Vision Intelligence, an AI smart hardware company, has completed a pre-A round of financing worth tens of millions of yuan, according to EqualOcean.
Since Apple launched the Airpods in 2016, the market size of TWS headphones has grown by leaps and bounds. According to Counterpoint data, global TWS headphones shipments were only 9.18 million units in 2016, and reached 233 million units in 2020, with a CAGR as high as 124% from 2016 to 2020; in 2021, TWS headphones shipments were 299.6 million units, up 29% year on year, the market growth rate is starting to slow down, and the wireless headphones market is gradually entering the stock competition The wireless headphones market is gradually entering the stock competition stage.
Vision Intelligence's CEO Ma Xiao believes that after entering the highly competitive Red Sea market, the TWS headset market will be dominated by two types of enterprises: one is the mobile phone manufacturers continue to launch their own brand of TWS headset; the other is specialized in vertical market TWS headset vendors to fill the market vacancies with differentiated products. Vision Intelligence is targeting the office scenario by launching iFLYBUDS Pro, iFLYBUDS Air, iFLYBUDS Nano+ and other conference and office headphones.
Financial professionals are one of Vision Intelligence's main customer groups, with a large number of meetings that need to be recorded every day. Users travel a lot and it is not convenient to record in scenarios such as airports or high-speed trains. With the iFLYBUDS series, users can quickly start recording during video conferences or phone calls.
On the issue of how to combine AI and headset products, Ma Xiao believes that it is not effective to directly connect chatbots or big models to the headset, and users will feel that the AI function is relatively chicken ribs due to the more general feedback, which is difficult to solve the difficult needs of office scenarios. Through the user's independent operation of the feedback model effect, the formation of self-training data, automatic model iteration, no longer need manual intervention, so that the accuracy of the vertical model is getting higher and higher, the user's viscosity also increased, and then faster accumulated to more vertical areas of data samples to further optimize the model. And with the addition of the new feature AI assistant, vision intelligence can more accurately identify the content of meetings in specific areas such as finance.
Through several years of technology accumulation, iFLYBUDS Pro can now last up to 50 hours, noise reduction depth of 45dB, adding flash memory chip, the headset comes with 4 hours of call recording storage space, while the sound quality has also been greatly improved.
In terms of sales channels, Vision Intelligence has been shopped to T-mall, Douyin E-commerce, Jingdong and other platforms, especially in Douyin platform to achieve unexpected success. Ma Xiao said, only during the 618 period, Vision Intelligence can do 2 million transactions in a day. Vision Intelligence has begun to layout offline and overseas channels in the second half of this year, and will further improve the sales layout.
This round of financing is led by Future X Capital (Chinese: 天际资本), and the proceeds will be used for a variety of purposes, including new product development and market expansion.