Aiming at the 10 trillion-level blue ocean in ten years! A company has just received tens of millions of financing to enter the market

Recently, Shenzhen-based precision agricultural robot company Weier Technology received tens of millions of RMB in angel round investment. Weier Technology focuses on field operation scenarios and launched the company's first fully self-developed "AI planning algorithm + robot" intelligent cotton topping robot.

This round of financing was jointly led by Qingshui Bay Fund under Professor Li Zexiang and Zero Venture Capital, and Inspur Capital served as the exclusive financial advisor for this round of financing. The funds raised will be mainly used for product research and development and iteration, commercial verification and team building. Professor Li Zexiang's team has incubated leading robot companies such as DJI and Yunjing.

Agricultural robots are the rising stars in service robots . According to relevant statistics from IFR, agricultural robots ranked fifth in global service robot sales in 2021. The market size of agricultural robots has reached 1.146 billion yuan in 2022. It is estimated that the total global agricultural robot market will be about 9.3 billion units in 2025, and will increase nearly 4 times to 36 billion units by 2030. The market size is expected to exceed 10 trillion!

The continuous increase in population will widen the gap in food demand, and the demand for agricultural robots will increase

WHO (World Health Organization) predicts that the world population will reach 9.7 billion in 2050. The increase in population will inevitably lead to an increase in food demand. Currently, the global agricultural land area is about 5 billion hectares, of which about one-third is used as arable land. The huge population growth has led to a continuous decline in the global per capita arable land area, which is now less than 0.2 hectares.

China, as the country with the largest agricultural land area, has about 500 million hectares of agricultural land. The two countries with the largest irrigated farmland area are China and India, about 68 million hectares each. The continued increase in population in the future will inevitably prompt the release of production capacity in Asia, especially China, and at the same time open up the demand market for China's agricultural robots.

The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs issued the "14th Five-Year Plan for National Agricultural Mechanization Development", which clearly stated that by 2025, the total power of agricultural machinery in the country will stabilize at around 1.1 billion kilowatts, and the comprehensive mechanization rate of crop planting and harvesting will reach 75%. Currently, the comprehensive mechanization has exceeded 60%. In the future, more types of agricultural robots will be added to agricultural operations, which will further improve my country's mechanization level.

Only by solving the pain points of the industry can we overcome the obstacles to the development of agricultural robots

At present, the main purchasing power of agricultural machinery abroad is still the local government or agricultural alliance, while in China it is mainly large agricultural cooperatives or large agricultural companies. The high cost of agricultural robots and automated equipment has become an obstacle to their development. At present, the cost of agricultural labor in China is not high, and the labor force is relatively dispersed. The excessively high cost of robots makes it unaffordable for many farmers who lack funds to buy or use them, resulting in the inability to fully popularize some automation.

Secondly, some agricultural robots currently on the market have complex operating issues, which leads to farmers not feeling the convenience brought by automation when using robots, thus creating a resistance to robots. Coupled with the high price, many farmers are deterred from using robots.

Solving the pain points of the current agricultural robot industry will open up the Ren and Du meridians of agricultural robots. The first is the cost issue. Currently, the core components of robots account for 70% of the cost. The supply of this part once relied on foreign countries, resulting in an increase in the cost of the whole machine. In recent years, with the upsurge of domestic parts replacement, a number of excellent parts manufacturers have emerged in China. In the future, with the development of the entire robot industry chain, it is expected that the current high price of robot whole machines will be reduced.

This time, Weller Technology won the favor of investors by solving operational problems. Cotton topping is the "last mile" in the mechanized cotton planting process. Weller Technology has developed its own binocular vision 3D reconstruction algorithm and built a million-level cotton top leaf data set to achieve accurate top leaf removal. It can not only perform high-quality topping operations in a fool-proof manner, but also reduce costs by nearly 90%.

The policy wind is blowing across the country, and agricultural robots have great potential

Since 2019, the country has issued a series of policy documents, including the "Digital Rural Development Strategic Outline" and the "Digital Rural Development Action Plan (2022-2025)". The 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China wrote the acceleration of building a strong agricultural country into the report of the National Congress of the Party for the first time, which is of great strategic significance for promoting agricultural modernization.

On March 10 this year, the First Session of the 14th National People's Congress approved the State Council's institutional reform plan, which will promote the establishment of a new national system, optimize the management of the entire chain of scientific and technological innovation, promote the transformation of scientific and technological achievements, and promote the integration of science and technology with economic and social development. Among them, one of the specific requirements was put forward for accelerating the realization of high-level agricultural science and technology self-reliance.

Liu Zheng, CEO of Weller Technology, said: "At present, global agricultural machinery giants are all transforming their agricultural machinery into intelligent ones, which is also a historic opportunity for China's agricultural machinery manufacturing industry to overtake others. The core product competitiveness of intelligent agricultural machinery will be the ability to operate precisely. It is the vision of the Weller Technology team to implement the productization idea of ​​agricultural technology as agricultural tools and empower agricultural productivity with technology."