Mobile Robot Company ForwardX Robotics Secures Nearly $31.4 Million in C Round Financing

On Tuesday, ForwardX Robotics, a leading mobile robot company, announced its completion of round C financing totaling nearly 200 million yuan ($31.4 million), led by Taikang Life Insurance and followed by Haochen Capital and Qualcomm Ventures.

After this round of financing, the accumulated financing amount received by ForwardX Robotics in 2021 exceeded 400 million yuan. According to the company, this round of financing will be mainly used for the R&D of new products, supply chain, production and overseas market expansion.

In August 2020, ForwardX Robotics officially released its fourth generation mobile robot V-AMR. This is the only AMR in the world that adopts computer vision multi-sensor fusion scheme, but also can schedule in large-scale clusters, plan routes independently, avoid obstacles and quickly adapt to changes of complex surroundings.

Looking back at the development of mobile robots, it took Chinese researchers a long time to catch up with the technology level of foreign developed robots. The fourth generation of visual AMR robots have finally achieved overtaking with the rapid development of deep learning technology in China, and are currently in a leading position in the world.

Up to now, according to the company, in the field of the fourth generation visual AMR mobile robots, ForwardX Robotics is the only company in the world to realize mass production.

For this financing, in addition to the company’s own solid and steady technology and commercialization strength, Qi Ou, founder and CEO of ForwardX Robotics, ascribed more to the industry consensus of the capital market on the current trend of “robots replacing humans.” Especially with the increasing maturity of technologies and the weakening of demographic dividend, the inflection point that the cost of robots is lower than that of human labor is approaching.

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Qi said, “Reflected in our clients, the aging population and the reduction of the willingness of young people to engage in highly repetitive and mechanical labour have forced the logistics industry and manufacturing industry to face the problems of difficult recruitment and expensive employment. For example, customers in the manufacturing industry are faced with over 10% of labor loss annually. At this time, the advantages of robots are gradually showing, which can help enterprises reduce costs and better adapt to the intelligent upgrading of industries while supplementing the labor gap.”