New journey! Shanghai's first mass production factory for humanoid robots is coming soon

2024 will be the first year for Zhiyuan to be commercialized. This innovative company located in Lingang New Area will also build the first mass production factory of humanoid robots in Shanghai.

Recently, Lingang Group and Zhiyuan Robotics held a signing ceremony for a comprehensive and in-depth strategic cooperation agreement. The ceremony organized multiple links such as the signing of the Zhiyuan manufacturing plant, the centralized procurement signing, and the strategic signing of partners. The publicly disclosed content mentioned that these signings will promote Zhiyuan Robotics to start a new journey of commercial mass production from the first phase of the production and manufacturing base in Lingang Fengxian, and build it into the first mass production factory of humanoid robots in Shanghai.

The founding team of Zhiyuan Robotics said that the birth and development of Zhiyuan Robotics is inseparable from the strong support of Lingang Group. Since the signing of the "Strategic Cooperation Agreement" in August last year, the cooperation between the two parties has continued to deepen, forming a high-level meeting mechanism and a daily contact and coordination mechanism. Zhiyuan Robotics' R&D, testing base, and production and manufacturing base have been established in the Lingang Group Park. Looking to the future, Zhiyuan Robotics' products will steadily achieve local R&D, local manufacturing, and local application in Lingang.

In August last year, the two parties signed a strategic cooperation agreement for the first time. At that time, it was disclosed that Lingang Group would open up its application scenarios to guide the innovation direction of robots through deterministic scenario docking, jointly define products with Zhiyuan Robotics, and accelerate the maturity of products with value needs and practical applications, so as to achieve breakthrough results in actual application scenarios. The specific application scenarios opened include automobile manufacturing, 3C manufacturing, and logistics. Lingang Group said that they hope to accelerate the maturity and large-scale commercial use of Zhiyuan humanoid robot products through this measure, help Zhiyuan Robotics to go through the "1-10" stage, and accompany Zhiyuan to the "10-100" stage.

At the first shareholders' meeting of Zhiyuan Robotics held on February 28, the company disclosed its 2024 plan: Zhiyuan Robotics will lead with the new generation of products, Yuanzheng A2 and Juechen C5, to empower business scenarios, focus on customer needs, and create the most competitive robot products through technological innovation to help enterprises upgrade to intelligence.

The Zhiyuan Robot team said that in 2023, Zhiyuan Robot has made solid progress in the field of general-purpose robots, completing the establishment of corporate governance structure, basic team formation, product research and development, key technology preparation, and full-function process capability construction for mass production, laying the foundation for high-quality development. 2024 is the first year for Zhiyuan Robot to be commercialized.

Zhiyuan Robotics was established in the Lingang New Area in February 2023. It positions itself as an innovative enterprise dedicated to creating a world-class leading embodied intelligent robot product and application ecosystem through the integration and innovation of + robots. The founding team includes many industry veterans including "Zhihuijun" Peng Zhihui, with comprehensive and complementary backgrounds, and has deep core technology backgrounds, industry management experience and industry resources.

Last August, the company's first humanoid robot "Expedition A1" was unveiled. At the humanoid robot launch conference, Zhihui Jun said that commercial implementation is the most effective way to test the value of a technology company. At present, the company's first general-purpose embodied intelligent robot can be used in scenes such as automobile chassis lines, chassis assembly, appearance, 3C assembly, gear module stations, material handling, biochemical laboratories, and robot butlers.

As of December last year, Zhiyuan Robotics has completed five rounds of financing, with investors including Hillhouse Capital, BlueRun Ventures, BYD, etc. In December 2023, the company completed an A+++ round of financing of over 600 million yuan. It is understood that Zhiyuan Robotics is also in the process of a new round of financing, with a pre-investment valuation of 7 billion yuan.

In addition to the favor of the capital market, Zhiyuan Robot also relies on the Lingang industrial ecosystem and is becoming an important step in the Lingang Group's layout of the humanoid robot industry.

This year, the humanoid robot sector has ushered in an important catalyst. Goldman Sachs also overturned its previous forecast report on humanoid robots, re-estimating the original data of the global humanoid robot market reaching US$6 billion in 2035 to US$38 billion, and predicted that the shipment volume of humanoid robots will reach 1.4 million units in 2035. Humanoid robots have an unlimited future.

Review editor: Liu Qing