Chinese funds back local AI-RPA player Laiye

Lightspeed China Partners, its global affiliate Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital China, and Wu Capital also participated in the round. The Global Voyager Fund is controlled by Ping An Insurance Group.

Lightspeed China Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners co-led a $42 million Series C round in February last year, which followed a $35 million extended Series B in 2019 led by Cathay Innovation, the venture affiliate of Cathay Capital. 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 an AI plus RPA solution.

It has supplied "RPA+AI" products to customers including steel manufacturer Shougang Group, Jointown Pharmaceutical Group, China Southern Power Grid, Taiping Insurance, and Hong Kong-listed Longfor Properties. 

Laiye's robotic process automation (RPA) software subscription revenue soared 900% year-on-year in 2020. This helped the company achieve positive cash flow for its enterprise business. Its conversational artificial intelligence product, Laiye Chatbot, achieved profitability in the fourth quarter of 2020.

In the past year, the company has accelerated its international expansion despite the pandemic and now serves a customer base that includes close to 100 Fortune 500 companies, dozens of government agencies, and more than 1,000 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

A new initiative is to build a global developer community, chiefly by organizing RPA+AI competitions and launching a bot store that connects SMEs to freelance developers. The company has a community of more than 400,000 developers and more than 500 partners, primarily in China. International partners include Microsoft, Deloitte, and KPMG.

Guanchun Wang, chairman and CEO of Laiye, said in a statement that the company wants to create the world's largest developer community for software robots and the largest bot marketplace in the next three years. This will involve certifying at least one million software robot developers by 2025.

On the product side, Laiye aims to enhance its RPA offering with native AI capability. There is a focus on compatibility with more operating systems like Linux and Android, and deployment on all major cloud platforms. Solutions will also be customized so they are relevant to target markets around the world. 

Founded in 2015, Laiye initially focused on interactive robots for consumer and business end-users. The strategy changed in 2019 with the acquisition of Awesome Technology, an RPA specialist, which coincided with the extended Series B.

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. 

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• Topics
• Greater China
• Expansion
• Technology
• artificial intelligence
• China
• Lightspeed Venture Partners
• Ping An
• Sequoia Capital