Chinese startups Xingmai Chuangxin, 1data Technologies and Auros have bagged funding.
Robotic pool cleaner startup snags $29m
Xingmai Chuangxin, a Suzhou-based firm that manufactures robotic pool cleaners, has bagged 200 million yuan ($29.1 million) in a funding round, according to a release on Tuesday.
Source Code Capital, Shunwei Capital, GL Ventures, and Yunmu Capital joined the round. The company will use the proceeds towards product R&D, as well as building up its supply chain. The firm also plans to expand its products to the North American market.
Founded in July 2022, the firm is set to launch its first generation robots in “early 2024”. It hopes to tap into the global robotic pool cleaner market, which is still at a nascent development stage.
CDH Investments leads 1data’s Series B round
1data Technologies, a provider of AI-based robotic process automation bots, has secured 200 million yuan ($29.1 million) in a Series B round led by the venture and growth capital unit of alternative investment specialist CDH Investments.
The round saw the participation of Convivialité Ventures, the venture capital arm of French spirits group Pernod Ricard. Previous backers IDG Capital, and Eastern Bell Capital re-upped in the round.
The firm plans to use the proceeds to upgrade its automation system with a large language model (LLM) that is trained on a massive corpus of unlabelled text data to analyse the context of the conversation and produce human-like responses, 1data CEO Bian Xiaoyu said. ChatGPT, the popular AI chatbot from OpenAI, is one of the applications of such a model.
Founded in 2017, the Shanghai-headquartered firm previously bagged 200 million yuan ($31 million) in a Series A+ round joined by IDG Capital, Sequoia Capital China, Eastern Bell Capital, and SIG. The firm has branches in Beijing, Shenzhen, as well as in Singapore.
Auros secures $17m to expand market-making business
Auros, a Hong Kong-based crypto trading and market-making firm, has snagged $17 million in a funding round led by high-frequency trading firm Vivienne Court, according to a release on Tuesday.
The round, joined by Trovio, Primal Capital, and a consortium of senior alumni from market-making giant Optiver, will help the firm to further expand its business, as well as scale its derivatives businesses.
Auros said in December 2022 that it applied for a “light touch” Provisional Liquidation order to protect all of its creditors, after the FTX meltdown.
The “light touch” approach is commonly deployed where businesses are balance sheet solvent, but cash flow insolvent, and where this cash flow insolvency can be quickly and effectively remedied by corporate restructuring, the firm explained in an announcement.
Founded in 2019, the firm claims that its operations are worldwide, with offices in Hong Kong and New York.