RIOS Intelligent Machines Completes $13 Million in Financing, Led by Yamaha!

Intelligent robot systems with artificial intelligence and machine vision as core technologies are subverting the traditional manufacturing landscape, and the dawn of the Industrial 4.0 era has arrived. In this technological wave, RIOS Intelligent Machines has successfully attracted the favor of the capital market with its innovative automation solutions.

Recently, RIOS Intelligent Machines announced that it has raised $13 million (about 93.51 million yuan) in Series B financing, led by Yamaha Motor Corp and IAG Capital Partners. It is reported that this round of funds will be used to develop and provide artificial intelligence and vision-driven robot technology, and will start with wood and plywood processing products.

Unleash manufacturing productivity with AI vision

Manufacturing has always been the lifeblood of economic development, but for a long time, the improvement of production efficiency has encountered bottlenecks. Traditional assembly line operations are repetitive and boring, labor costs are high, and errors are prone to occur. The innovation of RIOS is to integrate artificial intelligence and machine vision technology into the production workshop, which greatly alleviates these difficult problems.

RIOS's system can monitor the process in real time, use computer vision to identify and classify product defects, and then combine artificial intelligence algorithms for automatic sorting and intelligent decision-making. This advanced quality inspection and optimization capability can not only significantly improve product qualification rates and reduce labor costs, but also maximize the production potential of existing equipment. RIOS focuses on multiple manufacturing verticals such as wood, beverages and food, and is committed to unleashing more productivity with intelligent robots.

Unlike many AI systems that rely on large amounts of training data, RIOS's mission control center uses an innovative semi-supervised learning model. Operators only need to draw a box around the object to be identified, and the intelligent system can automatically learn and copy the annotations without the need for a large amount of manual annotation data. This efficient learning method greatly reduces the threshold for using intelligent systems.

“You put a system on a conveyor, pick an item, and you’re done,” explained Clinton Smith, RIOS co-founder and CEO. “Not only does it count objects, it also identifies the parts of the board that need to be cut to meet the needs of customized production.”

Intelligent simulation releases new momentum for digital transformation

In addition to intelligent optimization at the workshop level, RIOS's solutions also extend to the entire production process. It cooperates with NVIDIA Omniverse to achieve factory digital twin modeling and simulation, which is a key link in connecting the upstream and downstream of smart factories and realizing the digital transformation of the manufacturing industry.

Through the digital twin model, manufacturers can pre-simulate and optimize production line layout, logistics flow, etc., avoid repeated debugging after actual production, and significantly shorten the cycle from design to production.

Investors are confident

In the era of Industry 4.0, intelligent manufacturing will undoubtedly become an important force for industrial transformation. RIOS's self-developed artificial intelligence and machine vision systems have brought new development opportunities to the traditional manufacturing industry, which is also the main reason why investors are competing to increase their investment in this round of financing.

Yamaha has been an investor in RIOS Intelligent Machines since 2020. The automaker said it has more than doubled its investment in RIOS, demonstrating its confidence in the company’s autonomous technology and business strategy.

IAG Capital Partners, a Charleston, South Carolina-based private investment group that invests in early-stage companies and works with innovators to build manufacturing companies, will also join the RIOS board of directors as IAG partner Dennis Sacha.

In fact, the digitalization of manufacturing has become a general trend. Global manufacturing giants have been working hard on digital transformation, seeking to modernize production processes and intelligentize products. At the same time, breakthroughs in emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and industrial Internet have also injected new vitality into the manufacturing industry, giving birth to a number of disruptive innovative companies.

RIOS's successful financing is a vivid footnote to this development trend. Its Series B financing not only received support from Yamaha's heavyweight investors, but also almost all of its existing investors participated, including Main Sequence, the main investor in the Series A, which doubled its investment proportionately.

Such strong financial strength will surely help RIOS accelerate technology iteration and commercial implementation. Let us look forward to the fact that in the near future, smart factories will flourish everywhere and promote industrial upgrading to a new level.