SoftBank fund to join $300mn investment in Cloudminds

SoftBank Vision Fund is joining a $300mn investment in Cloudminds, helping the Chinese robotics and artificial intelligence startup ramp up production capacity with the goal of tripling its revenue this year.Cloudminds, which last raised money in 2017 at a $440mn valuation, aims to sell half a million of its robots this year to Chinese customers from banks and malls to hospitals, chief financial officer Richard Tang said in an interview. The latest funds will bankroll, among other things, the expansion of a $20mn production line it’s building in Shanghai that should kick off output in June or July, he said during the Credit Suisse Asian Investment conference.Cloudminds’s XR1 robot in Barcelona last month.The latest funding, which Tang disclosed and hasn’t been previously reported, is in its initial stages and subject to change, he said. Representatives for the Vision Fund, its largest external backer with nearly 30% of the company, weren’t immediately available for comment.Four-year-old Cloudminds hopes to capitalise on a growing mania for robots across a swathe of industries from restaurants and retail to hotels. Its signature machine is the XR1, which for nearly $50,000 comes equipped with voice, motion and vision as a platform that other developers can then write software to customise. It’s planning to expand into the US in a small way this year, selling several hundred robots, then Japan in 2020, Tang added.Robots have so far failed to fire the public’s imagination outside of factories and warehouses. Boston Dynamics, a much-ballyhooed firm started by engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example, spent more than a dozen years developing four-legged automatons but still hasn’t proven they can be commercialised. Most of the $2.1bn spent by consumers in  2017 on household robots was for automated vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers – not exactly cutting-edge.Still, Cloudminds builds robots with greater dexterity and versatility than Boston Dynamics’s or SoftBank Group Corp’s own Pepper, Tang claims. Its XR1 can hold an egg, sew with a needle and pour water, he said. Its machines, which can function as guards in a residential complex or as service droids, combine Internet computing power with in-device processing, Tang added.While the XR1 and its ilk can record images and sound, Tang says it needs user-permission to collect and store information such as facial data. It’s deepening its footprint in America but Tang said any US data it collects will be stored locally, not transmitted overseas.