Mobile Robot Firm J-Elephant Secures Nearly 100M Yuan in Angel and Pre-A Financing

Mobile robot manufacturer Beijing J-Elephant Technology Co., Ltd. announced on Wednesday that it has secured nearly 100 million yuan ($15.2 million) in angel and pre-A financing rounds. The angel round featured joint contributions from Sequoia China Seed Fund, Legend Star and Sinovation Ventures. The pre-A round saw joint contributions from Linear Capital and Challenjers Venture, and the co-investors were existing shareholders Sequoia Capital and Legend Star.

J-Elephant was established in January 2020, incubated by the Artificial Intelligence Engineering Institute of Sinovation Ventures. It is a robot company developing products for intelligent manufacturing. Lu Feng, the company’s founder and CEO, brings 15 years of experience in the field of robotics. He once held important positions at the Alibaba DAMO Academy and the Artificial Intelligence Engineering Institute of Sinovation Ventures, and headed the development of many cutting-edge robotics technologies and products in China and abroad.

J-Elephant has launched three versions of standardized autonomous mobile robots for forklift trucks, which can meet customers’ needs for automatic transportation of goods of various sizes. The new funds are mainly to be used for R&D and enhanced production capacity of forklift autonomous mobile robots (AMRs).

J-Elephant also provides platform-based handling robots, JMS industrial intelligent digital platforms, and integrated intelligent logistics solutions for both software and hardware. These could be applied to the whole process of material circulation in the manufacturing field.

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The firm’s new generation of unmanned forklift AMRs has been used by many Fortune 500 enterprises, mainly for transporting mid-sized and large goods, covering pharmaceutical, food, semiconductors and other industries. Feng said the company would launch more products in the cold chain industry in the future.

Logistics serves as an important link in the manufacturing process. During production, roughly 75% of time is spent on storage, loading and unloading, as well as waiting for processing and transportation. Moreover, logistics costs account for about 30% of total production costs in manufacturing. With intelligent manufacturing, automation represents the general trend for the future logistics industry.