Having previously received investment from Li Zexiang and Vision Capital, this company aims to develop a photography robot that can "direct the shoot" | Early-stage Project

Author | ZHANG Ziyi

Editor | YUAN Silai

Hard Krypton learned that Yueqian Innovation, founded in 2023, received investment from Li Zexiang in its seed round; at present, the company has completed its angel round financing, with participation from Shunwei Venture Capital, Nanshan New Industry Investment, and Innoangel Capital.

Yueqian Innovation's first product takes the force-balanced motorized camera arm Cilin X as the entry point, combining intelligent and lightweight hardware and software design, to try to lower the threshold for independent creators and small shooting teams to arrange, execute and reproduce camera movements. The company regards Cilin X as the first step of "commercializing professional photography capabilities".

Motorized camera arms are widely used in film, advertising and product shooting. It can carry the camera to move in space, accurately reproduce the same trajectory, and capture orbiting, diving or high-speed follow shots that are difficult for human hands to complete. However, for a long time, motorized camera arms have been expensive, bulky, and have extremely high usage thresholds.

Take Bolt from British manufacturer MRMC as an example, when paired with a track, its product can reach a maximum camera movement speed of 12m/s with a load of 20kg, but the equipment together with the base weighs about 600kg, which mainly serves professional shooting scenarios; the Cinebot Mini and Cinebot Nano launched in recent years have been significantly reduced in size, but the main body of the robotic arm still weighs 33.5kg and 25kg respectively.

On the other hand, the global video creator ecosystem is also undergoing new changes.

A 2025 survey by video platform Wistia shows that more than 40% of surveyed enterprises produce at least one video per week, and 71% of enterprises complete video production in-house, which is higher than the 63% in the previous year; IAB predicts that in 2025, U.S. brands will spend 37 billion U.S. dollars on creator advertising, a year-on-year increase of 26%. Video production is expanding from a small number of large-scale projects to the continuous and high-frequency content needs of in-house brand teams and individual creators.

Therefore, there is still a gap in the existing supply of the photography accessories market: film-grade robotic camera arms have complete spatial camera movement capabilities, but are difficult to enter small studios; camera sliders, pan-tilts and electric jibs are more portable, but have limited movement directions, and adding more degrees of freedom requires combining multiple pieces of equipment.

For creators, this is not a simple issue of equipment parameters. Shooting a product advertisement, character interview or desktop creation often requires repeated adjustments between composition, focal length, camera position and movement trajectory; when the team size shrinks and the content update frequency increases, these tasks that were originally completed by photographers, robotic arm engineers and multiple sets of equipment have begun to become the bottleneck of creation efficiency.

What the startup Yueqian Innovation targets is the layer of unmet demand between large film robotic arms and lightweight shooting accessories: in a limited space, let creators obtain more free, stable and reproducible camera movement capabilities at a deployment cost close to that of personal devices.

When Zeng Cheng, founder and CEO of Yueqian Innovation, first saw large equipment on a film set, the first thing he noticed was this threshold.

"(The motorized camera arm) costs tens of thousands of yuan a day to rent, and two engineers are required to be on site for programming. The equipment needs to be booked in advance, pre-programmed before shooting, and if the director changes a requirement on site, it may take several more hours. It is low in efficiency and expensive," Zeng Cheng told Hard Krypton.

The Yueqian Innovation team shifted its target to the space between large robotic arms and small photography accessories, hoping to retain the 6-degree-of-freedom camera movement capability, allow content creators to deploy independently, and obtain a better creation experience at the same time.

In terms of product exploration direction, as it is a brand-new product, Yueqian Innovation has also gone through many twists and turns. Initially, the team chose to scale down the general-purpose 6-axis robotic arm proportionally, and successively produced prototypes weighing about 70kg and 40kg.

"At that time, the idea was very straightforward, just make the motors, reducers and materials smaller," said Zeng Cheng. But 40kg is still not easy for one person to carry; general-purpose robotic arms need to take into account different tasks such as grasping and welding, and if the original structure is followed, it is difficult to meet the requirements of weight, stability and shooting trajectory at the same time.

After that, Yueqian Innovation made new trade-offs in product R&D. The camera needs to change its position and orientation in space, so the six degrees of freedom cannot be easily deleted; but unlike industrial robotic arms that repeatedly grasp objects, after the camera is installed, the load during shooting is relatively fixed.

Based on this feature, Yueqian Innovation uses a mechanical structure to pre-balance the camera and the arm body, so that the motor is mainly responsible for generating motion instead of continuously lifting the load. This design can reduce the torque originally required to drive the joint from 100N·m to less than 10N·m, and also reduce the vibration and backlash caused by high-reduction-ratio transmission.

In terms of motion structure, Cilin X uses the first three degrees of freedom to control the camera position, and the last three degrees of freedom to control the lens attitude. Yueqian Innovation hopes to reduce the singularity problem of the traditional 6-axis configuration during shooting through the "3+3" configuration and a special motion control scheme.

Industrial robotic arms emphasize extremely high repeat positioning accuracy, while motorized camera arms pay more attention to whether the movement process can be continuous and smooth. Facing actual shooting needs, Yueqian Innovation's technical priority is to achieve a better balance between accuracy, motion stability and overall lightweight of the equipment.

Zeng Cheng regards Cilin X as a photography robot, not just a robotic arm that moves automatically: the vision system perceives the subject, the algorithm plans the trajectory, and then the robotic arm completes the shooting. In his vision, the photography robot first takes over the work of "carrying the camera", freeing creators from the physical labor of moving and lifting the camera, and refocusing their attention on composition, narration and creativity.

"We hope users can grow from camera operators to cinematographers and directors, and the robot will undertake the execution tasks," Zeng Cheng told Hard Krypton.

Therefore, the target users of Yueqian Innovation's first-generation product are professional users who already understand composition and camera movement. The simplest operation process is that users directly drag the robotic arm to set key positions, the algorithm is responsible for connecting and smoothing the trajectory, and the vision system is responsible for perceiving spatial relationships and tracking the shooting subject.

In the longer term, Yueqian Innovation hopes to accumulate data from professional users' composition, trajectories and camera parameters to form a visual expression model. At that time, the photography robot will not only execute shots, but also participate in storyboarding, shooting and editing, and gradually learn the user's expression preferences.

In the future, Yueqian Innovation plans smaller products for ordinary users, hoping to allow people without photography training to "record life with cinematic language".

CEO Dialogue

Hard Krypton: Generative AI has lowered the threshold of video production, will it affect the demand for motorized camera arms?

Zeng Cheng: Generation and real shooting are complementary to each other. AI is good at generating things that do not exist in the world, while the essence of shooting is recording. Advertisements can use AI to generate images, but for high-unit-price products such as mobile phones and cameras, consumers have a longer decision-making chain, during which they will watch reviews, look for real information, and build trust. Generative AI can add creative shots to real-shot videos, but the real appearance and usage experience of products still need to be recorded.

Creators will continuously pursue higher-quality material output for scarce attention. In the future, AI generation and high-quality real shooting will both be choices in creators' "arsenal of tools". We will also embed AI capabilities into our products at workflow nodes, all in all to better serve creators' expression.

Hard Krypton: Won't the user group of content creators be too niche? If companies such as DJI and Insta360 enter the market later, how will Yueqian respond?

Zeng Cheng: This group of users has a clear commercial closed loop, and the equipment is a tool for them to produce content and earn income, so their usage frequency and willingness to pay are more clear. We will start with professional users first, and then extend the capabilities to ordinary users.

The entry of giants further proves that this business has the potential to grow large. What Yueqian needs to consider is to survive in this process, and accumulate products, user understanding and creation data.