EqualOcean has been informed that Sophon (Chinese: 广东智子) has recently completed tens of millions of CNY in Series A financing.
Founded in 2016, Sophon is a national high-tech company whose business integrates R&D, production, service and sales, and is able to provide customized one-stop solutions for material handling.
Material handling, as an important part of process-based industrial automated production lines, previously relied on a high degree of manual labor, and in recent years has been gradually replaced by automated production lines, and material automation is becoming a general trend. Wan Wei, co-founder and deputy general manager of Sophon, said that new energy-driven process improvement is very strict process requirements, and material automation handling systems can be used for formula Strict management, better guarantee the consistency and stability of the material batch, improve product quality, and therefore has been more widely used.
According to estimates, 2023-2025, only the new energy industry in the powder-related material automation equipment market demands more than tens of billions of dollars. The process industry in the powder-related materials automation equipment market demands hundreds of billions of dollars. At present, China's process industry development is in the stage of transition from manual and semi-automatic to full automation, the penetration rate of fully automated systems is relatively low, and this market is basically held by GEA, Bühler Group and other overseas giants, the localization rate is less than 10%, there is a vast space for development and a huge opportunity for localization substitution.
Sophon has achieved rapid expansion in recent years due to the booming development of the new energy industry; Sophon's revenue scale in 2022 has exceeded 100 million yuan, and as of July 31, the total amount of new orders for the company in 2023 has reached hundreds of millions of yuan.
At present, Sophon has entered the supplier system of CATL (Chinese: 宁德时代), Putailai (Chinese: 璞泰来), Hithium Energy (Chinese: 海辰新能源), Brunp (Chinese: 邦普循环) and other first-tier battery and material enterprises. At the same time, its solutions have rapidly landed in the food and fine chemical industries, Uni-President (Chinese: 统一), McQuay (Chinese: 麦克维尔), Delian Group (Chinese: 德联集团), and so on, are Sophon's important partners.
Founder and CEO of Sophon, Mr. Zheng Chunyang, said that in this regard, the company would continue to plow into the field of material handling, expand the head of food and medicine, new materials, new energy, fine chemicals and other industries, head of the customer, and in response to the needs of industry segments, the development of inevitable homogenization system, co-precipitation method of preparation processes and equipment, fully automated vapor deposition manufacturing system CVD, powder atomic deposition coating system, PALD and other advanced manufacturing processes and equipment. PALD and other advanced manufacturing processes, systems, and equipment, for customers to output a complete set of automated intelligent solutions. After the new round of financing, the company will also accelerate the layout of overseas business and is committed to becoming the world's leading integrated solution provider for the process industry.
Sophon's current round of financing was invested by SupreMind Capital (Chinese: 六脉资本), and the funds will be mainly used for downstream customer development and new product and technology development, with Yunshu Capital (Chinese: 云舒资本) acting as the exclusive financial advisor.