Received tens of millions of yuan in Pre-A round financing. "Changyao Innovation" intelligent lawn mower robot raised over 2.2 million US dollars in crowdfunding within 30 days | Financing debut

Written by Hu Yiting

Edited by Yuan Silai

HardcoreTech has learned that recently, Changyao Innovation Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Changyao Innovation") has received a pre-A round of financing of tens of millions of RMB. This round of financing is led by Gree Group, with TONGCHUANG WEIYE, Gaofeng Patient Capital, Zelos Capital, X Group and individual investors participating, and the old shareholders continue to increase their investment. The funds will be used for manufacturing, marketing and R & D investment in new robot products.

Changyao Innovation was established in Shenzhen in 2022, providing home-boundaryless intelligent lawn mower robots to global consumers. This year, it launched the presale of its first product AIRSEEKERS TRON and Tron Max on Kickstarter. Within one month, the crowdfunding amount exceeded 2.2 million US dollars, and the first batch of ordered products exceeded 1,500 units.

Currently, Changyao Innovation has begun to deliver the first batch of crowdfunding users one after another, and will start to deliver orders to offline channel partners and chain stores next spring. It is reported that currently, Changyao Innovation has obtained orders of more than ten million levels.

The boundaryless intelligent lawn mower robot is different from the traditional lawn mower that needs to be wire-laid (lay wires in advance to limit the working area) or the push-type lawn mower. It can realize autonomous operation in multiple scenarios such as lawns and gentle slopes by using multiple positioning solutions such as UWB, RTK (Real-time kinematic), laser SLAM and visual SLAM. Users only need to remotely control the operation through the mobile phone app to start, monitor and stop the lawn mowing task.

The boundaryless intelligent lawn mower robot is still in the early stage of the market, with North America and Europe as the main markets. Hu Yue, the founder of Changyao Innovation, told HardcoreTech: "At present, the shipment of lawn mower robots is still mainly the traditional wire-laid (wire-laying) products. This year, the global shipment of boundaryless products does not exceed 300,000 units. Although there are many players in the current market, more are following the trend; the homogenization of similar products in the current market is serious, with a large amount of marketing investment, 'brand education' has become 'category education', and there are not many manufacturers that can really ship. There are still a lot of opportunities in the market. Currently, the market share ratio of intelligent and traditional wire-laid (wire-laying) products is less than 1:10."

Last year, Changyao Innovation has received angel round financing jointly invested by Oriental Fortune Capital, Blue Ocean Zhonli Capital, Shuimu Wutong Capital, brizan ventures, angel investor Cheng Xiaohua, etc. Professor Gao Bingqiang, the former dean of the School of Engineering of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Lu Feng, the executive director of Guangyuan Capital, also continue to increase their investment. A total of three rounds of financing have been completed, with a total amount of nearly 100 million yuan.

This year, Changyao Innovation launched its first product AIRSEEKERS TRON and Tron Max on Kickstarter, with an early bird price starting from 1,299 US dollars. In order to solve the problem of strong outdoor light interference and excessive exposure of a single camera, the two products are based on visual technology, equipped with six cameras and TOF sensors, and adopt a 360° AI visual navigation system. Even if there is unilateral sunlight interference, other cameras can still operate normally, maintaining centimeter-level precise visual positioning.

The first product of Changyao Innovation, AIRSEEKERS TRON, image source: Kickstarter official website

Without the need for RTK or peripheral wiring, AIRSEEKERS TRON can last for 3 hours, complete a one-time lawn mowing and evenly cover the grass clippings to turn them into fertilizer. During the lawn mowing process, its front wheels can tilt inward by 30 degrees and climb slopes with a gradient of up to 65%.

At present, Changyao Innovation is delivering the first batch of pre-ordered products by online and offline channels, and it has successively completed the delivery of the first batch of crowdfunding users.

At the same time, Changyao Innovation has set up branches in the United States and Europe, and has entered the process of signing orders with offline agency channels. It will gradually expand to new countries in the future. At the end of this year, Changyao Innovation will also start selling on overseas independent stations, and the first product is expected to be priced at more than 2,000 US dollars.

In terms of the founding team, the founder Hu Yue graduated from the Electronic Engineering Department of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He has many years of living and entrepreneurial experience overseas, and also has global Top500 factory production, research and commercialization experience; the two co-founders both have more than ten years of entrepreneurial experience, and served as the former founder and former co-founder of a well-known robot company in Shenzhen.

Investor's point of view:

Zhao Liang, the investment director of the leading investor Gree Group, said: The lawn mower robot track is on the rise, and the penetration rate of domestic brands in the overseas market is rapidly increasing. The third-generation intelligent lawn mower robot independently developed by Changyao Innovation adopts a pure visual solution and a surround-view three-eye visual repositioning technology based on deep learning, achieving absolute precise positioning and solving the pain points such as positioning loss and robot "getting lost" that often occur in the industry. Once the company's products are crowdfunded, it will detonate the market. More importantly, we are optimistic about the company's young, hardworking and excellent team. We believe that they will definitely win a place in the broad market, and launch more excellent products in the future to become a leading courtyard service robot product supplier.

Wang Peng, an investor of TONGCHUANG WEIYE, said: Changyao Innovation is a very distinctive company in the field of lawn mower robots. First, the pure visual solution currently adopted by the company can achieve high-precision operation and the convenience of low deployment cost; second, the founding team is excellent. The founder Hu Yue has triple experiences of overseas, big factories and entrepreneurship. The management team is also a veteran who has been working in the robot industry for many years and can achieve a good realization in all aspects such as product design, customer demand analysis and product implementation; third, the industry has not formed a clear leading pattern, and Changyao Innovation has the opportunity to become a leading enterprise with a very high ranking. We look forward to Changyao Innovation becoming a new Chinese business card and a world brand.

Lin Yankun, the founding partner of X GROUP, said: Changyao Innovation is a high-tech enterprise dedicated to creating a new generation of intelligent outdoor ecology for global consumer users. I really appreciate the founder Hu Yue's ultimate pursuit of making good products. For many years, he has conducted field research and insights on the target audience of lawn mower robots overseas, understood and explored the problems and pain points of users in the process of using related competing products, and tried every way to solve and iterate one by one on his own products while constantly subtracting to strive for the ultimate cost performance of the products. At the same time, the core team has a background of big factories and has the complete self-developed software and hardware capabilities and supply chain resources. With the rapid advancement of the AI+ wave, I believe that under the leadership of the founder Hu Yue, Changyao Innovation will definitely become a leading enterprise in the field of intelligent robots in the near future.

John, the founding partner of Gaofeng Patient Capital, said: The products of Changyao Innovation adopt a vision-based positioning and navigation technology, which is innovative and leading in the field of lawn mower robots. Compared with traditional technical solutions such as wire-laying, UWB, RTK, etc., the visual solution can better adapt to different lawn scenarios without the need for manual wiring and deployment of base stations, truly achieving "plug and play". For the long-tail problems that are difficult to solve with the existing technical solutions, such as the failure of RTK when encountering occlusion, visual blind spots (such as facing a white wall, a large lawn, a dark and staggered scene, etc.), and rotational drift, the visual solution of Changyao Innovation has made targeted designs and optimizations, which greatly improves the stability and reliability of the product in a complex environment, and has significant advantages in the lawn mower robot field.