36Kr Exclusive: Well Technology Secures Tens of Millions of Yuan in Series A Financing, and Its Products Have Covered Multiple Scenarios in Field Operations.

Author | Zhang Ziyi

Editor | Yuan Silai

36Kr has learned that "Weier Technology", an agricultural precision operation robot company, recently received tens of millions of RMB in Series A investment. It is led by Guanghua Capital under the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (Guangdong) National Innovation Center. The financing funds will be mainly used for product research and development and iteration, commercial expansion, and team building.

Up to now, Weier Technology has received three rounds of financing, with a cumulative financing amount of tens of millions. Historical investors include Kunlun Capital under Kunlun Wanwei, Qingshuiwan Fund under Li Zexiang, and Zero2IPO Ventures. Langchao Capital serves as the long-term exclusive financial advisor.

Since its operation in 2022, Weier Technology has focused on the development in the field of precision agriculture, mainly covering the field operation scenarios, providing professional agricultural intelligent equipment, data analysis, and decision support systems, promoting the digitalization, precision, efficiency, and scientificization of the agricultural machinery industry. The company uses its technological accumulation in the fields of robotics, perception, navigation, and automatic systems, and takes the most complex field management link as the entry point to launch several innovative products including the cotton intelligent topping robot, the intelligent row-to-row weeding robot, and the transplanting operation quality monitoring module, helping agricultural production to be precise, efficient, green, and safe.

Image source: Enterprise

The comprehensive mechanization rate of agriculture in China is increasing year by year, but the mechanization level of the management link remains stagnant. The main reason is that traditional agricultural machinery cannot effectively adapt to the growth needs of crops and the complex operating environment. And precise operation provides higher adaptability and operation accuracy for agricultural machinery, which can not only solve the contradiction of insufficient integration of agricultural machinery and agronomy, but also improve the efficiency of farmland operations, reduce costs, and optimize farmland management to the greatest extent.

Take cotton planting as an example. Cotton is a woody plant, planted once a year and harvested once a year. Although all links in the current cotton planting and production process have basically achieved full mechanization, the key link in cotton field management - cotton topping, is still mainly manual operation, and the degree of mechanization lags behind.

The cotton intelligent topping robot produced by Weier Technology integrates the human eye recognition system and the intelligent control system, and can simulate the manual topping action. Its physical operation method reduces the use of pesticides and reduces residues, while solving the problems of low efficiency and high cost of manual topping.

Image source: Enterprise

In the agricultural weeding scene, chemical weeding is commonly used in China at present, and manual weeding is mainly used for special crops. However, some weeds have developed resistance to herbicides, and chemical substances slow down the growth of crops; the amount of weeding drugs used is large, with occasional harmful effects, the reduction of organic matter content in the underlying living soil organisms, and at the same time, chemical weeding seriously pollutes the environment, and pesticide residues are transferred to the food chain, threatening food safety. And manual weeding has extremely low operating efficiency and high cost.

The intelligent row-to-row weeding robot of Weier Technology is specially designed for weeding between rows in large field plots. It adopts advanced machine vision technology to accurately identify the seedling belt and automatically control the left and right offsets of agricultural tools to ensure that physical weeding does not harm the crops.

The robot is equipped with efficient tools, which can quickly remove weeds between rows and in furrows, support 24-hour uninterrupted operation, with a maximum speed of 18 km/h, and an average daily operation efficiency of thousands of mu, and the weeding rate reaches more than 90%. In addition to the significant weeding effect, it can also effectively loosen the soil to ensure the realization of mechanized green weeding while ensuring the operation quality.

The transplanting operation quality monitoring module product of Weier Technology is installed on the support arm in the middle of the rotary box of the transplanter in a modular form. Through artificial intelligence technology, it can accurately identify the missing seedlings in the high-speed transplanting operation and promptly send out sound and light alarm prompts. The cloud platform generates a real-time heat map of missing seedlings, clearly showing the missing seedling areas. Users can statistically analyze information such as the operation area, work efficiency, and operation quality assessment in real time through the big data dashboard, and support offline operations to comprehensively manage the farmland and achieve fine-grained yield increase.

In terms of market expansion, the cotton intelligent topping robot of Weier Technology is currently in the small-batch trial production stage and has been sold in the Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Divisions of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps and Aksu and other places, assisting Xinjiang agricultural service providers to undertake more than 100,000 mu of cotton topping tasks. At present, the product has completed the second-generation iteration, and the software, hardware, structure, and algorithm have all realized the full-link product function development.

"At present, global agricultural machinery giants are carrying out the intelligent transformation of agricultural machinery, which is also a historical opportunity for China's agricultural machinery manufacturing industry to overtake on a curve. In intelligent agricultural machinery, the most core product competitiveness will be the precise operation ability. Practicing the productization idea of 'agronomy is agricultural tools' and empowering agricultural productivity with technology is the vision of the Weier Technology team," Liu Zheng told 36Kr.