Gao Bingqiang has participated in three consecutive rounds of investment, a Shenzhen-based smart pet hardware firm has closed a Pre-A round of financing worth tens of millions of yuan | Hardkr Exclusive

Written by｜Huang Nan

Edited by｜Yuan Silai

36Kr Global learned that Orange Cat Universe, a pet smart hardware company, has recently completed a multi-million-yuan Pre-A round of financing, with continuous additional investment from Professor Gao Bingqiang and his Gaofeng Patience Fund, Qianhai Innovation Investment (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd., Changlei Venture Capital and other investors. The funds will be mainly used for technological innovation, product iteration, patent system construction, expansion of the global offline channel network, as well as promoting in-depth integration of production lines and mass production delivery.

Prior to this, the company has successively completed two rounds of early financing, with investors including Professor Gao Bingqiang and its affiliated fund Brizan Ventures Phase II Fund, Gaofeng Patience Fund, Professor Gan Jie, Future Technology Fund, Beyond Venture Fund, etc. Cangzhu Capital acted as the exclusive financial advisor.

Founded in 2023, Orange Cat Universe focuses on the pet smart hardware track. Its first product is a powerless passive cat nest grooming and hair collector. With its self-developed exclusive forming mold and processing technology, the company has mastered technologies such as comb tooth structure and integrated wool felt forming, and has obtained PCT global patent certification. The product has been verified on overseas crowdfunding platforms and has entered leading pet chain channels in Europe.

Orange Cat Universe powerless passive cat nest grooming and hair collector (Source: Enterprise)

Founder Tian Youren has rich full-stack software and hardware development capabilities. During his university years, he participated in robotics competitions such as the China Engineering Robot Competition and RoboMaster, and won national awards for many times. Other core members cover R&D of robotic engineering, consumer hardware overseas expansion, brand marketing and other directions, with both technical implementation capabilities and global commercialization capabilities.

The pet hardware track has long been dominated by the inertial logic of "adding functions". Mainstream players try to add various electronic control modules, connect to network functions, and expand the dimension of perception collection, equating function stacking directly with intelligence to build differentiated barriers.

However, the complex superposition of mechanical and electrical components has instead become the most prominent risk source of products.

For example, for cat owners, the problem of seasonal loose hair has always been a high-frequency pain point for users. When cats enter the molting cycle, a large amount of hair will be scattered all over the house, which is very difficult to deal with. Existing solutions all have shortcomings: manual combing takes up a lot of the owner's energy, and many cats resist being combed; the existing electric pet grooming equipment on the market continues to face safety and reliability hazards such as mechanism hair jamming and operation failure.

"What users really need is not the nominal 'intelligence', but the specific result of reducing cat hair at home," Tian Youren said. Pets cannot speak and cannot actively avoid risks. Once a complex electronic control structure has a mechanical abnormality, it is very easy to cause direct physical injury.

Based on the principle of safety, Orange Cat Universe chose to make subtraction in the engineering path. Its first product, the cat nest grooming and hair collector PawSwing Neo, adopts a passive pure mechanical structure, with no motors, batteries or sensors, and the whole hardware is not equipped with any circuit design.

Behind this extreme simplification is a product logic that returns to common sense: the intelligence of pet hardware should first serve pets. Only when pets are comfortable and at ease can pet owners feel relaxed and happy.

Passive pure mechanical structure (Source: Enterprise)

Taking cat grooming as an example, instead of chasing the cat, forcing it to be combed, and causing trouble to both the cat and the user, it is better to take advantage of the natural habit of cats who love to drill holes and enter and exit the cat nest, so that the cat can complete the grooming by itself.

To this end, the Orange Cat Universe team cleverly embedded the grooming and hair collection structure into the entrance and exit of the cat nest. In this way, every time the cat enters and exits, the loose hair is combed down and collected naturally, which does not require the owner's forced intervention, and will not bring the cat the sense of oppression of being held down.

On the grooming module, the team simulated the barb structure on the surface of a cat's tongue, and carried out a large number of independent optimizations on the microscopic morphology and mechanical parameters.

Tian Youren said that a key quantitative indicator for structural optimization is "grooming efficiency": for every joule of work the cat resists, how many milligrams of cat hair can be combed off. The conventional manual combs on the market can comb off about 0.5 to 1.5 milligrams of hair per joule, while PawSwing Neo achieves 3 to 4 milligrams per joule. "We are not simply doing bionic reproduction, but completing engineering-level optimization with the help of bionic ideas."

At the same time, the barb structure of the cat's tongue itself carries physiological functions such as saliva adhesion and assisting body temperature regulation, which are of no value to grooming tools. Therefore, the team made active trade-offs in the structural design, retaining only the core mechanism for capturing loose hair.

A more critical trade-off lies in the safety logic. The Orange Cat Universe team once considered the "active adaptation" method, which uses a motor to drive the opening and closing of the grooming module to automatically adjust the size of the channel according to the cat's body shape, but this solution was finally abandoned. The reason lies in the "long-tail effect" of electronic control failure rate: once the motor gets stuck when the cat passes through, the consequence is not a simple "experience downgrade", but direct physical injury.

Therefore, Orange Cat Universe proposed a passive structure, that is, the contraction force of the channel comes from the power of the cat's own entry and exit, and the pressure of the grooming module on the cat's body is designed to be a constant force. No matter the cat is fat or thin, no matter how strong the cat squeezes, the pressure on the contact surface remains constant.

Under this passive architecture, the entire grooming function chain has no electricity and no active moving parts, and the failure rate is physically reduced to zero. Orange Cat Universe sacrifices the "intelligent sense" of "automatic adjustment" in exchange for the ultimate safety bottom line of pet hardware.

Orange Cat Universe's original passive structure (Source: Enterprise)

In terms of commercialization, the first product of Orange Cat Universe is priced at about 200 US dollars, and the overall return rate is less than 3%, which is far lower than the average level of the pet hardware track. At the same time, the team has established a mature community operation system to expand brand awareness, improve user stickiness and increase repurchase rates.

In 2026, the company won the largest professional pet chain channel in Europe, with more than 3,000 offline stores, and simultaneously accelerated the layout of markets such as North America and Australia.

In the current pet hardware track, with the continuous decline in the cost of large models and sensors, it has become very easy to add screens, IoT modules and AI voice to products. However, simple material stacking cannot build a moat. The real barrier is often the systematic ability from cognition to product design.

Orange Cat Universe chooses to make subtraction. Its technical threshold does not lie on the circuit board, but in materials, mechanics and manufacturing processes. By raising the physical upper limit of grooming efficiency, realizing safety redundancy with passive structure, deploying a wide PCT patent network, and deeply penetrating the supply chain, starting from a "power-free" product, Orange Cat Universe is trying to verify a pet hardware path centered on structural innovation and category definition, rather than selling points based on intelligent function stacking.

According to the plan, Orange Cat Universe will launch new pet hardware products by the end of this year, and launch the flagship model of the second-generation grooming platform in 2027.

The width of the entrance and exit can be adjusted according to the cat's body shape (Source: Enterprise)

The following is an excerpt of the interview between 36Kr Global and Tian Youren, founder of Orange Cat Universe (edited):

36Kr Global: As a smart pet hardware company, Orange Cat Universe's first product is a powerless, data-free pure mechanical device. What is the product thinking behind this? Are you worried that the brand will be labeled as "non-intelligent"?

Tian Youren: Intelligence should be the result of solving user pain points, not a prior purpose. When judging whether to introduce intelligent modules, we focus on whether the technical solution can find the optimal solution among cost, safety and experience, rather than stacking hardware to cater to concepts.

Regarding data return, the current pure mechanical version does not have the data closed-loop capability on the user side, but this does not mean that we are separated from data-driven. Our early iteration relies on benchmark tests in a self-built controlled experimental environment. In a closed scenario with controlled variables, based on long-term tracking of a small number of test cats, we can extract underlying physical data with extremely high signal-to-noise ratio. The iterative value of this high-quality structured data is often higher than that of massive but noisy C-end crowdsourced data. The data flywheel does not only have the path of device data return.

In addition, our team has a deep R&D background in robotics and multimodal perception, and we will launch advanced versions with sensing and visual recognition later. But on the underlying architecture, we adhere to the Fail-safe engineering design principle: even if the sensor fails or the system crashes, the pure physical contact mechanical structure can still guarantee absolute physical safety. Intelligence can be gradually superimposed through OTA or version iteration, but safety redundancy must be placed in the bottommost design.

In terms of brand strategy, we are not anxious about being labeled as "non-intelligent". The core cognition we want to convey to the market is that Orange Cat Universe is a hardware company driven by underlying engineering innovation and extreme product definition. Intelligence is only a tool. Making products that truly solve pain points and have commercial feasibility is the long-term barrier of hardware entrepreneurship.

36Kr Global: As a new category expanding to overseas markets, what pitfalls did you encounter in user cognition and business models that mature categories will not encounter? How do hardware companies plan the barriers from early patents to later channels?

Tian Youren: When building a new category, the biggest pain point is that there is no reference, and you need to educate the market from scratch.

When the product was first launched overseas, many overseas users' first reaction was to question "is this a meaningless gimmick", and even worried that "the machine will hurt the cat". Mature categories do not need to explain these common senses, but we have to eliminate them little by little. In the early stage, only a very small number of early adopters were willing to buy it, and we had to wait until the market was continuously verified before the public cognition was gradually established. The advantage is that once the cognition is recognized, the marketing cost will drop rapidly.

Secondly, we did pay the tuition fee on the business model. At the beginning, we were too naive about the cost structure of overseas expansion. The first generation of products did not calculate the overseas expansion chain carefully enough, and the pricing was too conservative. After deducting all freight, platform commission, return and exchange and marketing expenses, there was only a tiny profit. Later, we recalculated the accounts, raised the price, and the sales volume was even better. This shows that when expanding new categories overseas, you can't only focus on BOM hardware costs, you must calculate all the hidden costs of the whole chain, otherwise you will easily fall into the diseconomy of scale where the more you sell, the more you lose.

As a hardware company, barriers should be viewed in stages. In the early stage, we spent a lot of money on PCT global patent layout when defining products, to win a golden development window for the company's development. When the company's scale grows, patents are no longer enough, and the barrier will turn to offline channels. Especially overseas, about 85% of consumption happens offline. Those leading chain retail channels have extremely strict product selection standards, and they only favor products with top global innovation capabilities.

Therefore, our team's strategy is very clear: use the existing hit single product to knock on the door of these leading channels; after establishing cooperation, the barrier will become a "channel network". In the future, Orange Cat Universe will continuously import other new products in the product matrix into these connected networks, and further amplify the potential through cross-selling.