Chinese AI-RPA start-up Laiye raises $42m Series C

Cathay Innovation, the venture affiliate of Cathay Capital and Wu Capital also participated in the round. They participated alongside Lightspeed China in a $35 million extended Series B round last year. Lightspeed China provided seed and Series A funding in 2015 and 2016.

RPA systems simulate human behavior and fully automate highly manual processes, which can reduce labor costs, improve efficiency, and ensure projects are completed consistently. If AI can be equated to a robot's brain, RPA is the robot's hands. Laiye has combined the two capabilities to offer the first AI-RPA solution globally, Lightspeed said in a statement.

Founded in 2015, Laiye initially focused on interactive robots for consumer and business end-users. Its companion robot Xiaolai has interacted with tens of millions of users on WeChat, while business-focused Wulai is an intelligent dialogue robot platform for customer services and human resources departments.

The strategy changed last year with the acquisition of Awesome Technology, an RPA specialist, which coincided with the extended Series B. James Mi, founding partner of Lightspeed China, is said to have recommended the merger.

Awesome’s RPA platform UiBot was integrated with Laiye’s AI capabilities, which cover natural language processing, optical character recognition, computer vision, chatbot and machine learning. Laiye claims that 35% of the RPA robots now delivered to customers are enhanced with AI solutions.

Guanchun Wang, chairman and CEO of Laiye, said the company has established a 300-strong RPA+AI team that serves several dozen Fortune 500 and government clients. “The future of RPA is a combination with AI," Mi added. "The cognitive and learning abilities of AI can help automation through decision-making, significantly improving the RPA effect, and enriching use scenarios."

US RPA players UiPath and Automation Anywhere last year achieved post-investment valuations of $7 billion and $6.8 billion, respectively. In China, Laiye competes with local rivals such as Shanghai-based Emotibot, which secured a $45 million extended Series B from V Fund Management and Lingfeng Capital last year. Laiye announced that Jiaqi Weng, formerly CTO at Emotibot, has joined the company as a vice president.

According to a report by Zinnov, a US-based management consulting firm, global companies spent more than $2.3 billion on RPA in 2019, while over one-third of corporations globally are using or experimenting with RPA robots. In the business process outsourcing services market, the RPA market share exceeds 90%.

 

 

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