Recently, Astribot, a humanoid robot company, announced the completion of tens of millions of dollars in Pre-A round of financing, led by Matrix Partners, followed by industrial capital such as Daotong Investment and Qinghui Investment, followed by the old shareholder Yunqi Capital, and Huaxing Capital served as the exclusive financial advisor. This round of financing will be used for top talent recruitment, R&D investment, commercial deployment, etc.
According to public information, Stardust Intelligence was established at the end of 2022, and the name of Stardust Intelligence (Astribot) is derived from the ancient Latin proverb "Ad astra per aspera", which means "through the hard journey, to reach Stardust".
The company's founding core team consists of 6 people, all of whom are from Tencent RobticsX. Lai Jie, the founder of Stardust Intelligence, has more than 10 years of experience in robot research and development, and has worked in Tencent Robotics Lab (No. 1 employee), Baidu "Xiaodu Robot" (team leader), Hong Kong Polytechnic University, etc. He has designed a number of new robots, led the development of the wheel-legged robot Ollie at Tencent, and continued to promote the combination of robotics and artificial intelligence technology.
In April this year, Stardust Intelligent released its humanoid robot product S1. According to the introduction at the time, the S1 has the "strongest operating performance" among robots of the same specification, establishing a new AI robot standard, which can learn, think and perform multiple tasks like a human, which is "born for you, intelligent for you" (Naturally Yours).
In terms of software, S1 supports a variety of data collection methods such as video, motion capture, and teleoperation, and can use reinforcement learning, imitation learning, and multi-modal large models to complete learning and training. The robot can be upgraded with the software to continuously improve the intelligence and multi-task generalization capabilities.
In terms of hardware, the self-developed high-performance motor drive system has undergone many iterations and integrates multiple complex systems such as control, sensing, transmission and drive, providing the S1 robot with agile, flexible and silky dynamic operation capabilities, which is close to the speed and accuracy of industrial robots. In addition, the head, hands, and torso are modular, which can be flexibly assembled or disassembled according to different needs, improving task adaptability.
Lai Jie, CEO of Stardust Intelligence, said: "Our goal is to enable billions of people to have AI robot assistants. The new generation of AI robots can learn, think, and work like humans, use human tools and equipment, help people complete boring, difficult, or dangerous tasks, and even adapt to the environment and changes, so as to truly take care of the family. Such a world would require millions, if not billions, of robots. We invite you to ask S1 for more, so that its capabilities can grow from 55% and 85% to 99.99%, which is infinitely close to the human level. "
At present, the company has cooperated with leading well-known enterprises and institutions in the fields of scientific research, logistics and warehousing, intelligent manufacturing, laboratory automation, retail consumption, elderly care, personalized education, etc. It is expected to complete the release of the first-generation product in the near future and complete commercialization in 2024, and will continue to iterate products and expand the boundaries of application scenarios based on the concept of "the strongest AI robot assistant".
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said at the 2024 Tesla shareholders' meeting held a few days ago that humanoid robots will become the main force of the industry, and the number is expected to surpass that of humans, which is expected to reach 10 billion to 20 billion units. Tesla aims to produce 1 billion units a year and occupy more than 10% of the market.
In the domestic market, the humanoid robot industry is also considered to be the next blue ocean market. According to the "Humanoid Robot Industry Research Report", the market size of Chinese humanoid robots will reach about 2.76 billion yuan in 2024 and 75 billion yuan by 2029, accounting for 32.7% of the world's total, ranking first in the world; By 2035, the market size is expected to reach 300 billion yuan.