GGII data shows that from 2013 to 2023, the compound growth rate of industrial robot sales in the Chinese market will exceed 24%, and the compound growth rate of domestic industrial robot sales will exceed 32%. The share of domestic production will increase from 24% in 2013 to nearly 50% in 2023.
On the surface, this is the "first decade", and in it, I know that "big waves wash sand".
Zhang Zhaohui, who led Xi'an Youai Zhihe Robot Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Youai Zhihe") from the 50,000 yuan bonus in the 2017 "Entrepreneurship Greater Xi'an" entrepreneurship competition to the financing of more than 500 million yuan, said that there is a moment every year when "life hangs by a thread".
Fortunately, they are not only witnesses of the "big waves and sands", but also rare growers among them. In the past 7 years, Youai Zhihe has been ranked in the first echelon of industrial mobile robots, a national "specialized, special and new" little giant, and one of the "20 most competitive robot companies in the world".
On May 16, 2017, Youai Zhihe was established. This year is also known as the first year of the outbreak of China's industrial robot industry. When he went to the industrial and commercial bureau to register, the founder Zhang Chaohui added a coat - it was still spring in Xi'an at that time, and it was a little cold.
Looking for nails and stones pierced in tires and making tire inspection robots for Michelin is the first order that Youai Zhihe "encountered" at the roadshow of Xi'an Jiaotong University. Out of order demand and other considerations, Zhang Zhaohui decisively went south to "break" into Shenzhen, rented 8 workstations in Huaqiangbei and started working.
The three co-founders of Youai Zhihe, Xu Jin, director of the industrial logistics division, Zhao Wanqiu, product director, and Bian Xu, chief technology officer, have all sat in the "lattice file" of Huaqiangbei, and Zhang Zhaohui is under the same teacher and doctoral supervisor Mei Xuesong of Xi'an Jiaotong University.
Pictured: Chaohui on the right in the first row and Meicedar in the third right in the second row.
In fact, as early as 2016, Zhang Zhaohui talked to Mei Xuesong about the idea of starting a business, but he was held back and said to wait a little longer, "The teacher felt that the first was too young at that time, and the second was that the team's robot products were still in the demo stage, and they could be precipitated at the technical level." By 2017, they chatted again, and Mei Xuesong recognized it, but she was still worried that this group of young people would hit their "heads and bleed". At this time, Dr. Zhang Zhaohui was in his second year and 25 years old.
When he left school to start a business, he had completed the courses and credits at the doctoral level, and the middle stage of the doctoral ** topic had also been completed, and only the end was left. Zhang Chaohui, who is in a state of "suspension", has no anxiety about graduation, and even enjoys this state a little - after all, if you go to eat Haidilao after 10 o'clock in the evening, you can get a 20% discount.
In 2020, Zhang Zhaohui was on the Forbes China 30 Under 30 Elite List. His team remains "young" like him, and the relevant staff of Youai Zhihe told Financial Lollipop that the team is currently about 400 people, with an average age of about 29 years old.
Looking back, in the first year of the development of Youai Zhihe, it was indeed as Mei Xuesong expected, "people are embarrassed". Zhang Zhaohui said that he is always very nervous about sending positioning to customers, and he will worry that the other party will think that this is a stall. It was also in Huaqiangbei that they spent the most embarrassing period: in 2018, the founding team only received 2,000 yuan per person per month for about a year, barely enough to eat pork knuckle rice in Shenzhen.
In the process of crawling and rolling, they gradually explored the development path in addition to their own characteristics: one pedestal, two scenes. That is, based on the software and hardware of mobile robots, with the two scenarios of "industrial logistics" and "inspection and operation and maintenance", it takes root in the industry to help the intelligent upgrading of the industry. They firmly believe that it is the general trend for mobile robots to help industrial upgrading, and they must do "difficult but correct things".
At the 3rd anniversary celebration of Youai Zhihe, Zhang Zhaohui shouted: "We must have such a vision, look at the world, our mobile robots can PK with everyone, let them see, it turns out that China still has innovation (innovation)."
Picture: Stills from the "Wandering Earth 2" Youai Zhihe robot.
By 2021, the signal of "spring" is really coming: orders began to "jump" from single digits to 100 units, walked out of the business incubation building in Huaqiangbei, moved into the Golden Apple Innovation Park in Longgang District, Shenzhen, and had more than 10,000 R&D centers and production centers across the country.
Combined with the industry background, it has not been long for autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) to truly enter the industrial manufacturing market. For example, most of the current "star companies" such as Hikrobot, Jizhijia, and Jiazhi Technology landed around 2015. But in a short period of time, it was enough to "be treacherous". Among them, there are force majeure such as the epidemic and the capital winter, as well as the increasingly volatile industry ecology, and it is becoming more and more difficult to win by telling stories and so-called technical gimmicks with bells and whistles. Zhang Zhaohui said that the current two years are a critical time for reshuffling.
Youai Zhihe entered the market a little later, but it has gradually gained a foothold and entered a period of vigorous growth.
Its 2023 report card has just been "released": its performance increased by 100%+ year-on-year, its international business increased by 230%+, flagship product shipments accounted for more than 88%, and customer repurchase orders accounted for 75%.
At present, Youai Zhihe has 8 series of robot core products, covering two major sectors of intelligent inspection and industrial logistics, three major industries of semiconductors, new energy and energy, and has accumulated many high-quality partners such as TSMC, SMIC, Luxshare Precision, ASM, CRRC, Fast, China Huaneng, AVIC, COMAC, Hitachi and so on.
According to data from research institutions, on the list of "Top 5 Composite Robot Shipments in the Chinese Market in 2022", Youai Zhihe ranked first and became one of the "20 most competitive robot companies in the world".
In terms of quantity, the L series of general-purpose mobile jacking robots, which can realize the automatic transfer of material racks between the production warehouse and the production line, is the most sold, and is the "greatest common divisor product", and the demand is also the highest.
From a technical point of view, the O series of composite mobile robots has the highest technical threshold. This is a composite mobile robot that provides production line logistics automation for the semiconductor manufacturing industry, which can realize the closed-loop of material flow and data flow in the whole chain of semiconductor production. "The ROI of the O series is in three years, and the L series is in one to one and a half years".
Figure: Youai Zhihe O series robots.
Zhang Zhaohui believes that robots are not production tools in nature, but productivity. For example, after the introduction of two Youai Zhihe OW12 wafer handling robots in the production workshop of high-voltage IGBT chips and medium and low-voltage modules of a leading global rail transit equipment company, the production capacity was increased by 150%.
To understand this industry from the logic of "robots are productivity", we will find that "collaboration" is the key to building the production relationship between robots and application scenarios. For example, in the application of inspection and operation and maintenance scenarios, how to make the robot no longer a single point, but a matrix composed of production relations?
Some people in the industry once believed that the robotic arm and chassis manufacturers are constantly going deeper into the composite machine robot, but in Zhang Zhaohui's view, the two parties are now the overall "retreat" trend, because simply from the robotic arm or chassis to integrate the composite form, there will be large-scale application problems in the process of commercial landing, the key is the scheduling system, that is, the collaborative robot cluster co-field operation, which is what mobile robot manufacturers are good at. And this is one of the advantages of YouiFleet: at present, its software system YouiFleet can support more than 200,000 square meters of map recording, and realize the cluster scheduling of 1,000 mobile robots in the same scene.
The chassis, machine vision, sensors and upper-layer software systems of Youai Zhihe mobile robots are all self-developed by the company. We hope to realize the integrated whole plant planning of 'mobile robot + business software system'. Zhang Zhaohui also told Financial Lollipop that more than 50% of the 400 employees of Youai Zhihe are R&D personnel, and will continue to strengthen its R&D investment in software systems. Xi'an, as the main body of Youai Zhihe, will continue to increase its investment in R&D projects and business.
Zhang Zhaohui said that in Huaqiangbei, its own rapid iteration of temperament is deeply consistent with the early stage of Youai Zhihe. When the development reaches a certain scale, it is hoped that with the help of Xi'an's rich educational resources, it will attract more outstanding young talents in the development process. At present, there are forty or fifty people in the Xi'an team, although it is a "miniature team", but the quality is very high, not only to undertake a lot of research topics, but also to lay a good downstream foundation, such as Shaanxi Coal, Shaanxi State Grid, Ankang Hydropower, Fast and other customers. At the same time, there are very few cities in China that can engage in the robot industry, and Xi'an must be counted as one.
It is worth mentioning that Youai Zhihe not only has its own "Shaanxi gene", but also has seventy or eighty people in the current team who are Shaanxi babies, "Even the people who usually have company dinners are all six years of Xifeng." Zhang Chaohui smiled.
Since September 2017, Youai Zhihe has raised 7 rounds of financing, and the overall performance has several distinctive features:
First, the "Tsinghua Department" has made frequent moves. For example, Fangguang Capital, Common Investment, Innova Angel, Songhe Capital, and Zhenge**.
Second, the overall "repurchase rate" of investors is very high: HAX participated in the investment 5 times, Common Investment, Haina Asia, and Lanchi Venture Capital 3 times, and SoftBank Asia, Zheng**, and Xi'an Jiaotong**6 participated in the investment 2 times.
Among them, Xi'an Jiaotong is the first "bet" investment institution, its executive director Ke Hongbin believes that the entrepreneurial spirit and ability to resist pressure are very strong, the team configuration is scientifically attractive, the track prospect is wide and the space is large, and the product chassis technology is leading in the industry.
Financial Lollipop learned that the total financing amount of Youai Zhihe is currently more than 500 million yuan.
In July 2017, Youai Zhihe won the second prize of the team group in the "Entrepreneurship Greater Xi'an" Entrepreneurship Competition, with a bonus of 50,000 yuan, which is the "first money" earned by itself. It is worth mentioning that Oka Zhibo also won awards in this competition, Zhang Zhaohui and Zhu Jiannan (Western University of Technology), the founder of Oka Zhibo, although they are not from the same school, but they are very familiar, they were born in the same year, the same month and the same day.
From 50,000 yuan to more than 500 million yuan, the entrepreneurial capital of Youai Zhihe in the past seven years has become "thicker and thicker", and it has also gone wider and wider after wading through the "embarrassing road".
First, the product version has moved from rapid iteration to stability: relying on industrial logistics, inspection and operation and maintenance scenarios, Youai Zhihe has consolidated the algorithm base, built a mobile robot matrix suitable for subdivided scenarios on the basis of modular and configurable product architecture, equipped with business software systems, and provided intelligent upgrade services for enterprises through bottom-to-end solutions.
Zhang Chaohui believes that "a stable plan is more important than everything". The "repurchase rate" can also reflect the customer's satisfaction with the stability of the version to a certain extent. More than 75% of the orders in 2023 are from repeat customers.
Figure: ARIS-8848, the intelligent inspection robot of Youai Zhihe, climbed Mount Everest.
The second is to gradually enter the harvest season: the report card of 2023 has allowed Youai Zhihe to stabilize the competitive barriers in the "big wave gold rush" of the market. At the same time, in the context of peers beginning to roll out of the sea, Youai Zhihe has made steady progress in overseas markets and has a good foundation: its logo YouiBot (Youai Zhihe's English name, meaning "you, me, robot" harmonious symbiosis) has entered the mobile robot market in more than 30 countries and regions such as Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Germany.
Zhang Zhaohui said that at present, the proportion of overseas sales of Youai Zhihe is about 15%, and it is expected to increase to 30% in the next two years.
For the entire robot industry that does not yet have hematopoietic ability, the direction of capital is very important. In an environment where there are still many uncertainties in the macro environment, deterministic growth is a natural safety cushion for investment. What is certain is that after tempering and passing through the cycle, the certainty of Youai Zhihe is significantly enhanced linearly.
For Youai Zhihe, authenticity is very important.
Zhang Zhaohui often said to the team: "What we show to our customers is unfalsifiable." If you walk into his office, you'll find an oil painting of a series of products from Uai Zhihe behind his desk. He joked, saying that buying something else is not necessarily true, but this and the painting inside are all true. Including the robots that appeared in "The Wandering Earth 2", they have all been delivered in reality, such as the first offshore wind power intelligent safety "guard" in China.
It is also important to look at the gaze from afar. Up to now, the "highest point" crossed by Youai Zhihe is at 12:22 on May 4, 2022, when the intelligent inspection robot ARIS-8848 and the "Summit Mission 2022" Everest scientific expedition team successfully reached the summit of Mount Everest.
Of course, there will be higher "peaks".
Pictured: Zhang Zhaohui and Youai Zhihe robot family.
Postscript:
In 2016, Zhang Zhaohui, Bian Xu, Zhao Wanqiu and other brothers went to Shanghai to participate in the International Robot Exhibition CIROS, and the heart of entrepreneurship began to sprout. At this time, they are still spectators.
At the 2021 World Artificial Intelligence Conference, director Guo Fan discovered them and took the initiative to extend an "olive branch" to invite 16 robots to "specially invited" to participate in "The Wandering Earth 2", which caused people across the country to "watch".
Then to the 2023 IREX Japan Tokyo International Robot Exhibition, in addition to the main booth of Youai Zhihe, there are 6 first-class merchants who have exhibited their products, and everyone ridicules "Youai Zhihe as far as the eye can see". At this time, it was the phrase "let them see, it turns out that China still has innovate" echoing when they were young.
By May 16, 2024, it will be the 7th anniversary of the establishment of Youai Zhihe, and I don't know what kind of "prophecies", golden sentences and exciting new products will appear at this celebration. They are looking forward to the next spring, looking forward to "The Wandering Earth 3", and also looking forward to the arrival of the end of the industrial revolution.