First Automation Raises CNY 30 Mn in Seed Funding for Product R&D

Founded in 2022, the founding team of First Automation aims to develop China's first self-controllable high-end general-purpose CNC system, and fully cover the entire life cycle of the CNC system from research and development to sales.

According to the data, the global CNC system market size exceeds CNY 50 billion, of which the Chinese CNC system market size fluctuates between CNY 9 billion and CNY 16 billion. China's CNC system market mainly focuses on the low-end market, mainly focusing on the delivery of customized projects. However, this customization mode can not meet the functional and versatility requirements of mid-to-high-end machine tools. In addition, the accumulation of China's numerical control technology has not yet become systematic, resulting in slow progress in impacting the high-end market.

Due to this, the development idea of First Automation is: based on the world-class R&D experience of the founding team, reconstructs the underlying structure of the CNC system, and truly realizes the comprehensive domestic independent control of high-end general-purpose CNC products. Specifically, it means: In terms of infrastructure, completely decouple the functional modules of the internal control mechanism and external related hardware to make it suitable for different types of CNC machine tools and maintain the versatility and competitiveness of products; in terms of data architecture, completely decouple real-time, quasi-real-time, and non-real-time processing data to achieve real-time performance and the performance of core CNC functions, ensuring control accuracy and speed to catch up with imported products; in terms of processing modules, optimize the design to meet the real-time and operability requirements of different functions, taking into account the potential for future scalability and the improvement of system stability.

In addition to First Automation, several companies are competing in the numerical control system market. Representative companies in China include FEELER (友佳), GSK (广州数控), and Huazhong Numerical Control (华中数控); internationally, FANUC and MAZAK in Japan, Haas in the United States, Heidenhain in Germany, Fagor in Spain, and NUM in France are quite powerful.

This round of financing for First Automation was jointly led by Zhengxuan Investment (正轩投资) and Glory Ventures (耀途资本), and Leap Capital (跃为资本) acted as the exclusive financial advisor. This round of financing will be mainly used for product research and development.