Chinese tech media outlet 36kr reported today that TetraBot (天创机器人), a mobile inspection robot developer, had secured over 100 million yuan (US$13.67 million) from a Series C round of financing.
The round was led by Guangzhou Industrial Investment Holding Group and a corporate venture capital arm of Haier Group, with participation from Zhi Bo Investment.
cnrobopedia reported earlier that the Nanjing-based firm raised close to 100 million yuan from a Series B+ funding round in March.
The fresh funding will add to TetraBot’s coffers as the firm goes into overdrive to innovate its product portfolio, expand overseas, enlarge its market share, and build an ecosystem with partners from the field of industrial maintenance.
TetraBot specializes in the manufacturing of primarily smart wheeled and rail-guided robots to automate processes such as patrol, inspection, surveillance and disaster prevention in the industrial and energy sectors.
Currently, its products can be found in industries such as electricity, petrochemical, metal smelting, mining and public utility services.
As industrial companies and energy suppliers digitalize their operations, they face increasing limitations in efficiency, cost and industrial know-how.
Amid the digital shifts of these sectors, TetraBot first carved out its niche in the energy segment, supplying autonomous robots for inspection purposes.
The large fleet of robots were put to test in a complex working environment, where they acquired knowledge about inspection and maintenance in both breadth and depth.
The large amount of operational data then fed into these robots to realize scale-ups and iterations.
Over the past few years, TetraBot has extended its business presence across a variety of industries, serving 600 clients and logging more than 100 million km in the distance covered by its robots.
The company expected a surge of more than 50% in its 2023 revenue, with a repeat purchase rate of over 30%.
According to Liu Shuang, president of TetraBot, by deploying mobile robots to undertake inspection tasks, the company paved the way for an overhaul of how things are done in this field.
Robots, with their capabilities like dynamic perception, prediction and prewarning, self-driven decision-making and targeted maintenance, are supplanting human inspectors in ever-larger numbers.
As a result, labor intensity and personal safety hazards are now coming down drastically, said Liu.
Besides, TetraBot claims that its mode of robot-powered inspection comes with a predictive model enabling clients to evade risks, bolster efficiency and achieve cost reduction.
Liu added that smart, robot-led unmanned inspection is now gaining traction in various industries since the second half of 2020 and the trend is here to stay.
