Say goodbye to 30 days of cat litter scooping! Zhichao has completed its seed round financing, redefining the cat litter box with robotic arm + AI, with the highest selling price up to 9999 yuan.
ZhiChao AI Pet Butler Smart Litter Box Project
ZhiChao AI Technology - Leveraging robotics and AI technologies to solve full-scenario pain points of pets' eating, drinking, excreting and moving for users, is seeking seed round financing.
I. Industry Background: The Smart Pet Hardware Track Is Exploding, With Obvious Defects In Traditional Products
The smart pet hardware track has exploded in 2026, while traditional cat litter boxes still have multiple technical flaws and industry pain points.
The global pet market continues to expand. According to statistics from PW Consulting, the global pet industry market size reached 320.4 billion US dollars in 2025, of which the smart pet hardware track accounted for 12.023 billion US dollars, and the number of pet-owning households worldwide reached 1.604 billion. The huge user base brings broad growth space for intelligent pet devices.
As a core category of pet hardware, smart cat litter boxes are becoming the purchase choice of many pet-owning families, but mainstream products on the market still have unavoidable structural defects:
Most of the existing mainstream automatic cat litter boxes adopt a drum and sieve structure. During the rolling process of the drum, the clumps of cat litter are easily broken and shattered, which greatly reduces the cleaning quality, and the decontamination effect is very unsatisfactory;
A large amount of dirty cat litter cannot be completely cleaned, the cat litter box continuously emits foul odor, and the gaps in the filter screen are easy to accumulate dirt, forming a sanitary dead corner for bacterial growth;
Most products only complete the basic action of automatic litter shoveling. After the feces are stored, users still need to frequently manually replace the feces collection bag, the odor overflows during the process of dumping the dirt, and users inevitably come into contact with dirty substances;
Most products have relatively isolated functions, only focusing on excreta treatment, lacking linkage of feeding and drinking water, and perfect pet health monitoring capabilities;
The internal structure of the equipment is complex, which makes disassembly and cleaning difficult, cat litter jamming failures occur frequently, and some products also have design defects that may cause pet injuries;
Some products are matched with high-cost consumables. Many consumers feedback that the smart devices purchased at high prices are actually pseudo-smart, semi-smart or non-smart products, which still require users to invest a lot of time and energy in maintenance, and do not truly realize the core demand of liberating users' hands.
With the improvement of the consumption power of pet owners, the market is no longer satisfied with single-function pet equipment. The demand of pet-owning groups for hardware products with long-term maintenance-free, pet health monitoring, and multi-scenario integrated integration continues to rise, and the industry is in urgent need of new products with underlying technological innovation to be launched.
II. Product Solution: Reconstruct The Mechanical And AI Technology System To Build A One-Stop AI Pet Butler Terminal
ZhiChao is the world's first smart pet hardware terminal that deeply integrates robotics technology and AI technology. The product completely breaks away from the product positioning of traditional smart cat litter boxes, integrates five scenarios: cat litter cleaning, smart feeding, smart water feeding, health monitoring, and human-pet interaction, creates a full-process, full-scenario autonomous operating smart AI pet hardware, which can achieve up to 30 days of operation without manual intervention.
Technical Highlights:
Mechanical Structure Innovation: Abandon the drum sieve technology scheme commonly used in the industry, adopt an innovative mechanical structure with linear rails and robotic arms, which has stronger decontamination effectiveness, while completely eliminating the risk of hurting cats. The core mechanical structure has obtained invention patents;
Sewage Discharge System Upgrade: Equipped with an integrated flushing and sewage discharge system, feces can be directly discharged into the urban sewage pipe network, solving the problem of odor diffusion from the source;
Bacteriostasis And Odor Isolation: Equipped with a fully enclosed bacteriostatic material body to realize physical odor isolation of cat litter odor, and UV sterilization maximizes the maintenance of the internal environment of the cat litter box;
AI Intelligent Perception: Equipped with high-precision visual sensors and high-performance computing chips, it identifies the status of pets entering and exiting the device at the millisecond level, completes the intelligent start and stop of the power system, and takes into account both use safety and energy saving effects;
Health Monitoring System: Automatically collect multi-dimensional data such as pet toilet frequency, toilet duration, weight, etc., rely on the AI model to complete the health trend analysis of the pet's excretory system, output health reports, and the device will give real-time early warning when there is an abnormality in pet health;
Multi-scenario Integration: In addition to the basic intelligent excreta cleaning, it also integrates timed and quantitative intelligent feeding, circulating filtered running water drinking, and is also equipped with a high-definition video camera, stores a variety of voice call sounds, to realize human-pet interaction functions such as intelligent pet teasing;
Remote Control: The supporting APP can realize remote status viewing and remote control.
In terms of intellectual property rights, ZhiChao currently has 4 invention patents, 1 appearance design patent, and a number of core technology patents are in the application stage, building its own technical competition barrier. Compared with mainstream similar products on the market, this project is one of the few pet hardware products in the industry that simultaneously integrates multiple capabilities of full-process automatic cleaning, pet health monitoring, automatic feeding and water feeding, and human-pet interaction.
III. Business Model: Three-Tier Revenue Structure To Build A Diversified Business Closed Loop
ZhiChao builds a business model with three tiers of revenue:
The First Tier - Hardware Sales: As the main source of revenue, three tiers of hardware products are launched: Zhikang Version priced at 2999 yuan, Zhiyou Version priced at 6999 yuan, and Zhizun Version priced at 9999 yuan;
The Second Tier - SaaS Subscription Service: A pet health subscription service of 28 yuan/month, which outputs weekly pet health reports and trend analysis to users, and provides one-on-one video consultation services with veterinarians;
The Third Tier - Data Monetization: Relying on anonymously aggregated pet behavior and health data, it outputs data value to the pet insurance and pet medicine industries, and taps the commercialization potential of data.
Financial Forecast: The project forecasts that the annual revenue will reach 220 million yuan in 2027, 850 million yuan in 2028, and 1.58 billion yuan in 2029. With large-scale mass production, the BOM cost of hardware will continue to decrease, driving the comprehensive gross profit margin to continue to increase.
IV. Market Channels: Dual-Layout, Focusing On High-Net-Worth Pet-Owning Groups
The target users are focused on high-net-worth pet-owning groups, and the channel layout adopts two paths: online and offline:
Online: Take the Tmall official flagship store as the first launch channel, cooperate with vertical pet KOLs on Douyin to carry out product performance evaluations, and precipitate private domain users;
Offline: Enter high-end pet life halls in first-tier and new first-tier cities to lay out experience equipment, participate in large global vertical pet exhibitions, and enhance brand influence through event and film & television activity naming at the same time.
V. Core Team: Combination Of Cross-Field Professional Talents
The project team is composed of a number of cross-field professional talents:
Founder Bi Zhifu: A creative and imaginative mechanical design engineer who has independently created multiple mechanical products, holds a number of personal invention patents and has many entrepreneurial experiences;
CEO Chen Liyuan: Master of Electrical Engineering from Zhejiang University, has AI R&D experience in multiple Internet and overseas technology enterprises, and is good at building the full technical stack of AI products;
CTO Liu Shi: Holds a doctorate in computer science, has worked for Motorola and Google, and is deeply engaged in AI algorithm and system architecture R&D;
COO Guo Yonglong: Graduated from Henan University of Technology, former marketing director of the Great China region of a leading multinational enterprise, has rich experience in global market operation of large enterprises, and is good at brand building, channel expansion and business monetization.
VI. Financing Plan: Seed Round Launched, Targeting 2 Million - 20 Million Yuan
At the present stage, the project launches seed round financing, with a financing range of 2 million to 20 million yuan, and plans to release 1% to 10% of equity.
Exit Mechanism: The project plans to complete capital exit through strategic merger and acquisition or independent IPO in 2031, providing investors with an exit channel.
Facing the wave of pet consumption upgrading, ZhiChao hopes to tap the long-term value of the pet track through the model of "Hardware + AI + Service + Data".