Recently, 36Kr learned that advanced industrial sensor company XinSuan Technology announced the completion of PreA round of financing, which was led by Shunwei Capital, followed by Huafang Capital and old shareholder Sequoia China. The XinSuan Technology team has completed two consecutive rounds of financing within a year, with a cumulative financing scale of 100 million yuan. Azure Capital has served as the company's long-term exclusive capital advisor.

The funds from this round of financing will be used to invest in further enhancing the mass production capacity of core products such as industrial code readers, and increasing multi-category R&D in the field of advanced industrial vision sensors.

At present, the global industrial sensor market size of more than 50 billion U.S. dollars, and maintain an annual growth rate of 10%, is expected by the end of 2023 the global market size will be more than 60 billion U.S. dollars; with the domestic level of industrial automation to improve, China's industrial sensors market size has also reached nearly 55 billion yuan, with an annual growth rate of more than 16%, much higher than the global growth rate. At the same time, the Chinese market for industrial sensors, especially high-end manufacturing sensors, has been monopolized by the U.S., Japan and Germany for a long time.

Industrial sensors in the field of one of the big single product industrial code reader field, for example, Keyence (Keyence), Cognex (Cognex), as well as Deloitte (Datalogic) and other well-known international brands monopolize the field of China's advanced code reader more than a decade, while the domestic brands in the accumulation of algorithms has been relatively weak, for the decoding rate and stability requirements of the industrial scenarios have been very high Can not cut into. But at the same time, with the continuous improvement of China's overall manufacturing level, including new energy battery manufacturing, new energy vehicle manufacturing, as well as high-end 3C products and other production for the accuracy and efficiency is getting higher and higher, the original domestic code reader brand is even more difficult to open up the situation, and is always in the “agent labeling” and some low-end scenarios to fight the price competition. Price competition.

The new calculation founding team chose the most difficult technology, the highest threshold, cut into the lowest fault tolerance rate of industrial code reader products into the market, the new calculation founder Zhang Suning told 36 Krypton: “Only in the most difficult single product to stand on the foot, positive PK overseas manufacturers of the core products, domestic industrial sensors have the opportunity to really establish their own brand value.”

The new calculation team in the algorithm has accumulated nearly 8 years of time, testing a large number of industrial code reading scenarios, in the last year successfully launched the new calculation code reader R275-A and R270-A series of products. 2023, the new calculation has realized the mass production of code reader products as well as the verification of the quality control test, and successfully entered a number of representative of high-end 3C product manufacturers and new energy factory supplier directory. Suning Zhang said, “XinSuan has meanwhile become the exclusive supplier of several manufacturing terminals, tearing a hole from the front in a market monopolized by overseas brands for almost a decade or more.”

In terms of algorithm technology, XinSuan has developed its own ISP pre-processing algorithm “Pixel Adaptive Enhancement Algorithm”, which provides super-resolution processing for image inputs with millions of resolutions, and in the sub-pixel localization task, in order to obtain more information about the input pixels to achieve better resolution reconstruction, it uses the hybrid attention mechanism of the Transformer model. While achieving adaptive enhancement, a self-attention scheme that combines channel attention and all window information is used, thus taking full advantage of their respective strengths, i.e., the ability to utilize global statistics and strong local fitting.

With the help of XinSuan's unique 'Pixel Adaptive Enhancement Algorithm', the R275-A and R270-A series of stationary readers can achieve 3 megapixel image quality by utilizing a megapixel image sensor input, said Suning Zhang.

Currently, XinSuan's products have completed mass production deliveries to a number of customers in the first half of 2023, including 3C, new energy, and automotive production lines, and it is expected that tens of thousands of products will be delivered in 2023, according to the founding team. Meanwhile, the team has begun the development of code-reading products based on the algorithmic advantages that have been accumulated in logistics, warehousing, and robotics scenarios.

The investor said:
Cheng Tian, Partner of Shunwei Capital: “With the arrival of the Industry 4.0 era, intelligent manufacturing and industrial automation have become the key strategic direction of national industrial upgrading. Code for manufacturing production, as all parts of the 'electronic ID card', is the only unchanging identity mark. Industrial code reader as a high-end manufacturing field 'neck' equipment equipment, the domestic market has long been monopolized by foreign brands, policy guidance direction is clear, the trend of domestic substitution is clear. Benefit from the future of lithium batteries, new energy vehicles, precision manufacturing and other downstream industries continue to pull, the market has broad prospects for development. New calculation of its products outstanding performance, the first code reader in the decoding rate, read contrast, broken graphics recognition and other dimensions have been comparable to the international head of the brand. Founder Zhang Suning has a wealth of high-end industrial code reader development experience and commercialization experience, looking forward to the team to continue to plough into the field of industrial machine vision, with high-quality and cost-effective products, to fill the gaps in the domestic market, to help the transformation and upgrading of advanced manufacturing trend”.

Lu Zhi, Partner of Huafang Capital: “Various types of industrial sensors are the cornerstone of the digital transformation of domestic industry and the source of data. The industrial code reader, which has long been monopolized by overseas large manufacturers, is a very important part of it. We are very happy to meet the XinSuan team and participate in it, and we are very impressed by the entrepreneurial spirit and R&D strength of the founding team. At present the team has also broken the foreign monopoly situation in a number of scenarios, we believe that the XinSuan team will be able to quickly achieve more scale landing in industrial process automation in the future, and continue to develop new scenarios.”