ForwardX Robotics, a leading developer of AI-powered Autonomous Mobile Robots for warehousing and manufacturing environments, has announced to close its Series B Funding by raising another round of more than US $38 million led by CDH Investments’s VGC, Eastern Bell Capital and Dohold Capital.
Angel Around and ZGC Group were the other investors that helped ForwardX raise funding.
This funding brings ForwardX’s total Series B Funding to over US $63 million after an initial round of US $10 million in March 2019 and an extension of US $15 million in April 2020.
Since its founding in 2016, ForwardX has now raised close to US $74 million in venture capital.
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ForwardX currently works with a number of companies including apparel firms in number of continents worldwide to automate their warehousing operations and have seen a lot of success with its AMRs.
Nicolas Chee, Founder and CEO of ForwardX Robotics commented, “Our flexible automation platform enables supply chain facilities to elevate worker performance, reduce growing labour costs’ pressures and adapt quickly and effectively to changes in the market.”
The company will use its Series B Funding to accelerate the development of new products and existing products, while expanding its market share across China and the United States. In addition, the company will invest in new international markets, such as Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom.
“With the popularity of digitalisation and enterprise transformation, demand for AMRs in traditional supply chain industries will only continue to grow in the future. After 4 years of building a strong foundation, ForwardX Robotics has developed the business acumen and technological capabilities to establish itself as an industry leader,” shared Tang Tao, Managing Partner at Eastern Bell Capital.
According to Mingyu Wang, Senior Partner at CDH Investments, the next three to five years will be seen as the golden age of the AMR industry. “With ForwardX’s multi-robot cluster scheduling capabilities and ability to commercialise its solution, we are very optimistic about ForwardX’s future and the value it will create in the AMR field,” said Wang.
It’s worth mentioning here that TCL Industries Holdings – one of the investors –co-operated with ForwardX on a project as part of its 5G digital transformation initiative to achieve unmanned material handling across the factory.
“The project has been successful so far with seamless collaboration between (ForwardX’s) AMRs, workers, machines and the loading carts. We are now looking towards the second and third phases of the project,” said Caijun Zhao, Head of President’s Office at TCL Industries Holdings, a subsidiary of TCL Technology.
“As the only commercialised AMR developer to utilise advanced image processing and computer vision, ForwardX Robotics possesses not only leading technical assets but also clear business applications across various industries,” said Ji Wang, Investment Director at Dohold Capital.
