Yunzhou Tianqi plans to complete 20 million yuan of angel round financing, and the investor has not been disclosed.
Short-process Hot Stamping for High-strength Aluminum Alloy Lightweight Components, Yunzhou Tianchuang Plans to Raise 20 Million Yuan in Financing
High-strength aluminum alloy has always been the preferred material for lightweight structural parts, but when it comes to manufacturing thin-walled parts with complex shapes and qualified strength, the manufacturing end has long faced a dilemma: cold stamping features low cost and fast cycle, but its forming limit is limited, and the strength of finished parts can only stay in the range of 200 to 250MPa; traditional hot stamping with heat treatment strengthening can achieve a strength of 300 to 350MPa, at the cost of solution treatment that often takes 20 to 30 minutes, artificial aging that lasts for more than ten hours, and a unit cost of over 100 yuan. The goals of lighter weight and higher strength have long been blocked by a cost barrier. The solution of Zhejiang Yunzhou Tianchuang Intelligent Manufacturing Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Yunzhou Tianchuang") is to combine the two processes of heat treatment and forming into one production line, use rapid heating and in-die quenching to reduce the single-piece cycle of hot stamping to less than 15 seconds, and cut the per-kilogram cost to 65 to 70 yuan. The company plans to launch an angel round of financing in October 2026, with a planned fundraising of 20 million yuan and a post-investment valuation of 150 million yuan.
I. The Manufacturing Bottleneck of Thin-walled High-strength Parts Lies in the Cycle of Heat Treatment
The lightweight value of aluminum alloy comes from its physical property that the density is only one third of that of steel, but when it is made into load-bearing structural parts, the formability of the material and the final strength often show a trade-off relationship. 6-series and 7-series aluminum alloys are usually in T6 aging strengthened state when leaving the factory, with very low plasticity at room temperature, and they are prone to cracking once pressed for complex curved surfaces; if annealed state or soft aluminum is used instead, the forming process will be smooth, but the strength cannot meet the load-bearing requirements. Therefore, such thin-walled complex parts as automobile door anti-collision beams, battery pack shells, and UAV cabin section wall panels have long relied on thick materials, reinforcing ribs and multi-part welding for compensation, which reduces both material utilization rate and structural efficiency.
The mature solution in the industry is the hot forming quenching process (HFQ), whose idea is to connect the solution heat treatment and stamping forming in series: the plate is heated above the solution temperature for heat preservation, so that the precipitated phase is fully re-dissolved to form a supersaturated solid solution, then quickly transferred to the cold die for stamping, and quenched by the cooling of the die, and finally the strength is restored through artificial aging. This route can take into account both complex shapes and high strength, but its bottleneck lies in the cycle: the solution treatment takes 20 to 40 minutes, and the artificial aging lasts more than 12 hours, which pulls the production line cycle to 5 to 10 minutes, increases the fixed investment and energy consumption simultaneously, resulting in a unit cost of about 100 to 110 yuan, making it difficult to undertake price-sensitive bulk orders.
The technical route of Yunzhou Tianchuang comes from the accumulated research on lightweight manufacturing of Xi'an Jiaotong University, with two core modifications. First, the independent solution treatment link is canceled, and the rapid heating technology is used to directly heat the T6-state plate to the forming temperature range, combined with rapid transfer within 7 to 10 seconds and in-die pressure holding quenching, so as to control the single-piece forming cycle within 15 seconds; second, the strengthening link is postponed to 20 to 40 minutes of artificial aging, or the temperature of the downstream painting process is used to complete equivalent strengthening, thus saving the floor space, energy consumption and work-in-progress waiting of the entire solution furnace. According to the calculation given by the company, this "short-process" route reduces the per-kilogram cost from 100 to 110 yuan of the first-generation hot stamping to 65 to 70 yuan, and the part strength is increased to 350 to 550MPa, covering common aerospace aluminum alloy grades such as 6111, 5754 and 7075.
II. Integrate Simulation and Monitoring into One Production Line, Charge by Part Instead of Selling Aluminum by Ton
Process parameters alone are not enough. High-strength aluminum alloy has high quenching sensitivity, and slight deviations in transfer time and cooling rate will affect the final strength and dimensional accuracy, which is why this process has long been monopolized by European production lines. In addition to the process, Yunzhou Tianchuang has built an AI simulation and monitoring layer: the upstream uses finite element simulation and AI computing platform to carry out process window search and die opening trial production, the production line side collects multi-source heterogeneous sensor data such as vibration, current, voltage and temperature, and conducts full-process optimization through graph structure coding, supervised contrastive learning and multi-convolution kernel fusion, with supporting real-time digital twin monitoring. The project party said that the value of this system lies in reducing the number of trial productions and the reject rate, so that the non-standard process can achieve batch stability.
In terms of business model, Yunzhou Tianchuang has not chosen to sell aluminum alloy raw materials or general stamping parts, but charges customers based on the full life cycle of "process development - simulation - mass production - quality inspection", and outputs manufacturing services for lightweight structural parts rather than materials themselves. The target customers are concentrated in four types of scenarios: first, the fuselage window frames, cabin section wall panels and hull outer panels of eVTOL and large UAVs, where weight reduction is directly converted into endurance and effective load; second, high-frequency moving parts such as the skeletons and joint shells of humanoid robots and powered exoskeletons, where reduced inertia means synchronous decline of motor load and energy consumption; third, ultra-thin integrally formed fuselages for consumer electronics and smart wearables; fourth, structural parts of battery packs and body-in-white for new energy vehicles. The company judges that the underlying demands of these four types of needs are highly consistent - lighter, stronger and lower cost, belonging to a market where the same set of manufacturing capabilities can be reused.
The support for market space comes from policies and industrial rhythm. CCID Research Institute estimates in the *China Low-altitude Economy Development Research Report (2024)* that the scale of China's low-altitude economy was about 505.95 billion yuan in 2023, and it is optimistically expected to exceed 1 trillion yuan in 2026; among them, the eVTOL market size is expected to increase from 980 million yuan in 2023 to 9.5 billion yuan in 2026. On the humanoid robot side, aluminum alloy, with its balanced density and strength, mature process and lower price than carbon fiber and titanium alloy, has become the mainstream material for fuselage skeletons and joint shells, and 2026 is regarded by the industry as the starting point of large-scale mass production. The superposition of the two markets provides a customer base for the new lightweight process.
III. The Production Line Will Be Put into Operation at the End of 2026, and the Funds Will Be Mainly Invested in Production Capacity and R&D
Yunzhou Tianchuang was founded in 2025, with its registered capital and equity structure subject to the industrial and commercial registration. The founding team has overseas university background, and its core technology originates from the research accumulation of lightweight material design and intelligent manufacturing of Xi'an Jiaotong University, with independent intellectual property layout around the short-process hot stamping process and equipment. The company has completed a 15 million yuan seed round of financing in December 2025.
In terms of technical verification, the project party disclosed that it completed the pilot test in Frankfurt, Germany in 2024, continuously trial-produced 300 aluminum alloy parts, and passed 30 performance tests of 4 major categories; in the same period, it started the layout of the first domestic aluminum alloy hot stamping forming production line, which is positioned to replace imported equipment. On the customer side, a number of intended cooperations have been accumulated: XPeng Aeroht eVTOL fuselage window frame, a certain university's model UAV cabin section wall panel, a certain model of unmanned boat hull outer panel, and the exoskeleton of the wheeled inspection robot of Xi'an Jiaotong University. In addition, there are verification cases of door anti-collision beams and door inner panels in the automotive field, involving aerospace aluminum alloy and carbon fiber composite materials.
The production capacity and capital planning have also been arranged. The company plans to build a production line at the Tongxiang base in Zhejiang, which will be put into operation at the end of 2026, with a designed annual production capacity of 500,000 parts and an annual output value of 120 million yuan; the total investment in 2026 is 25 million yuan, including 18 million yuan for production line construction, 1 million yuan for R&D investment, 2 million yuan for market expansion, 1 million yuan for operation management, and 3 million yuan as cash reserve. The 20 million yuan angel round funds of this round are planned to be used in the proportion of 60% for production capacity ramp-up, 20% for R&D investment, and 20% for market expansion, focusing on promoting the process finalization of 6-series and 7-series aluminum alloys and carbon fiber composite materials, and tackling customer introduction and system certification in the low-altitude economy and humanoid robot fields. The exit path given by the company is B-round repurchase in 2030 and merger and acquisition exit in 2035.