Tuesday, December 1, 2020

Help the machine install eyes, "Dingna Automation" completed the B round of 100 million yuan financing

 Dingna's short-term goal is to become the world's leading provider of intelligent visual inspection solutions.

Machine vision is an important front branch of the artificial intelligence industry. Machine vision gives machines the ability to "see" and "cognize" by simulating the human visual system, which is the basis for machines to understand the world.

The global machine vision market has been growing steadily since 2015 and is expected to reach US$25 billion by 2022, with a compound annual growth rate of 22.1%. China's machine vision market has entered a stage of rapid development since 2015 , with a compound growth rate of 24.9% from 2015 to 2022, which is higher than the global level.

Suzhou Dingna Automation is a company that can provide machine vision inspection solutions for manufacturing customers Recently, Dingna completed a 100 million yuan B round of financing jointly invested by Source Code Capital, Yuanhai Minghua, and Xiaomiao Capital The Series B financing will be used to expand production capacity, meet customer needs, introduce high-end experts and talents, develop new products, and maintain the competitiveness of technologies and products.

Dingna was established in 2010. The company is committed to 3D vision ultra-high-precision measurement technology, deep learning complex defect detection technology, artificial intelligence object recognition technology and robot vision intelligent grasping technology, and launches a comprehensive software and hardware integration Automatic intelligent manufacturing equipment currently covers subdivision scenarios such as 3C, automobiles, 5G, display panels, and semiconductors.

"So far, Dingna has 10 years of experience in the industry. The past 10 years can be divided into three stages. From 2010 to 2017, we are mainly doing machine vision system modules , and we have been exposed to nearly a thousand application scenarios ; from 2017 -In 2019, we made an overall solution based on visual inspection; in 2020, some of our projects will begin mass production, and most of our target customers are from the 3C industry.” said Dingna CEO Qin Yinghua.

Qin Yinghua recalled that the cooperation between Dingna and US consumer electronics giants began in 2013, but initially focused on "indirect cooperation". We provide vision systems to third-party equipment integrators, and then they provide them to each other as a whole." Since 2017, Dingna has become a direct partner of each other.

"We are facing the quality system of the other side's entire parts supply chain, such as glass, metal parts, plastic parts, etc. We have to conduct quality inspections for the production links of these parts." Qin Yinghua said.

Qin Yinghua compared Dingna's attempts in the 3C field in the first few years to "from 1 to 99", but now it is "from 99 to 99.99". "The step from 99 to 99.99 looks relatively small, but it is the most difficult step. Because 1-99 is mainly iterative, there may be no way to achieve mass landing, and a small number of machines need to be put into the customer’s production line. Verify whether the technology is stable and reliable." Qin Yinghua said. "But the last step from 99 to 99.99 means that a large number of equipment will be launched for mass production."

Qin Yinghua said that the entire process needs to systematically optimize and iterate on equipment hardware and software algorithms. What customers need is a stable and reliable equipment that has been repeatedly tempered, not a single industrial camera or a piece of the latest algorithm code.

In the first 7 years of the company's establishment, Dingna completed the accumulation from 1 to 99. "We have done many projects in non-3C industries and have accumulated rich experience in many industries. However, it is not easy to gain the trust of customers at the top of the pyramid . It took Dingna a full 3 years. From our indirect service to the customer, Established contact with them and upgraded to a "direct partner", one is because the technology has been recognized by the other party, and the other is because we insist on being customer-centric and can quickly respond to the other party's requirements and meet customer needs."

"The other party was worried that our company's volume was too small and the risk was not easy to control, so initially we only cooperated on small projects, such as visual inspection related to smart watch parts." Qin Yinghua said that Dingna successfully completed the task. Gaining the trust of each other, while the company expanded in a planned way, the ability to undertake projects was stronger, and the two parties gradually began to dock tasks related to smartphone parts.

Qin Yinghua said that in the past two years, the American technology giant has consciously cultivated its domestic supply chain. At the same time, as a whole, the market size of machine vision inspection equipment in the field of consumer electronics and related display panels, chip manufacturing and other core components will be close to 3 billion yuan in 2019, and will reach nearly 4 billion in 2020. Consumer electronic products have a short life cycle and a large demand, so in the next few years it will drive the rapid growth of machine vision market demand.

According to Qin Yinghua's plan, Dingna's short-term goal is to become the world's leading provider of intelligent visual inspection solutions, and the long-term goal is to establish a firm foothold in the consumer electronics field and penetrate into display panels, automobiles and other fields in the future. Currently, Dingna has self-developed standardized modules and productizable solutions in the process of serving customers across industries.

In terms of team, Dingna has a professional team of 300 people, mainly technical R&D personnel. Dingna Automation invests 15% of its revenue in research and development every year. The company already has more than 80 patents and software copyrights. At present, the company has branches in Shenzhen, Zhejiang and Silicon Valley in the United States, and is accelerating the layout of its R&D headquarters in Suzhou Park.

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