Wukong Blue is seeking angel round financing for large-scale implementation and R&D iteration.

AI solves the labor pain points of orchard picking, Wukong Blue is seeking angel round financing

Starting from blueberries to enter the high-end agricultural picking track, it has realized a closed commercial loop with pay-per-volume billing model

In the global high-end agricultural sector, the picking process has long relied on manual labor, which has become one of the biggest bottlenecks restricting large-scale planting. Taking blueberries as an example, according to the project materials provided by Wukong Blue, the annual global expenditure on blueberry picking is about 227.5 billion yuan, while the average age of picking labor in producing areas reaches 57.6 years old, the annual growth rate of labor cost exceeds 15%, and the mechanization rate of the picking process is less than 1%. In Yunnan's blueberry producing areas, there was once a situation where no pickers could be recruited even with a monthly salary of 8,000 yuan. The working environment of 40℃ high temperature and dense mosquitoes in greenhouses has led to a continuous outflow of young people from the front line of agriculture. The contradiction between the shrinking labor supply and the expansion of planting area of cash crops such as high-end berries, tea and flowers has formed a rigid and continuously expanding market demand.

Starting from blueberries, AI picking targets the mechanization gap in the "last link"

Wukong Blue (Chengdu) Robot Co., Ltd. chooses to cut into the high-payment scenario of blueberry picking. The high-end agricultural AI picking robot developed by the company is designed for modern agricultural greenhouse scenarios, integrating AI machine vision, intelligent control and flexible end effector, to realize full-process automation from autonomous walking, identification and positioning to flexible picking. According to the project data, the robot achieves centimeter-level positioning and autonomous obstacle avoidance by combining GPS-RTK and visual SLAM; the vision system adopts a deeply optimized target detection algorithm, combined with multispectral, binocular vision and LiDAR, the recognition rate of mature fruits reaches 98%, the positioning accuracy is ±2mm, and the grabbing success rate in occluded scenarios exceeds 95%; the end adopts a bionic flexible grabbing scheme, which protects fruits and plants through force feedback control, the physical damage rate of fruits is controlled within 0.5%, and the commodity rate is about 15% higher than that of manual picking.

In terms of in-depth technology development, the company is advancing from two-dimensional recognition to three-dimensional precise positioning. Public information from the National Intellectual Property Administration shows that Wukong Blue applied for the invention patent of "A mature blueberry recognition and calyx positioning method based on intelligent picking" in March 2026 (publication number CN122265989A). Through the calibration of the RGB-3D camera system and point cloud reconstruction, combined with the calculation of the normal vector of the calyx surface, the optimal picking pose is determined, and the angle of the robotic arm is iteratively adjusted with a closed-loop feedback mechanism to improve the recognition accuracy and positioning stability in complex orchard environments. In addition, the company has jointly developed an intelligent trajectory planning algorithm with Harbin Institute of Technology, which reduces the time of a single picking action to the 0.8-second level, and plans the multi-machine cluster collaborative scheduling capability, reserving architectural space for the evolution towards unmanned farms.

Instead of selling equipment, billing by kilogram, the RaaS model lowers the threshold for customer decision-making

Different from the path of most agricultural robot manufacturers that "sell complete machines and provide leasing services", Wukong Blue adopts the Picking as a Service (RaaS) model: customers do not need to purchase or lease equipment, and the company charges by the actual amount of picking delivered (the project data shows that the reference price is about 6 yuan per kilogram), delivering robots as production capacity rather than commodities. This model converts customers' capital expenditures into operating expenditures, significantly lowering the trial threshold for medium and large planting enterprises. According to the company's data, the customer conversion rate under this model exceeds 90%, the overall picking efficiency can reach 5 to 8 times that of single-person operation, and the comprehensive picking cost is reduced by 30% to 50%.

In terms of market space, the company estimates that the global high-end agricultural picking market capacity exceeds 20 billion US dollars, covering categories such as blueberries, tea, flowers, tobacco, and greenhouse tomatoes. Relying on the position of the affiliated institution Wuchuang Industrial Group as the vice-chairman unit of the Blueberry Industry Association of Honghe Prefecture, Yunnan Province, Wukong Blue has convenient conditions for early promotion and scenario implementation in core producing areas. It plans to first achieve large-scale verification in the domestic blueberry and tea picking markets, and then replicate to other high-value crop categories.

The team has a compound background of industry and capital, and angel round funds support large-scale implementation

Wukong Blue (Chengdu) Robot Co., Ltd. was established in December 2019, with a registered capital of 5 million yuan, and its registered address is located in Sichuan Tianfu New Area. Its current business scope covers R&D and sales of intelligent robots, intelligent agricultural management, agricultural machinery services and other fields. The company's core team comes from the front line of industries such as Siemens, GE and Full Truck Alliance, with backgrounds in high-end manufacturing, robot technology and capital operation, and has its own planting base as R&D and testing scenarios, completing the whole link from technology verification to commercial delivery. The company also receives support from institutions such as Sichuan Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Mianyang Robot Industry Technology Research Institute.

At present, Wukong Blue is in the angel round financing stage, and the raised funds will be mainly used for the mass delivery of picking robots and coverage of producing areas, R&D and iteration of multi-category picking capabilities, as well as team expansion. The company plans to cover the main domestic producing areas within three years and start overseas expansion simultaneously. Under the background that the structural shortage of agricultural labor is irreversible, whether it can continuously optimize delivery cost and stability and complete the replication from a single category to multiple categories by adopting the pay-per-volume billing model to enter the high-value crop picking link will be the core proposition that Wukong Blue needs to prove to the market after this round of financing.