Chinese AI startup Laiye announced to merge with UiBot, a startup developing Robotic Process Automation (RPA) system. The newborn called Laiye completed its Series B+ round of financing in a total of USD 35 million.
Robotic Process Automation. Photo: Credit to Pexels.
On June 27, Chinese AI startup Laiye (来也科技) announced to merge with UiBot (奥森科技), a startup developing Robotic Process Automation (RPA) system. The merged new company, still adopting "Laiye" as its official name, released its strategy called “RPA + AI” combining the advantages of the two original companies.
Meanwhile, Laiye – the newborn – completed its Series B+ round of financing in a total of USD 35 million, led by Cathay Capital and followed by Wu Capital and Lightspeed China Partners. This funding will be used to recruit RPA product managers and business development executives, as well as NLP, deep learning and reinforcement learning expertise. Before this funding, Laiye had completed three rounds of financing in a total of USD 15 million invested by Pengpai Capital, Sequoia Capital China, Zhen Fund, Microsoft, Lightspeed China Partners, and Wu Capital.
Established by several machine learning scientists from Lvy League in 2015, Laiye focuses on speech interactive system based on deep learning, reinforcement learning, and natural language processing (NLP). Its products have been adopted in multiple scenarios, including smart home, retail, mother&baby, tourism, education, communication, automobile, finance, and so on.
Founded in 2017, UiBot develops customized RPA solutions to enterprise clients. The founders and core members of UiBot have over-18-year experience in the field of RPA. Within a half of the year, after its products were launched, they have been downloaded for around 300 thousand times, obtained over 30 thousand users and more than 6,000 companies registered, according to Li Wei (李玮), co-CEO and president of Laiye.
RPA has become one of the hot investment targets in recent years, which is to use intelligent and automatic software to manipulate some works by manual operation in the past. AI is exactly used to realize automation. With the support of RPA +AI, enterprises are capable of raising efficiency, reducing cost and avoiding mistakes from the human.