Chinese company RobotPlusPlus has raised a Series C funding round to expand its working-at-height robotics operations and develop embodied AI applications for industrial environments.
The Beijing-based firm develops robots for hazardous maintenance work, with its hull derusting robots having been deployed at more than 100 shipyards and used on more than 10,000 cargo vessels, according to the company.
RobotPlusPlus says the robots can improve derusting efficiency by five to six times and reduce overall costs by 30% to 50% compared with manual methods.
The company operates in more than 18 countries and has customers and partners including NOSCO Shipyard, Drydocks World, ST Engineering Marine, Saudi Aramco and Vopak.
More than 60% of its workforce is engaged in R&D, with investment in R&D exceeding 20% of revenue for three consecutive years. Its robots have accumulated more than two million operating hours, providing operational data for the development of AI models for industrial environments.
The Series C round, which the company claims was worth “hundreds of millions of RMB”, was led by Qianggang Capital Fund, with participation from GIG Capital Group, Sealand Innovation and Juntong Capital. Existing investor Fosun RZ Capital also increased its stake.
“The true value of industrial robotics lies in real-world execution,” said Dr Hua-Yang Xu, Founder and CEO of RobotPlusPlus.
“Over ten years, we have built special-purpose robots that are genuinely deployable at scale, and this round lets us bring those solutions to more industrial sites around the world.”
