36Kr Exclusive | Ninebot Leads Investment in an AI Smart Imaging Equipment Company, Achieving Nearly Fourfold Annual Growth Amidst Competition from Industry Giants

Author | Zhang Ziyi

Editor | Yuan Silai

Yingke learned that the intelligent sports imaging brand "XbotGo" (Shenmou Yuanzhi) recently completed a new round of financing of nearly 100 million yuan. Led by Ninebot Capital, followed by Yuanhe Holdings and Butong Capital, and the old shareholder Zero One Ventures oversubscribed. Yunxiu Capital served as the long - term exclusive financial advisor.

In the United States, where the youth sports culture is well - developed, sports are not only about competition but also the core of family life. Relevant data shows that more than 30 million teenagers in the United States participate in professional sports training, and American families spend an average of up to 10 hours a week on their children's sports activities.

However, a long - standing pain point for parents is that manual shooting at the sports field not only prevents parents from immersively enjoying the "instant emotional value" of the game, but also makes it difficult to accurately capture wonderful instantaneous images and sports data due to the long distance, small targets, and complex scenes.

The origin of XbotGo's entrepreneurship also stems from the experience of Tan Kefeng, the founder and CEO, who accompanied his child to play football for several years, which made him realize the shooting problems and market opportunities in sports activities. Based on this, XbotGo's products aim to solve the shooting problems in sports activities. They provide users with automatic shooting equipment to capture images and data on the sports field, and help users analyze and disassemble data through AI. Ultimately, they can automatically generate content to solve the problems of sports activity analysis and creation, such as one - click generation of highlight clips, training data analysis panels, or multi - camera real - time live - streaming online interaction, etc.

Take XbotGo's newly launched independent AI camera Falcon as an example. It is the first AI camera that can shoot independently without a mobile phone. It is equipped with dual - lens 4K/30, HDR tracking and shooting, and supports 6TOPS computing power. This product with a unit price of nearly $700 successfully achieved nearly $2.5 million on the crowdfunding platform.

(Image source/Enterprise)

In the process of achieving this "fully automatic" mode, the team faces engineering challenges that are completely different from traditional imaging.

Yingke learned that in an outdoor environment with direct sunlight and a high temperature of over 30 degrees Celsius, the camera needs to maintain high - intensity AI inference computing for 4 - 5 hours, which brings great power consumption and heat dissipation pressure. To ensure that the algorithm can accurately track the ball and players with low latency, the internal space of the camera is almost filled with batteries and heat dissipation modules. In addition, in order to drive the precise mechanical rotation that can cover the entire field, the motor drive algorithm has also been optimized many times to ensure the stability of the picture during high - speed camera movement.

This insistence on "AI first" stems from XbotGo's unique iteration path. Before launching Falcon, XbotGo had previously released two generations of AI gimbal products based on smartphones.

During the product iteration process, the XbotGo team found that relying on mobile phones had irreconcilable contradictions such as difficult adaptation, easy overheating, and occupation of users' communication functions. So, the second - generation product "Chameleon" introduced a dedicated AI chip to relieve the computing burden from the mobile phone. Until the birth of Falcon, XbotGo finally achieved the leap from an "accessory" to an "independent imaging platform". At the same time, after the AI gimbal product was launched into the market, it also obtained very valuable and real user usage data and sports environment data. It is worth mentioning that the user boot - up rate and activity of this product were higher than expected, which also provided sufficient "nutrients" for the XbotGo team on the AI analysis and software development side.

On the channel side, XbotGo plans to officially enter more than 1,000 Best Buy stores in the United States in June this year. The first batch will cover two or three hundred core city stores. The company has reached an exclusive cooperation with TeamSnap, the largest youth sports platform in the United States, and will integrate the camera system into its native live - streaming and storage services.

Meanwhile, XbotGo is accelerating the process of software commercialization. Based on the Visual Large Model (VLM), Falcon will be able to conduct professional data statistics on goal determination, camp analysis, etc. while shooting in the future, and provide a content creation ecosystem platform for different types of users.

In terms of the team background, the founder Tan Kefeng is a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California. Before returning to China to start a business, he served as the technical leader of Amazon's advanced hardware laboratory Lab126. He has more than 10 years of experience in overseas intelligent hardware R & D and team management and has won many top - level Qualcomm technology awards. Most of the core team members are from first - tier technology companies such as Huawei, Amazon, ByteDance, and DJI.

Q&A with the Founder

Yingke: You mentioned that "there is a way to do hardware entrepreneurship even without much money". How did XbotGo survive and develop in the early days with extremely limited resources?

Tan Kefeng: This is a very realistic problem. Many entrepreneurs think they must raise a large amount of money before starting, but we didn't get real VC financing until the third year. In the early days, our idea was to "leverage": since we lacked resources, we borrowed the mature mobile phone gimbal ecosystem in the market and focused our core energy on the algorithms and software we were good at.

The barrier of this approach is that although you are selling a gimbal, it provides a completely different "automatic shooting" value. This also allowed us to verify the market with a very low start - up barrier. It was the sales of two or three thousand sets of gimbals in the early days that gave us the most real user feedback and accumulated know - how in more than 20 sports scenarios.

Yingke: Why did you iterate from the gimbal product to the independent camera? It's a big leap.

Tan Kefeng: We conducted a lot of user research and realized there was a cognitive limitation: when users only have a carriage, they will only ask for the carriage to run faster and never dare to imagine the existence of a car.

In the early research, most users did not actively propose an independent camera because they were limited by their existing technical knowledge.

But through in - depth observation, we found that difficult mobile phone adaptation, the inability to reply to WeChat during shooting, and the mobile phone shutting down due to overheating were all problems that hindered the experience. So we decided to be the "car". At that time, 85% of the users in the research approved the development of an independent camera. After the product was launched, the user scale expanded rapidly. Facts have proved that when an independent camera device with significantly better shooting results than manual shooting appears, users are willing to pay for it.

Yingke: What kind of product is XbotGo's ultimate goal?

Tan Kefeng: Shooting is just the first step. What we ultimately pursue is to "shoot elegantly and beautifully". Professional sports broadcasting requires dozens of cameras and dozens of professional photographers to work together.

Falcon's current level may still be at the 0.1 stage. Our vision is to enable the AI camera to have aesthetic and director capabilities, achieve multi - camera collaborative shooting, and even automatically generate professional commentary to realize a multi - type content ecosystem. We hope that in the future, for provincial, municipal, or even community - level competitions, there will be no need for a professional production team. As long as our equipment is set up, a quasi - professional live - stream can be produced. We hope that in the future, ordinary consumers can use XbotGo's products to record their sports lives at any time. Whether it is for entertainment or amateur training needs, we can provide them with AI tools for recording, dissemination, and creation.

Views from the Investors:

Ninebot Capital said: We highly recognize XbotGo's edge - side AI algorithms, imaging engineering, scenario data, and global channel capabilities. We also admire the team's technical precipitation and execution ability. We look forward to XbotGo becoming the most sports - savvy and most companionable AI imaging partner for global sports enthusiasts and creating a new - generation intelligent imaging brand with international influence.

Yuanhe Holdings said: We fully recognize the company's efficient product iteration ability, hardcore technological innovation strength, and strong business growth potential. We also highly agree with the vision and execution ability of the core team led by Mr. Tan. In the future, Yuanhe Holdings will continue to provide support and companionship. We firmly believe that XbotGo will continue to break through and innovate, launch more competitive products, and embark on a higher and farther development journey.

Butong Capital said: With the advent of the AI era, AI broadcasting, AI refereeing, and AI data analysis have gradually become possible. In in - depth exchanges, we have seen the XbotGo team's firm investment in technology R & D and their diligent spirit in product iteration. Butong Capital is highly optimistic about XbotGo and believes it will become the best intelligent "partner" for global sports enthusiasts.

Zero One Ventures said: In the field of sports shooting and recording, XbotGo has evolved from enabling users to "shoot" at the beginning to helping everyone "shoot well" today with the empowerment of AI. As the earliest angel - round investor of XbotGo, we are not only impressed by the company's product technology innovation ability and rapid business development but also highly appreciate the team's profound scenario insight and commercial thinking ability. We believe that XbotGo will bring more breakthrough innovations to the industry.