The C round exceeded 1 billion again, and the cumulative financing has exceeded 5 billion. What is the magic of this robotics company?

Recently, the intelligent robot unicorn enterprise Dahua Robotics Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Dahua Robotics") received over RMB 1 billion in Series C financing, with participation from Knowledge City Group, Shanghai Guosheng Investment Group, and Shuimu Chunjin.

This round of financing will be mainly used for the company's new products, technology research and development, as well as capacity expansion and upgrading. While continuing to expand its market share, it will develop different cloud robots for various service scenarios, continue to invest in new product research and development, and maintain its technological leadership in the market.

Looking back at Dahua Robotics’ financing history, it can be said to be very luxurious. The financing amounts of the A, B and B+ rounds were approximately US$100 million, US$270 million and US$200 million respectively, and the angel round also had US$30 million. Including this time, it has completed a total financing of more than RMB 5 billion. The investors are also a number of big institutions such as SoftBank China Capital, Venusstar, Shenzhen Capital Group, Zhongguancun Development Group, Gemdale Group, Foxconn, etc. So what magic does this company have that attracts investment institutions to continue to invest?

According to information, Dahua Robotics was founded in 2015 and is a leading company in the field of intelligent robots. It focuses on the research and development of cloud-based intelligent robot technology and is committed to building a large-scale integrated intelligent machine learning and operation platform, secure high-speed network, commercial service robots and other intelligent devices at the telecom operator level. If robots serve people, then Dahua Robotics is a service robot.

Cloud-Network-End System Creates a Real Intelligent Robot

All along, major companies have been working hard to make robots more intelligent and able to understand various human instructions, which is undoubtedly very difficult. Either they expect technology to advance by leaps and bounds, or they use a big-brick approach to build a huge robot "brain". Studies have shown that if robots want to be as intelligent as humans, the volume of their "brains" must be at least a million times that of human brains.

In the research of intelligent robots, Dahua Robotics creatively proposed the concept of cloud robots and created a "cloud-network-terminal" model. It can be said that this innovative approach to improve the intelligence of robots has become a major technical direction for the future development of intelligent robots.

The so-called "cloud-network-end" model refers to the robot's cloud brain + 5G safety network + robot body. The cloud brain can realize digital twin technology, that is, create digital virtual applications of robots, continuously improve the robot's cognitive and learning abilities in the process of human enhancement and machine intelligence learning, and then express what it has learned in the robot body through the 5G safety network.

Huang Xiaoqing, founder and CEO of Dahua Robotics, once said that separating the robot's "brain" from its body and placing it in the cloud, responsible for the most core data processing and intelligent computing, and placing the robot's body in a service location, responsible for perception and service, can break through the performance limits of traditional robots and provide humans with smarter and more efficient services.

And through distributed deployment, more complex computing capabilities can be placed in the cloud. Based on the development of 5G network technology, the "cloud-network-end" structure can achieve a large-scale reduction in the cost of the robot itself and achieve the goal of "converting communication capabilities into computing power". Intelligent robots based on the "cloud-network-end" architecture will be the inevitable direction of the entire industry in the future.

"Robots are humanity's third computer. Now that humans have PCs and smartphones, robots will be the next most important computing device," Huang Xiaoqing said. He also revealed that Dahua Robotics' consumer-grade robots are expected to be the first to be commercialized in 2025.

In 2022, the Ministry of Science and Technology officially approved and supported Dahua to build the "National New Generation Artificial Intelligence Open Innovation Platform for Cloud Robots", which is currently the only artificial intelligence open innovation platform related to cloud robots. This also represents the recognition of the cloud brain operating system for cloud robots and multimodal artificial intelligence by relevant ministries and commissions.

Dahua Robotics seizes the trillion-dollar intelligent robot market

After years of in-depth research, CloudMinds Robotics has established a fairly complete intelligent robot ecosystem. In 2022, CloudMinds Robotics released HARIX OS (HARIX Operating System) at the GDC Developer Conference. Its entire architecture includes HARIX RDK (Robot Development Kit), "cloud-network-end" model, AGI (artificial intelligence) platform and robot intelligent joints SCA.

Among them, HARIX RDK is a cloud-based robot open service platform and development tools provided to users, including a blueprint editor, an action dance editor, a scene map tool, etc., which can allow users to train and evaluate robots with the help of simulation scenarios, and realize large-scale AI simulation, experimentation and intelligent autonomous training and learning of multiple intelligent robots.

The AGI (artificial intelligence) platform works as a cloud brain and is designed to enhance machine intelligence. The platform was jointly developed by Dahua Robotics and Sun Yat-sen University. It is currently able to combine a variety of GPT technologies and is compatible with data in multiple modalities such as intelligent voice and vision for deep learning of robots.

The robot's intelligent joint SCA integrates communication, computing, and sensing, but its volume is only 1/10 of that of a traditional server system. It can make the robot's body movements more flexible and reliable, and adapt to more scenarios. At present, the intelligent flexible joint SCA has achieved whole-machine assembly production, effectively reducing costs and paving the way for the commercial use of future consumer-grade robots.

This year, Dahua Robotics released the multimodal cognitive model RobotGPT, which can be said to have given cloud robots a "soul". RobotGPT is an interactive generative AI model designed to realize the multimodal behavior of robots in complex application scenarios.

RobotGPT enables robots connected to the cloud brain to continuously improve their learning ability based on reinforcement learning with human feedback. In addition to being able to communicate like humans, they can also work like humans, such as welcoming guests, guiding tours, automatic patrols, passport checking, human-machine collaboration, etc. It can be applied to smart cities, smart agriculture, smart health care, high-end intelligent manufacturing, smart education and other industries.

By the end of 2022, Dahua Robotics has more than 1,600 patent applications. As a leading company in the intelligent robot track, Dahua Robotics has built a high technical barrier. Behind this is a market of more than one trillion dollars that is accelerating. According to a McKinsey report, by 2030, about 400 million jobs in the world will be replaced by automated robots, of which the market space for humanoid robots will exceed 12 trillion. Musk emphasized in his speech today that the ratio of humanoid robots to humans will exceed 1:1 in the future, that is, the number of humanoid robots on Earth will exceed the number of humans in the future.

Huang Xiaoqing, founder and CEO of Dahua Robotics, expects that in the future, a large number of different types of robots will be able to effectively access the cloud brain, thus forming an industrial ecosystem similar to that of the Internet era: a new and powerful cloud robot ecosystem formed by operators, application developers, artificial intelligence providers and robot body manufacturers. Robot body manufacturers will be able to achieve large-scale production of robots, just like mobile phone manufacturers. This is exactly the ecosystem that the industry expects, and it will flourish in the next five to ten years.