Kuang Zheng, a former engineer of DJI, develops data acquisition equipment, and Li Zexiang has invested in the related business.

October 10, ChinaVenture exclusively learned that Moxian Technology (Dongguan) Co., Ltd. (referred to as "Moxian Technology") has recently completed an industrial round of financing of tens of millions of yuan. The investors include Zibianliang Robot, Songshan Lake Industrial Investment and a leading embodied intelligence company, and the old shareholder Clear Water Bay Fund continued to increase its investment.

According to their plan, the funds from this round will be used for the R&D and iteration of the new generation of data acquisition gloves, optimization of the supply chain system and construction of mass production capacity. As products extend from robot tactile sensors to data acquisition equipment, Moxian Technology is further building its product manufacturing and delivery capabilities.

Led by Kuang Zheng, who once served as a sensor engineer at DJI, this enterprise, one of the earliest domestic companies to explore the R&D and industrialization of flexible tactile sensors, starts from flexible pressure sensing materials, integrates materials, structures, circuits and algorithms into products, which are applied in scenarios such as consumer electronics, smart homes and robots.

After 5 years of development, Moxian Technology has completed 5 rounds of financing. Its investors also include Xifeng Changqing, Damai Venture Capital, Yonghua Investment, Heding Co-investment, Shenzhen Investment Holdings, Shanghai Angel Association, Dongguan Science and Technology Innovation Investment, Qin'an Co., Ltd., Shoucheng Holdings, Beijing Robot Industry Development Investment Fund, etc.

Founded by a former DJI employee, a star company is born in Dongguan

The birth of Moxian Technology originated from a supply problem Kuang Zheng encountered in hardware development.

After graduating with a bachelor's degree in computer science, he joined DJI and started working on sensor design, data processing and other related fields. When developing products at DJI, Kuang Zheng observed that many product functions can only be truly realized when the underlying sensors meet corresponding conditions.

Although there is market demand, when it comes to the actual procurement of electronic skin sensors, Kuang Zheng found that most suppliers mainly provide test equipment or serve their own research, and do not aim to stably supply finished kits and mass-produced standard products.

In his view, this situation makes it difficult for some consumer electronic products to be used on a large scale. "We were thinking at that time, why is tactile sense so important, but there have been no large-scale products emerging?"

With this question, Kuang Zheng, who originally planned to pursue a postgraduate degree in Hong Kong, followed the suggestion of his tutor Li Zexiang and chose to first explore the problems found in his work. At that time, he was more exploring whether there were new technical paths to solve the problem, whether commercialization directions could be found under the new technical paths, and whether such demand existed universally in addition to DJI.

The logic behind it is not difficult to understand. If other industries do not have such demand, this kind of technical exploration will be difficult to develop into a business. Subsequently, similar demands emerged one after another in scenarios such as sweeping robots, lawn mowers and mattresses, and even some colleagues who had left to start their own businesses came to Kuang Zheng for solutions.

These demands made him realize that the problem was not limited to a single project or industry, but existed universally. In August 2021, Kuang Zheng officially established Moxian Technology in Dongguan, starting from consumer scenarios, and designing the performance and reliability of sensors according to the requirements of real products.

As several co-founders who used to work at DJI joined the team one after another, the team brought accumulated R&D experience and engineering capabilities into entrepreneurial practice, and gradually built a complete capability system covering polymer materials, structure, chip and signal processing, large-scale mass production and marketing, and began to build product and manufacturing capabilities along the supply gap initially discovered.

Earlier than that, investors had already started to make investments.

According to Kuang Zheng's recollection, before Moxian Technology was officially established, Li Zexiang had invested in them through the Clear Water Bay Fund. After that, Xifeng Changqing, Damai Venture Capital, Yonghua Investment, Heding Co-investment, Shenzhen Investment Holdings, Shanghai Angel Association, Dongguan Science and Technology Innovation Investment, Qin'an Co., Ltd., Shoucheng Holdings, Beijing Robot Industry Development Investment Fund and other institutions successively became their shareholders.

However, when initially facing investors' questions about the size of the market, this newly established company still could not give a clear answer. "What we were doing at that time was looking for nails with a hammer," Kuang Zheng explained. Underlying technologies need to be applied in specific scenarios to generate commercial value.

At that time, they deduced opportunities from the importance of tactile sense and the possible downstream functional demands, and then gradually found the final landing point of the products. Until 2023, more and more embodied intelligence companies came to Moxian Technology to customize sensors, and the robot application scenarios gradually became clear.

The miniaturization, stability and service life design experience accumulated from the original consumer business became the basis for adapting to new demands. Moxian Technology continued to operate its existing business, and also began to modify products to meet the needs of robot customers.

As the data generated by sensors continued to increase, the company extended its products from the perception components on the main body to data acquisition equipment through continuous contact with the industrial chain.

Looking at the latest industrial round from this choice, the focus of investors has been placed on the company's mass production and engineering capabilities. This round of financing is directly invested in the new generation of data acquisition gloves, supply chain and mass production capacity, which is exactly the result of Moxian Technology's transformation from finding application scenarios to undertaking manufacturing.

With 6 types of data acquisition gloves, the annual shipment of sensors reaches 350,000 sets

For customers who need to collect the process of human operation, how the fingers bend, what gestures are formed, where the hand touches the object, and how much pressure each part bears are information of different dimensions. The data acquisition equipment of Moxian Technology records the pose and contact of the hand respectively, providing corresponding data input for model companies and data acquisition enterprises.

Focusing on tactile perception and hand pose capture, Moxian Technology has currently launched six glove products. Among them, the Rigidcore Tactile and Fabric Tactile series focus on tactile perception, while the UltraLite Motion and EMF Motion series are used for hand pose detection. Tactile gloves can be used in combination with pose gloves to realize synchronous collection of tactile information and hand pose data.

Specifically, the Fabric Tactile series adopts flexible fabric sensing technology, with more than 360 sensing points covering the whole hand; the Rigidcore Tactile series is equipped with more than 800 sensing points on the whole hand. These sensing points distributed in different positions of the hand can help customers obtain the contact area of the hand and its pressure distribution information.

In terms of hand pose detection, the UltraLite Motion and EMF Motion series are used to capture hand poses and finger movements. For customers who need to collect multiple types of data at the same time, Moxian Technology has also developed an all-in-one multi-modal fusion device, which aligns tactile data, hand pose data and other data in time and space, reducing the engineering input of customers in data synchronization and fusion.

These devices can adapt to the existing data systems of customers. According to Kuang Zheng, different model companies have different understandings of data accuracy, quantity and collection methods, and gloves are only one part of the whole system. Therefore, customers will put forward requirements covering areas, wearing methods and device compatibility, and products need to be adjusted according to these demands.

"We are helping customers save time and reduce the cost of data collection per hour." In his view, adaptation after clarifying the needs is usually faster. The difficulty lies in that customers themselves are also trying, and the product definition will continue to change, which means that Moxian Technology not only needs to provide sensing devices, but also cooperate with downstream parties to complete integration.

Since sensors need to balance service life, cost and batch consistency, and the surfaces that different customers need to cover vary in size, softness, hardness and curvature, the company chooses the percolation flexible piezoresistive technology route, hoping to adapt to multiple product forms on the basis of a relatively unified process.

The flexible piezoresistive material of Moxian Technology deforms under pressure, and its internal conductive state changes accordingly. Then the circuit reads the resistance change and converts it into a signal. Flexible materials can adapt to different contact forms, but to convert the signal into usable input for customers, problems such as material consistency, calibration and installation need to be solved.

In actual scenarios, some original consumer products can accommodate planar sensors, but because robot fingers and palms have more curved surfaces, the company has developed a solution to directly form curved surfaces during the manufacturing process, and adjusted the calibration system according to the robot's demand for quantitative force values.

"If tactile technology wants to be finally implemented, it must return to the basic logic of the manufacturing industry." Kuang Zheng regards process capability and system integration capability as important competitive thresholds.

Since the existing supply chain cannot fully meet some non-standard demands, they have gradually opened up links such as material production, sensor module manufacturing, algorithm development and non-standard testing, and independently developed some production equipment, so as to implement the specific requirements of product development into the manufacturing process.

It is worth noting that Moxian Technology is not the only company making data acquisition gloves on the market. When asked if he was worried that other enterprises would buy gloves for reverse R&D, Kuang Zheng replied, "The key lies in whether we can continue to invest, deeply understand customer demands, and solve complex problems in R&D and manufacturing. The ultimate goal of Moxian Technology is to provide downstream customers with high-quality, clean and repeatable data, while significantly reducing their hourly data collection costs."

After 5 years of development, Moxian Technology has also achieved a series of results with the recognition of customers, and its products are widely used in embodied intelligence, smart home, consumer electronics, medical equipment and other fields.

"In 2025, the company's sensor shipments reached 350,000 sets, and it is expected to be more this year." According to Kuang Zheng, they have supplied many leading robot companies and data acquisition companies, and it is expected that the shipment of data acquisition gloves will reach thousands of pairs in 2026.

In the next stage, Moxian Technology will continue to develop new generation data acquisition gloves, optimize the supply chain and build mass production capacity. "We are a perception infrastructure enterprise based on hardware, providing sensing solutions for downstream customers." Kuang Zheng said frankly that their current work is to further promote the large-scale mass production of tactile sensors, so that downstream parties can continuously obtain usable new types of data.

This article is from the WeChat official account "ChinaVenture", author: Lu Zhigao, published with authorization from 36Kr.