Yuguang has completed its second fund raising activity in 2019, to bankroll its R&D and mass production of micro-nano optical sensing system.
Beijing Yuguang Science and Technology Development company (驭光科技) has completed series B+ round of financing, raised CNY 100 million led by China Merchants Venture (招商局创投).
Founded in 2016, Yuguang is devoted to the design, manufacture and applications of advanced diffractive optics and micro nano optics, and provide complete diffractive optical solutions for customers. It provides manufacturers long-distance, high-precision and eye-safety three dimension sensing system.
Core technology is its algorithm which solve the pain points of optical applications; accurate optical model, and simulate the scene. Combining with its manufacturing precision (minimum up to 10 nm), its solutions are widely applied to downstream practices such as smartphone manufacturing, security, payment.
It is its second time this year that has attracted capital injection. In January it has secured series B round of funding in the similar size with the latest one. Before this year's two financing, it completed the Angel round of financing led by ZhenFund and Lengend Star in 2016; Series A was led by Shunwei Capital and Baidu Venture Capital in 2017. At present, the main customers of Yuguang are mobile phone manufacturers such as Huawei.
Optical is in the upstream of the whole machine vision industry chain. Robot Industry Association (RIA) Automation Vision Branch defines machine vision as automatically receiving and processing an image of a real object through optical devices and non-contact sensors to obtain the required information or devices used to control the motion of the robot.
In simple words, machine vision is to measure and evaluate with machine instead of human eyes, bring automation and flexible production to enterprises. Through the development of AI, machine vision has been a fundamental sub-sector and the premise of robot automation. At present, the market share of machine vision in the field of AI can reach more than 30%. Brighter, well-distributed and stable light source will improve the quality of machine vision products, so the advanced optical solutions has playing an important role in the whole system.
China's machine vision industry is developing rapidly, and it is one of the most active areas in the world. The market size has exceeded CNY 10 billion in 2018. With the improvement of industry technology and the wider application of product, it is estimated that the market size will reach CNY 12.5 billion at the end of 2019.
According to its CEO Dr. Tian Kehan (田克汉), after this round of financing, Yuguang will continue to expand its leading edge in the field of optical precision processing and strengthen its investment in system integration, promote the application and mass production of core micro-nano optics in various directions, such as three-dimensional sensing of mobile phones, off-screen optical systems, and promote other fields of micro-nano optics such as AR/VR, advanced lighting, new display, etc. The application and mass production of micro-nano optical sensor system will be strengthened in the fields of consumer electronics, security monitoring, and vehicle-mounted systems, and the R&D and technical barriers in the field of optical chips and sensor systems will be continuously strengthened.