36 Krypton learned that the intelligent storage robot “Sophon Jump” recently announced the completion of two consecutive rounds of financing of tens of millions of yuan, supported by Yuyue Capital and Shanghai Zizhu National High-tech Zone. The funds will be mainly used for iterative product research and development, team expansion and further market development. Promotion.
“Sophon Jump” (Proton Robotics Inc) was established in 2018, its main business is to solve the logistics warehouse sceneSeeding and sorting of multiple orderswithReturn sortingDifficulties-toExtreme Cube™ Intelligent Sorting Robot SystemTo replace the inefficient and increasingly expensive manpower in the current logistics warehouse, it is understood that the company will complete product research and development in the second half of 2019, and achieve a leap from test orders, pilot orders to mass production application contract orders in 2020. Benchmark customers include OOCL Logistics, Zhuanzhuan, Five Crown Taobao clothing store 8090, a large duty-free shop in Hainan, etc., and have mature businesses in footwear and apparel, retail, cross-border e-commerce, live e-commerce, front-end warehouses, and pharmaceuticals. Case.
Extreme Cube™ Intelligent Sorting Robot System
Mr. Mo Xuming, the founder and CEO of Sophony, holds a master’s degree in robotics from the University of Pennsylvania. He told 36 krypton that, in addition to considering the cutting-edge and landability of technology, Sophony Jump focuses more on exploring the industries where robotics technology has the most broad application prospects. In the view of the company’s founding team, the digital and intelligent upgrading of warehousing and logistics is a sufficiently wide track without a ceiling.
In recent years, China’s online retail has continued to maintain rapid growth, which has directly driven the development of the express delivery industry. According to statistics from the State Post Bureau, the business volume of express service companies in 2019 was 63.52 billion, a year-on-year increase of 25.3%. At the same time, the logistics industry is facing increasing labor costs and difficulties in recruiting operators. The demand for intelligence in the logistics industry is also increasing. Cost reduction and efficiency increase have become an important task for logistics enterprise operation management. In this context, automated equipment solutions optimized for warehousing and logistics, such as AMR (autonomous mobile robots), handling and sorting robotic arms, and smart forklifts, have gradually penetrated into all corners of the logistics industry.
The entry point of Sophon’s transition is the blue ocean scene of multi-order sowing sorting and return sorting in warehousing logistics sorting, and the intelligent sorting robot system has been developed.Extreme Cube™“The entire system occupies an area of approximately 30 square meters and can achieve a sorting efficiency of up to 2500 items per hour; in addition,Extreme Cube™Can be adapted to 1All categories of goods below 0 kg,With high universality, the SKU coverage rate is close to 99%, and customers can recover costs within 18 months. It is suitable for e-commerce, retail, pharmaceutical distribution and other fields.
In terms of work flow, with a well-known second-hand trading platform[转转]As an example, after receiving a customer’s order, the warehouse’s WMS system immediately sends wave information, and the upstream workers responsible for collective picking will place the goods onExtreme Cube™At the entrance conveyor belt, the system is equipped with a fully automatic code scanning camera that can dynamically read the information of the goods, and the back-end WCS order system will allocate the goods to the designated sorting robot trolley in real time. The robot car moves under the real-time and accurate path planning of the multi-robot scheduling algorithm, and accurately places the goods into the bins on the shelves on both sides of the seeding wall. Each bin corresponds to an order. After the order is completed, the indicator light on the shelf lights up, and the downstream workers can then take the corresponding bins and enter the packaging and delivery link. If the goods are not put into the system in this wave, the system will identify them as abnormal parts. After receiving the goods, the robot car will spit out the abnormal parts from the spout port.
Extreme Cube™ application case
“In a high-load logistics warehouse, the intelligent warehouse sorting system must be fast and accurate.” Mo Xuming, CEO of Tomoko Jump, told 36Kr, “In addition, the cost of transformation is low, and the degree of flexibility is high, which can meet flexibility. The demand for capacity expansion and parallelism of man and machine is also a point that customers value very much.”
Different from the ground mobile robots such as AGV and AMR,[智子跃迁]The intelligent sorting robot system “Polycube™” is an intelligent sorting robot system based on three-dimensional mobile robot technology. This new type of robot has the ability to move XYZ three-axis autonomously at high speed in three-dimensional space. Combining the robot with the high-density multi-robot scheduling algorithm in the space, Jicube™ forms a comprehensive software and hardware solution for rapid sorting and flexible deployment.
It is understood that Exotec, a foreign warehousing robot company, is a practitioner of this technology direction. As of the end of 2020, Exotec has received a total of more than 100 million US dollars in financing and has landed in Fortune 500 companies such as Uniqlo and Dell.
In addition, the Sophony Transition Extreme Cube™ three-dimensional sorting system adopts a completely flexible modular design, which can be assembled freely according to the needs of users’ application scenarios. “Our three-dimensional sorting system is like’Lego bricks’, which can be assembled and assembled, increase or decrease the number of sorting robot carts, and tailor solutions for customers according to application scenarios to meet the sorting throughput required by customers.” Mo Xuming said, “Efficient and flexible control can be achieved to ensure that customers calmly respond to the peak of order growth during the ‘618’ and’Double Eleven’. The recent ‘618’ big promotion has happened. We have also received a lot of expansion orders and Repeat order.”
In terms of financing, Sophon has introduced a combination of equity financing and bond financing at a very early stage. “Sophon has achieved positive cash flow in the early stage of entrepreneurship and has run through the business model. How to use lower costs to leverage more This is something that the company’s management needs to consider more seriously and far beyond the capital itself.” Mo Xuming said.
In terms of the team, the founder and CEO Mr. Mo Xuming graduated from the Junior Class of Tianyi Middle School in Jiangsu Province, studied in the pilot class of Engineering Management of Shanghai Jiaotong University, and received the “Shen Nanpeng Alumni Scholarship” to study at Yale University. After completing his undergraduate studies one year in advance, he entered the University of Pennsylvania to study robotics. After graduation, he worked for a top robotics company in the United States, and as a member of the core R&D team, he built a seeding sorting-returning sorting robot for large-scale practical applications in industrial scenarios. After accumulating work experience and industry experience, Mo Xuming returned to China at the age of 24 and founded Sophon Jump.
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