AGV (艾吉威机器人), a Suzhou-based mobile warehouse robot startup, has closed a Series B round of funding worth nearly 100 million yuan (US$13.92 million), backed solely by Xingsheng Touzi.
Xingsheng is a state venture capital arm of a state-affiliated investment group in Tianmen, a city in central China’s Hubei Province.
Proceeds from this round will be used to construct AGV’s smart factory in Tianmen, its R&D facility in the provincial capital Wuhan and also explore markets in southwestern China.
Representatives from AGV said construction of the smart factory is going ahead at full throttle.
Under the agreement, the two sides will work closely to achieve supply chain complementarity and cooperate in areas such as key AI innovation, industrial agglomeration and digital factory.
Founded in 2011, AGV is one of the nation’s first companies to adopt laser-assisted navigation and realize coordination of a fleet of unmanned forklifts.
In the past, automated guided vehicles (AGVs) need labels to guide them to navigate warehouse floors. Through laser beams, their in-facility navigation becomes much easier.
AGV’s solutions have been deployed to industries as diverse as tire, petrochemical, textile, automobile, food, 3C, mechanical manufacturing, non-ferrous metals, new energy, and logistics, with around 500 use cases accumulated already.
As the startup’s platform rapidly increases in size, capacity expansion is now the first order of business, said Liu Shengming, founder and president of AGV.
He said the company chose to set up a second production facility in Hubei, enticed by the province’s status as an economic powerhouse and a transportation hub with easy access to the rest of the country.
“As a leader in mobile handling robots, AGV has advantages in R&D, technology commercialization and market layout,” said Wei Mingbo, chairman of Xingsheng Touzi. “We believe the next-gen mobile robot technologies represented by AGV’s will definitely become a pace-setter in industrial robotics.”
