Recently, VISIONNAV ROBOTICS announced $50 million in C round funding has been completed, jointly invested by Bytedance, Shunwei Capital (Xiaomi), CICC (China Unicom), IDG Capital, Lenovo Ventures and Eastern bell Capital
VisionNav was founded in 2016, committed to the development of industrial vehicles with L4 driverless technology, providing flexible unmanned logistics solution with driverless industrial vehicles as the core. From 2019 to 2021, VisionNav's performance has increased nearly 10 times. Compared with 2020, the turnover in 2021 has increase by 300%, the amount of average order and repeated purchase orders also both increased by nearly 300%. The deep- water landing scene of focus industries has achieved large-scale repetitive procurement.
VisionNav Driverless Industrial Vehicles
This round of funding will be mainly used to increase product scenario development in deep-water scenarios, standardize delivery and layout global scale applications:
1) Continue to develop new products for deep-water scenarios such as heavy-load counterbalanced AGF for both indoors& outdoors, VNA AGF etc., to realize large-scale application of truck loading& unloading, high access and multi-category cage stacking.
2) Expand the product team. Accelerate product delivery and project landing. And achieve standardized delivery in deep-water scenarios;
3) Layout global business. Promote markets in East Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia, and Europe, and expand operational support networks;
4) Cooperate with superior suppliers and partners to promote the development of driverless forklift industry.
The spot of driverless industrial vehicles is that the key capabilities of the product cannot fully meet the requirements of customers, including: 1) Comparable peak efficiency of manual operation; 2) High-precision operation; 3) Adaptability to various complex scenes. Recent years, as more and more technology companies enter the industrial unmanned vehicle industry, although the types and functions of products have been enriched, the progress of key capabilities has been slow. In the view of Luyang Li, CEO of VISIONNAV, improving the "flexibility" of driverless industrial vehicles is the key to change this status quo.
In 2021, as VisionNav launches AGF products based on self-developed “3D laser + vision” perception and positioning technology, multi-axis real-time motion planning technology and high-precision visual servo control technology. The "flexibility" has been greatly improved in complex scene large-scale landing. Truck loading& unloading, high access and multi-category cage stacking are also included.
At present, VisionNav has delivered nearly 150 projects, covering various difficult scenarios in many industries. It is reported that VisionNav is one of the enterprises with the widest, most and largest-scale projects of driverless forklift industry in China.
There are more than 200 members in VisionNav, of which more than 70% are R&D personnel. The core team brings together more than 20 PhD and masters from the University of Tokyo, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Zhejiang University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Harbin Institute of Technology and other famous universities at home and abroad. Members of management team are from the world's top technology such as the Ministry of International Trade and Industry of Japan, Qualcomm, Huawei, DJI, and Emerson.
