Meituan quietly enters the game, and major manufacturers gather on the robotics track

On October 26, Meituan invested in Beijing Galaxy General Robot Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Galaxy General) through its subsidiaries to expand its presence in the field of robotics.

This is not the first time Meituan has gotten involved in the robot industry. Wang Xing said many years ago that robots are Meituan’s most important “vertical investment area.” Meituan is not the only major company betting on the robotics industry. Baidu, Tencent, Alibaba, Xiaomi, and ByteDance have already gathered here, and each one is spending more generously than the other. According to statistics from China Robot Network, the domestic robot industry completed a total of 63 financings in the first half of this year, with the publicly disclosed financing amount being approximately 5-6 billion yuan.

However, behind the enthusiasm of capital, the profitability of the robotics industry is still questioned by many parties. There are also cases of star unicorns that have emerged in recent years.

The commercial prospects have not been tested, and the big manufacturers are obviously not here for money. Waving banknotes and crowding into the robot track, what are the Meituans trying to do?

(Image from Pexels)

A new prey who is only five months old has become the target of Meituan

Meituan’s actions this time are very low-key, mainly because they are not familiar with the company Galaxy General

According to public information, Galaxy General was established in May this year and mainly operates in the fields of intelligent robot research and development, industrial robot manufacturing, consumer service robot manufacturing and battery manufacturing. Although it has only been established for a short period of time, Galaxy General has not yet launched its own products, but the company's development plan has been clear: focusing on retail scenarios such as pharmacies and supermarkets, and committed to the development of dual-arm wheeled bionic robots. The first batch of products is expected to be released in 2024 , and plans to start mass production in 2026

There is no doubt about the love of capital for this start-up. Angel round financing was completed long before Meituan took a stake, including Lanchi Ventures, Source Code Capital, Matrix Ventures, iFlytek, and SenseTime. participate. It has been less than half a year since its establishment, and it has won the favor of so many VCs and major manufacturers without any products. In addition to benefiting from the overall popularity of the robotics track, the gold content of the start-up team is also very important.

After browsing the resume, we can find that the founding team of Galaxy General are all academic excellence and technical experts: founder Wang He has a doctorate from Stanford University, and has served as an assistant professor at the Frontier Computing Research Center of Peking University and an incarnation of Zhiyuan Research Institute. Director of the Large Model Center; Co-founder Yao Tengzhou has worked in the ABB Robotics R&D Center for many years, the latter is the world's leading supplier of robots and mechanical automation

Meituan has always had great ambitions for the robot industry. Looking back on history, we can find that they have tried various models from investment to independent research and development to cooperation with third-party companies

Meituan’s accelerated embrace of robots can be traced back to the second half of 2020. At that year’s annual report earnings conference call, Wang Xing said that Meituan’s business development not only relies on software, but hardware is also very important, and proposed that robots are one of the key vertical areas for investment. One year later, Wang Xing proposed a new strategy of "retail technology" and continued to strengthen investment in vertical fields such as robots and autonomous driving

Wang Xing’s idea at the time was to use robots to reduce human input, cut expenses, and improve efficiency. Therefore, the companies he invested in were mainly service robots, such as Pudu Robot, which makes restaurant robots, and Yinghe Robot, which serves the retail industry. Meituan’s independent research and development projects also focus on similar scenarios, with the main purpose of reducing costs and increasing efficiency.

However, as time goes by, Meituan’s robot investment strategy has been further refined.

In order to reduce costs and improve efficiency, we will continue to develop delivery robots and warehouse management robots, and conduct long-term tests in Shanghai, Shenzhen and other places to achieve unmanned delivery. These projects are designed to serve Meituan’s main food delivery and retail businesses, solve the long-term problem of excessive labor costs, and strengthen our competitive advantages

On the other hand, Meituan is also actively broadening its boundaries and exploring new tracks that are not highly related to its own business but have great potential - such as bionic robots where Galaxy General is located.

What Meituan is betting on is naturally the future of Galaxy General, not the present. The potential of bionic robots is obvious to all, including cleaning, service, and industrial manufacturing robots, which are beginning to move closer to the bionic model. For example, Chuimi added a bionic robotic arm to the X20 series of sweeping robots for the first time, and Yunshen Technology’s “Jueying” series of quadruped bionic robots have also been widely used in construction, outdoor inspections and other fields.

The "China Bionic Robot Industry Panoramic Report" points out that bionic robots have moved from the industrial manufacturing field to the service field, and the application prospects in industrial manufacturing, medical care, and education and training are all worth looking forward to. Before taking a stake in Galaxy General, Meituan and its subsidiary Longzhu Capital also invested in surgical robot company Connaughton and other companies.

There are many large companies that have the same idea as Meituan. This makes people wonder: Will bionic robots become the next technological hot topic?

Investors VS self-researchers, how much volume does a big factory have in using bionic robots?

Except for comprehensive players like Meituan, the major manufacturers in the robot competition can be roughly divided into two camps.

The first camp is the investment camp. Some large companies specialize in investing in popular projects, while others choose to cast a wider net.

In May of this year, when Zhihui Jun, who has the aura of "Huawei's Genius Boy", started a new round of financing with his own entrepreneurial project Zhiyuan Robot, it attracted various capitals to compete for it. Sanya Baichuan Zhixin, owned by Robin Li, Private equity investment fund limited partnership also successfully invested in the company.

Tencent entered the game earlier and has a wider scope. In its investment landscape, Leju Robot and Youbixuan play the most important roles. Both companies focus on the research and development of humanoid robots. Abroad, Tencent has also extended an olive branch to companies such as Kindred Systems in Canada and Marble and Wonder Workshop in the United States. The products developed by these companies are used in various fields such as catering and logistics.

Large companies in the other camp decided to personally intervene, set up subsidiaries and set up internal project teams to independently develop robots

Among them, Xiaomi is the first representative, and Lei Jun himself has repeatedly endorsed products such as the bionic humanoid robot CyberOne and the bionic quadruped robot CyberDog. In August last year, it was Lei Jun who personally launched CyberOne in his annual speech and emphasized that the product was fully self-developed by Xiaomi Robotics Laboratory, and that the first generation CyberDog was developed with the participation of Chumi Technology.

The content that needs to be rewritten is: (picture from Xiaomi official website)

Regardless of whether they are investors or self-researchers, major manufacturers have spent a lot of money on robots - And they also know very well that it will be difficult to make money from this project in a short period of time.

Taking Xiaomi CyberOne as an example, the production cost of a single unit is between 600,000 and 700,000, and it does not yet have mass production capabilities. Although CyberDog 2, launched in August this year, has reduced research and development costs based on the previous generation product, it is still difficult to reduce the price of core components, such as the NVIDIA NX chip with 21TOPS computing power and more sensors than the previous generation product. The official selling price of 12,999 yuan has also dissuaded most consumers. Lei Jun bluntly said that he "does not recommend ordinary players to buy it."

Then the question arises: Internet dividends are fading day by day. It has not been so easy for major manufacturers to make money in the past two years. Is it still necessary to invest in bionic robot projects?

2022 is the trough of the Internet industry. All leading manufacturers are tightening expenditures and taking measures to reduce costs and improve efficiency. Countless projects have closed this year. Taking Tencent as an example, it has closed down projects such as Penguin FM, Penguin E-Sports, Xiaoe Pinpin, and QQ Hall since last year. The latest person to join the closure list is Tencent Agency. Tencent Education’s C-end business is also reported to be reduced one after another

However, Tencent has always treated the robot project very favorably. It has not significantly reduced the budget or optimized the team. Instead, it has felt the pressure of brain drain. Lai Jie, the former head of Tencent's "RobticsX" robotics laboratory, a team dedicated to robot research and development, left his job at the end of last year to start a business. The new company, Stardust Intelligence, focuses on the development of bionic robots for scientific research scenarios. Almost all the start-up team has a goose factory background.

If a large manufacturer is willing to provide ammunition for a project that does not make money, there must be its own considerations behind it. There is no hope for short-term profits. In the long run, what are Meituan and Tencent trying to do?

With capital boom, start-ups still need to keep calm

On the surface, the purpose of investing in large manufacturers can be very simple: to be optimistic about the potential of bionic robots and to staking out land in advance. The trial and error cost of investing in external companies is relatively lower, and the risks are more controllable. Unlike the self-research group, which has to worry about various sunk costs such as talent recruitment, patent research and development, etc., even if the investment returns are not as expected, it is not necessary to leave the market in time. Not acceptable.

However, big companies with increasingly large investment territories, such as Baidu, as well as Tencent and Meituan, which are involved in investment and self-research, are definitely not as simple as just making a profit and running away. The deeper consideration of major manufacturers may be that bionic robots and their own businesses may complement each other.

For example, Baidu bet on Zhihui Jun’s Zhiyuan Robot, which is considered to be trying to find a hardware gripper in the field of AI applications. Another key project, the automotive robot Jiyue 01, has the same purpose. It is essentially a comprehensive application of Baidu's AI skill package such as natural language processing, intelligent interaction, and logical reasoning.

Meituan and Tencent may intend to build a research and development platform and export technology to the outside world. When Meituan established the Robotics Research Institute, it stated that it would break the demand barriers between enterprises and research institutions by establishing an innovation platform and realize the implementation of technology commercialization

However, the bionic robot industry is not as good as it seems - especially for start-ups. The bionic robot industry in Europe and the United States, which started earlier and is more prosperous than in China, has fallen into a moderate wave of bankruptcy this year, which has also sounded the alarm for colleagues in other countries.

Founded in 2015, Zume, which once aspired to "subvert the pizza making process," received investment from SoftBank shortly after its birth. The total financing amount exceeded US$500 million, but it did not survive the cold winter of 2023; Franka Emika from Germany also In August this year, the Munich District Court issued a bankruptcy administration order. The company was founded in 2016 and focuses on the development of industrial manufacturing collaborative robots equipped with bionic robotic arms.

Franka Emika’s experience is of great reference value for start-ups that are being favored by capital. At the beginning of its establishment, Franka Emika introduced large-scale external funds in order to accelerate the development of the company, which resulted in the control of the start-up team being weakened. The inability to reconcile issues with shareholders was the main reason why the company filed for bankruptcy.

This is a very common problem in start-ups: Most of the founding teams have a sense of mission and idealism, hoping to continue to increase investment in R&D and attack technical barriers, while shareholders representing the interests of the capital pay more attention to efficiency. It is hoped that commercialization will be prioritized. Failure to reach consensus on internal decision-making will not only cause the company to miss development opportunities, but in serious cases, like Franka Emika, there will be problems with capital mobilization, and it will eventually lead to filing for bankruptcy management.

Capital is a double-edged sword. If you make good use of it, you can get twice the result with half the effort; otherwise, it may lead to self-destruction. There is still a long way to go before bionic robots can be fully commercialized, which means that differences in interests between start-up teams and investors will exist for a long time

In view of this, the founding team needs to adjust the pace of development and should not overemphasize the speed of expansion, nor should it introduce so much capital that it loses control of the company. What's more important is to stay calm and always be clear about your goals and mission

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