Yicheng Innovation raises RMB 200 million to lift driverless factory hauler output from 3,000 to 10,000 a year

Shenzhen Yicheng Autonomous Driving Technology, which trades as Yicheng Innovation, has closed a RMB 200 million Series C, 36Kr reported on Nov. 3 Beijing time. Its investors include Yueke Group, Shanda Investment, Anhui State-owned Investment and Foshan Venture Capital. The money goes to factory capacity, core technology and commercial rollout of its driverless transfer vehicles, which haul materials around large industrial campuses.

Yicheng is building capacity ahead of demand. CEO Song Chaozhong told 36Kr the company can make 3,000 vehicles a year and aims for 10,000 after this round. At an average price of about RMB 400,000 a vehicle, the line it already has would turn out roughly RMB 1.2 billion of vehicles a year running full. Yet many buyers still purchase for demonstration because the category is new, 36Kr reported. The jump to 10,000 is a bet that those demo fleets turn into working fleets.

The vehicles already run human-sized shifts

The best case against that reading is how the vehicles are used. Yicheng, founded in 2017 and pitching itself as an L4 supplier, says it has several hundred customers in manufacturing, warehousing, ports and mines, all on very large sites, and that its vehicles make 7 to 8 trips a day, close to the rate of human drivers. Its best seller carries 5 to 10 tons, and the largest model in development carries 100 tons. Song says they run at 25 km/h, against about 3 km/h for most rivals, which he says steer driverless chassis with AGV logic. He also says Yicheng's per-vehicle gross margin is higher than for conventional transfer vehicles.

Next comes the arm on top

Yicheng wants to move from point-to-point hauling to running whole plants. It is adding a wheeled chassis with a robot arm for loading, unloading and small parts, trained on nearly two years of field data. The first units work at about 60% of a human worker's pace, the company says, and the full system is in trial deployment, with a customer site possibly running it as early as the third quarter of next year.

Abroad, Song says, hesitant customers changed their minds after they toured Yicheng's sites in China.