J-Elephant completes $15m rounds of fundraising
Beijing J-Elephant Technology Co Ltd, an forklift autonomous mobile robot manufacturer, announced on Wednesday it has raised nearly 100 million yuan ($15 million) in its angel and pre-A rounds of fundraising.
The angel round was jointly invested in by Sequoia Capital China, Legend Star and Sinovation Ventures. The pre-A round attracted other investors, including Linear Capital and Challenjers Venture.
According to Lyu Feng, CEO of J-Elephant Technology, compared with traditional human forklifts and forklift automated guided vehicles, the company's forklift AMRs are more flexible and safe.
"Our latest product has no blind areas, while manual forklifts and forklift AGVs have a blind area of around 25 and 40 percent respectively. It can also be integrated with existing automation tools effectively, which will help reduce deployment costs for clients," he said.
According to the company, the new round of funds will be used for research and development, talent recruitment, mass production capacity building and business expansion.
Kai-Fu Lee, chairman and CEO of Sinovation Ventures, said: "Logistics transportation not only affects people's daily life, but also plays an indispensable role in industrial automation. China is pushing the world toward intelligent manufacturing, and the next generation of intelligent logistics will be a core resource for China to drive domestic economic circulation and the next global industrial revolution."
As an incubating project of Sinovation Ventures' artificial intelligence laboratory, J-Elephant Technology has proved its latest forklift AMR has rich commercialization scenarios and broad market potential, as its products have been adopted by many of the world's top 500 companies, said Ren Bobing, executive director of Sinovation Ventures.