Focused on Advanced Industrial Sensors, Ningbo Xinsuan Completes Pre-A Round | 36Kr Early Stage

In the first half of 2023, Xinsuan completed volume deliveries to several customers with 3C, new energy and automotive production lines.

36Kr has learned that advanced industrial sensor company Xinsuan Technology has completed a Pre-A round led by Shunwei Capital, with Huafang Capital and existing shareholder Sequoia China participating. Within one year the Xinsuan team completed two consecutive rounds, raising a cumulative total in the hundreds of millions of yuan. Weilan Capital serves as the company's long-term exclusive financial advisor. The funds from this round will further expand mass-production capacity for core products such as industrial barcode readers and increase multi-category R&D in advanced industrial vision sensors. The global industrial sensor market currently exceeds USD 50 billion, growing about 10% a year, and is expected to exceed USD 60 billion by the end of 2023;

As China's industrial automation level rises, its industrial sensor market has reached nearly RMB 55 billion, growing more than 16% a year, well above the global rate. At the same time, industrial sensors in China, especially those used in high-end manufacturing, have long been dominated by American, Japanese and German companies.

Take industrial barcode readers, one of the major single products among industrial sensors: well-known international brands such as Keyence, Cognex and Datalogic have dominated China's advanced reader market for more than ten years, while domestic brands, relatively weak in algorithms, could not enter industrial scenarios with very high demands on read rate and stability. Meanwhile, as China's manufacturing level keeps rising, including new energy battery manufacturing, new energy vehicle assembly and high-end 3C products, production demands ever higher precision and efficiency, making it even harder for existing domestic reader brands, which have long competed on price through OEM relabeling and in mid- and low-end scenarios. Xinsuan's founding team chose to enter the market with industrial barcode readers, the product with the hardest technology, the highest barrier and the lowest tolerance for error. Xinsuan founder Zhang Suning told 36Kr: "Only by standing firm on the hardest single product and competing head-on with the core products of overseas leaders can Chinese industrial sensors truly build their own brand value."

The Xinsuan team has built up nearly eight years of algorithm work and tested a huge range of industrial code reading scenarios, launching the R275-A and R270-A series readers last year. In 2023 Xinsuan achieved mass production of its readers and passed quality control verification, and entered the supplier lists of several representative high-end 3C manufacturers and major new energy companies. Zhang Suning said: "Xinsuan has also become the exclusive supplier to several manufacturing end customers, opening a gap head-on in a market dominated by overseas brands for more than a decade."

On the algorithm side, Xinsuan developed its own ISP pre-processing algorithm, a "pixel-adaptive enhancement algorithm", which applies super-resolution to megapixel image input. For sub-pixel localization, to obtain more input pixel information for better resolution reconstruction, it uses a Transformer model with a hybrid attention mechanism. While achieving adaptive enhancement, it combines channel attention with self-attention over all window information, making full use of the strengths of each: global statistics and strong local fitting. Zhang Suning said that, with Xinsuan's own pixel-adaptive enhancement algorithm, the R275-A and R270-A series fixed-mount readers achieve 3-megapixel image quality from a 1-megapixel image sensor. Xinsuan completed volume deliveries to several customers with 3C, new energy and automotive production lines in the first half of 2023, and the founding team expects to deliver tens of thousands of units in 2023. The team has also begun developing code reading products for logistics, warehousing, robotics and other scenarios based on its accumulated algorithm advantages.

What the investors say: Cheng Tian, Partner at Shunwei Capital: "With the arrival of Industry 4.0, smart manufacturing and industrial automation have become key strategic directions of national industrial upgrading. For manufacturing, a code is like the 'electronic ID card' of every part, the one identifier that never changes. Industrial barcode readers are a 'chokepoint' device in high-end manufacturing; the domestic market has long been dominated by foreign brands, policy direction is clear and the trend toward domestic substitution is evident. Driven by downstream industries such as lithium batteries, new energy vehicles and precision manufacturing, the market outlook is broad. Xinsuan's products perform outstandingly; its first reader already matches leading international brands in read rate, readable contrast and recognition of damaged codes. Founder Zhang Suning has extensive experience developing and commercializing high-end industrial barcode readers. We look forward to the team continuing to deepen its work in industrial machine vision, filling gaps in the domestic market with high-quality, cost-effective products and supporting the transformation and upgrading of advanced manufacturing." Lu Chi, Partner at Huafang Capital: "Industrial sensors of all kinds are the cornerstone of China's industrial digital transformation and the source of its data.