Cathay Innovation leads $35m round for China AI player Laiye

The round coincides with Laiye's acquisition of Awesome Technology, which specializes in robotic process automation (RPA), whereby machines track tasks performed by people with a view to replicating processes and automating workflow. Laiye has also officially launched UiBot, its first RPA product. Following a soft launch six months ago, the UiBot app has accumulated 300,000 downloads, signed up more than 30,000 users and registered over 6,000 enterprise customers.

The new capital will go towards the recruitment of R&D and sales talent, the development of natural language processing (NLP), deep learning and reinforcement learning technology, and accelerating the commercialization of intelligent robots.

RPA systems simulate human behavior and fully automate highly manual processes. Lightspeed offered data entry as an example. Staff might need to continuously refer to enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, web pages and other documents, while also switching back and forth between systems for each function, such as tax and accounting. RPA can learn to perform these tasks, reducing labor costs, improving efficiency, and ensuring projects are completed consistently.

A statement from the venture capital firm cited a research finding by Gartner that the RPA market grew by more than 63% last year, making it's the fastest growing segment within enterprise software. It also noted that US-based RPA start-up UiPath recently raised $568 million in funding at a valuation of $7 billion.

Laiye was established in 2015 as an AI-powered concierge service accessed through a dedicated app and through Tencent Holdings' WeChat platform. It offers smart calendars, transportation booking and delivery. The company also targeted the enterprise market, positioning itself as an active customer service platform that reaches out to customers rather than responding passively to inquiries. It attracted clients from the financial services, retail and travel industries.

Lightspeed led Laiye's seed and Series A rounds in 2015 and 2016. It re-upped in the Series B a year later, which was led by Wu Capital. Lanchun Duan, a managing partner with Cathay Capital, said in a separate statement that Laiye's enterprise-level robot platforms and applications can make a significant contribution to the transformation of labor for the intelligent era.

Cathay Innovation recently reached a first close of EUR320 million ($358 million) on its second fund that will back start-ups in China, Europe, and North America. The fund has a target of EUR500 million. Its first close surpasses the entire corpus of Cathay Innovation's debut vehicle, which closed at $320 million in 2017.

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• Topics
• Greater China
• Early-stage
• Technology
• China
• TMT
• Cathay Capital Private Equity
• Lightspeed Venture Partners
• Wu Capital