With social changes in China and the drive to meet the labor force' changing needs, the robotics field is destined to be the future of the industry. Startups like ORIGITECH are growing rapidly.
A worker holding a tool. Image credit: Christopher Burns/Unsplash
Hangzhou-based robotics company ORIGITECH (崧智智能) announced the completion of the Series A financing round of tens of million yuan, which was led by ByteDance and followed by Lenovo Capital. The accurate number of the new financing rounds was not disclosed.
The company was founded in 2017 and has a team of overseas returnees, most of whom have studied and worked in the engineering field. The Co-founder and CEO Ding Hao (丁昊) studied and worked in Germany for over 14 years. His service as the Principal Scientist at ABB Corporate Research proves his expertise in robotics. ORIGITECH intends to provide robotics solutions for the industrial world.
In previous talks with insiders from investment companies, robotics firms and manufacturing units, it became clear to EqualOcean that automation levels are polarized among industries. The highest automation level can be found in the auto and mining industry, where minimal manual human involvement and high digitalization is prevalent in both management and manufacturing/processing. But for mechanics manufacturing, the industrialization process is yet to be called digitalized – manual work counts the most, with scattered distribution. Not only because of the variety of product types are countless, but also the manufacturers are hard to standardize because of the diversity of equipment.
ORIGITECH intends to provide solutions to collaborate with both workers and machines so to improve efficiency in the daily operation. Robotics in industrial use bring optimization in production. However, collaboration between workers and machines in robotics installation is crucial. In China, the occupational education cannot meet the talent demand in the industrial side, since the new generation is facing more occupational opportunities while manufacturing is less favorable due to the stereotype – dirty factories and heavy labor, even though the situation has been changing for decades.
With weathering population dividends as China becomes an aging society, and with a shrinking manufacturing worker pool since 2017, the secondary industry requires a better approach to fill the labor force shortage. Nevertheless, the cooling-off investment in the manufacturing sector echoes the decelerating economic growth in China. Whether if ByteDance's presence brings more attention to this sector, robotics is the trend for the industry. With abundant practical experience from the leading enterprises, employing front-end technology and managerial experience to adapt to China's secondary industry units will be the key to success for ORIGITECH's founding team.