Skip to main content

Rice Robotics picks up $7M, powers SoftBank’s office delivery

In the crowded enterprise robotics space, the ability to secure key clients is a crucial differentiator for companies. In the case of Hong Kong-based Rice Robotics, the important order has come from SoftBank.

Since January 2021, Rice’s robots, with their cute, cartoonish blinking eyes, have been delivering 7-Eleven products to Softbank staff at the company’s new headquarters in Takeshiba, Tokyo. These robots are capable of carrying a 30kg payload and have a storage space of 39 x 27 x 34 cm.

Rice effectively allows delivery workers to simply drop off customer orders at a designated spot for its robots to fetch, eliminating the need for them to navigate in and out of office buildings. The robots can operate continuously for 12 hours and recharge within one hour.

Recognition from SoftBank and other customers has convinced several investors to back Rice’s latest $7 million pre-Series A funding round. They include Alibaba Entrepreneur Fund, Soul Capital, Audacy Ventures, Sun Hung Kai & Company, and Cyberport HK. There’s no lead investor in the round.

The financing, said Rice, will allow it to push further into Japan, which is now the company’s biggest source of revenue. Aside from SoftBank, Rice also counts Toyota, Japan Post and Mitsui Group among its Japanese clients.

Japan has been a favored destination for China’s robotics companies seeking to expand internationally, given its aging population and openness to new technology. The ByteDance-backed warehouse robot maker Syrius Robotics, for example, made a foray into Japan at an early stage.

South China is no doubt the home to the world’s leading hardware supply chains. Counteintuiveinly, Rice makes its robots in Hong Kong instead of mainland China, where factories are abundant and labor costs are lower.

The four-year-old company previously made its robots through an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) on the mainland but discovered that manufacturing in its home city significantly brought down the unit cost of its robots, Rice’s founder and CEO Victor Lee told TechCrunch.

Manufacturing in bulk in mainland China is more economical, while Rice’s production size is too small to achieve an economy of scale, explained Lee. Furthermore, the Hong Kong government is actively trying to attract advanced manufacturing to diversify an economy that’s losing its appeal as a financial hub for Asia.

A portion of Rice’s new funding has been deployed to establish a production plant in Hong Kong. The facility, which spans an area of 13,000 square feet, has quadrupled the company’s annual production capacity from 500 to 2,000 robots.

With a starting market price of $9,000, Rice’s robots utilize the popular simultaneous localization and mapping technology, known as SLAM, for navigation. A big advantage of SLAM is that it continuously compares sensor data with the given map, allowing the system to construct an accurate and on-the-fly model of the environment and estimate a robot’s precise location.

Aside from service robots, Rice also offers a line of disinfection robots, of which demand surged during the COVID-19 pandemic, as was the case with many other robotics firms.


Want the top robotics news in your inbox each week? Sign up for Actuator here.




source https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/17/rice-robotics-picks-up-7m-powers-softbanks-office-delivery/

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Silent Revolution of On-Device AI: Why the Cloud Is No Longer King

Introduction For years, artificial intelligence has meant one thing: the cloud. Whether you’re asking ChatGPT a question, editing a photo with AI tools, or getting recommendations on Netflix — those decisions happen on distant servers, not your device. But that’s changing. Thanks to major advances in silicon, model compression, and memory architecture, AI is quietly migrating from giant data centres to the palm of your hand. Your phone, your laptop, your smartwatch — all are becoming AI engines in their own right. It’s a shift that redefines not just how AI works, but who controls it, how private it is, and what it can do for you. This article explores the rise of on-device AI — how it works, why it matters, and why the cloud’s days as the centre of the AI universe might be numbered. What Is On-Device AI? On-device AI refers to machine learning models that run locally on your smartphone, tablet, laptop, or edge device — without needing constant access to the cloud. In practi...

Apple’s AI Push: Everything We Know About Apple Intelligence So Far

Apple’s WWDC 2025 confirmed what many suspected: Apple is finally making a serious leap into artificial intelligence. Dubbed “Apple Intelligence,” the suite of AI-powered tools, enhancements, and integrations marks the company’s biggest software evolution in a decade. But unlike competitors racing to plug AI into everything, Apple is taking a slower, more deliberate approach — one rooted in privacy, on-device processing, and ecosystem synergy. If you’re wondering what Apple Intelligence actually is, how it works, and what it means for your iPhone, iPad, or Mac, you’re in the right place. This article breaks it all down.   What Is Apple Intelligence? Let’s get the terminology clear first. Apple Intelligence isn’t a product — it’s a platform. It’s not just a chatbot. It’s a system-wide integration of generative AI, machine learning, and personal context awareness, embedded across Apple’s OS platforms. Think of it as a foundational AI layer stitched into iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and m...

Max Q: Psyche(d)

In this issue: SpaceX launches NASA asteroid mission, news from Relativity Space and more. © 2023 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only. from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/h6Kjrde via IFTTT