can replace 2 workers in the manufacturing workshop and work continuously for 24 hours. Relative to the traditional AGV (Automatic Guide Car) and warehouse robot, it can identify locations in a strange environment in the case of zero scene transformation. Just like a worker, it can plan the optimal path from the initial autonomous region to the destination. In the operating process, it can avoid obstacles voluntarily besides planning the line all over again by itself, understanding the operation of the man-machine mixed field,” introduced by Qian Yongqiang, the CEO.
The company said it had received tens of millions of orders in 2017. Its main customers are BYD Company, laptop manufacturer Inventec, Alibaba Group’s logistics platform CaiNiao, etc. At this stage, the breakeven is virtually achieved.
The founder says it will continue to invest in the R&D of technology and product iteration in the future. These were also the main cost of Mooe Robot in the past. Therefore, one of the important reasons for the mass production of products this year is to reduce the cost through the upgrading of the supply chain. Additionally, the founder also mentioned his hope to broaden the company’s revenue by innovating the company’s sales model to achieve profit.
According to the company’s introduction, Mooe Robot will issue a new F series transportation robot in June this year. The product is mainly launched by targeting the pallet stock market with weight of more than 1 ton.