Will accelerate the deployment of global business.

It is learned that “Expanding Intelligence” has completed a $ 10 million Pre-B + round of financing, which was invested by Tiger Global. After this round of financing, Expanding Intelligence will continue to invest in product research and development, focusing on improving data feedback and industry solutions, and is laying out Singapore operations to accelerate the globalization process of enterprises.

Expansion Intelligence was established in November 2016 and is headquartered in Shanghai, China and Seattle, USA. The company is mainly aimed at enterprise users in the retail industry and wind power industry. It provides intelligent services based on computer vision and machine learning technology, and intelligent hardware such as drones. According to CEO Yan Zhiqing, in 2019, Bobo Intelligence completed annual revenue of nearly 100 million yuan as scheduled.

At present, JB Intelligence has cooperated with the formation of internationally renowned fast-moving consumer and retail brands such as Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart, and Procter & Gamble; the field of wind power has served domestic leading enterprises such as Longyuan, Shuangrui, Shanghai Electric, and has already cooperated with Europe GEV, one of the largest wind turbine operators, reached a strategic cooperation.

In the wind power industry, the biggest challenge faced by unmanned automatic inspections is that in the face of different operating environments, drones can still collect clear data completely and efficiently, and can provide The data management of the entire life cycle forms an effective data analysis report and delays the life cycle of the inspected equipment. This requires a set of software and hardware integration, front-end integration system and hardware products to achieve.

To this end, for the inspection of fan blades, Expanding Intelligence has made a number of hardware integrations–expanding the sensor mount, recording computer with edge computing model, and relying on computer vision, deep learning algorithms, focused image recognition, 3D Technologies such as modeling, data lake, and automatic image stitching provide vertical industry solutions for industry customers through multiple simulation experiments and field practices.

In the retail industry, the main difficulty of AI intelligent applications is to accurately and quickly identify tens of thousands of products, and the value creation link is in data mining and insight.

Expansion Intelligence launched the Retail Insights As A Service (RIAAS) to the market in 2019. This product is based on the massive identification of retail products and passes various IOTs. Edge computing hardware and compression algorithm models reduce network pressure, enabling brands and retailers to analyze and process data on mobile phones and IOTs.

It is understood that the founders of ZB Intelligent are from Microsoft. The R & D team has gathered scientists from many computer fields at home and abroad, and senior engineers from Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Intel, Huawei and other companies.

The following is the full report of the expansion of Pre-B financing in August 2019 by Bobo Smart:

It is learnt that the company has recently announced the completion of a $ 22 million Pre-B round of financing. This round of financing was led by CMC Capital and China Development, followed by GGV Jiyuan Capital, Development International, and Capital Construction Capital. Former Counselor of the State Council Shi Dinghuan joined the Strategy Committee, demonstrating the affirmation of the application results of the expansion of intelligent artificial intelligence products.

Expansion Intelligence was established in November 2016 and is headquartered in Shanghai, China and Seattle, USA. Expansion Intelligence is based on computer vision and machine learning technology, focusing on the two major industries of retail and wind power, providing end-to-end integrated intelligence for enterprise users. service.

Expansion Intelligence CEO Yan Zhiqing told that Expansion Intelligence has officially started commercialization in the wind power and retail industries in the second half of 2018. It is expected that revenue in 2019 will exceed 100 million yuan. In the future, Expansion Intelligence will continue to focus on solutions for the wind power and retail industries, and the goal is to achieve the world’s first.

Wind power: “fully automated, cost-effective”, has strategic cooperation with Europe’s largest wind power operation and maintenance business

The past ten years have been an important stage in the development of the global wind power market. In 2017, 52GW of new installed capacity was added globally, with cumulative installed capacity reaching 539.581GW. Among them, the global cumulative installed capacity of offshore wind power is 18.81GW, and the new installed capacity of offshore wind power is concentrated in the European and Chinese markets.

The height of wind turbine towers used for wind power generation generally ranges from 80-140 meters. Traditional operation and maintenance methods are basically completed by manpower, and face various problems such as long time-consuming, inaccurate detection and high risk factor. Therefore, Expansion Intelligence hopes to replace the traditional operation and maintenance mode with the UAV blade inspection mode to inspect the fan blades.

Expanding Intelligence is based on special flying robots and artificial intelligence technology. It provides automatic inspection of fan blades. Each fan only needs 25 minutes to complete inspection. Compared with traditional methods, the efficiency can be increased by 10 times. Landed in China, North America, Europe, Southeast Asia and other regions. In February this year, Expansion Intelligence announced , and the largest wind power operation and maintenance operator in Europe GEV reached a strategic cooperation and officially entered the European wind power market.

A key point of the service is to be “fully automated.” Yan Zhiqing told that the expansion is actually three-dimensional space autopilot. As long as the operation and maintenance personnel press a button, the special flying robot will take off. Through solid-state radar, machine vision, and sensors, it will achieve full-automatic flight, track the blades and take pictures. The data is transmitted to the cloud, and the data is generated through deep learning recognition analysis.

The significance of “full automation” is to get rid of the dependence on labor, and automatically adapt to the variables such as fan angle, model, environment, etc., and quickly achieve large-scale promotion and replication through standardized product services.

Another expansion of Bobo’s smart productsIt is characterized by high cost performance, and the robot hardware cost of its automatic inspection is several times lower than that of other mainstream manufacturers. The core reason behind this is the expansion of Bo’s advantage in software algorithms, reducing the requirements for hardware performance and configuration.

At present, the main service of the expansion of the three types of customers: wind farm owners, wind turbine blade factories, wind turbine equipment factories, providing products and services through the direct sales model, charging inspection service fees based on the number of services, rather than selling hardware profit, the essence is to do The business model of the operation.

For the future expansion in the wind power field, on the one hand, the expansion of Bobo Intelligence is to expand more domestic and foreign customers, and on the other hand, to expand more scenarios, from the automatic inspection of fan blades to more services, including Micro-site selection of wind farms, preventive maintenance, performance evaluation, financial insurance, etc.

Retail: Based on “goods identification”, it has strategic cooperation with international top customers such as Coca-Cola.

In the retail scene, manufacturers, retailers, and consumers have lost information, asymmetrical information, less fluidity, and less transparency due to “poor language and poor channels.” All parties have lost time, opportunity, efficiency, and experience. The expanded smart retail solution builds a bridge between products, stores and consumers through fast and accurate analysis of images, intelligent analysis and real-time communication.

Specifically, Expansion Intelligence uses machine vision + intelligent hardware as the core technology. Through the identification of “goods”, it provides shelf refrigerator freezer insight, merchandise information analysis, sales execution monitoring, etc., and focuses on the efficiency of physical retail operations Intelligent services.

At the current stage, for the big brand customers, ExpandBrowsing provides retail execution, shelf intelligence and competition tracking services. It uses mobile phones to take pictures to identify and analyze the product information and intelligence in the photos and feedback to customers. At the same time, through camera IOT hardware, it provides retail customers with services such as shelf vacancy identification and auxiliary replenishment.

In the profit model, Expansion Intelligence charges a fee based on the number of times of photo identification and analysis. If it involves IOT hardware, then it charges a hardware fee, which is essentially a business model for operation.

In the “Retail + AI” scenario, Expansion Intelligence chose to start from the identification of goods. One of the important reasons is that the difficulty of identifying goods is very high, including a large variety, huge quantities, continuous updates, environmental impact of light angles, products and The matching of price tags, etc., is difficult, and it can establish the advantages of the intelligent vision algorithm.

In terms of business strategy, Expanding Intelligence selects a few international head retail customers for in-depth cooperation. Based on the large size of customers, it can solve the most difficult application problems and obtain a large amount of high-value data. We can use our customers’ international markets to achieve global expansion.

According to official information, in the past two years, JBG has established strategic cooperation with internationally renowned fast-moving consumer brands such as Coca-Cola in many regions of the world, and the solutions provided have successfully landed in four markets including North America and Southeast Asia.

Three keywords:Soft and hard, head customer, global

The wind power and retail industries seem to be two completely unrelated industries, but when we talked with Yan Zhiqing about the expansion of intelligent industry choices, the biggest difficulties of wind power and retail industry solutions, the core key points that want to grow, etc Topic, but found the commonality between industries.

To sum up, what we want to do is to “digital offline scenes”, and then to the specific things to do, and the key points that can be made, can be summarized into three points:

  • The combination of hardware, software, and algorithms is complementary to achieve high-tech advantages and barriers.

  • Deeply cooperate with a few industry-leading customers, dig deep into the scene, establish the best end-to-end landing solution, and promote it on a large scale, instead of serving a bunch of long-tail customers from the beginning.

  • Global market expansion, the solution must be able to expand globally, so as to obtain a larger market size. Cooperation with international head customers also values ​​the possibility of future globalization.

    In the future, Bobo Intelligence will build on these three points to build a wider business scenario.