Ant Group leads Juzhi Industry's hundred-million-yuan Series A funding to advance mass production of robotic electronic skin

Robot Frontline reported on October 29 that today, Shandong flexible fabric tactile sensing company Juqiao Industrial announced the completion of a hundred-million-yuan Series A funding round, led by Ant Group, with existing shareholders Lingyi Venture Capital, Weihai Gangrong, and Qingdao Hexin participating.

The funds from this round will mainly be used for large-scale mass production and delivery of fabric electronic skin, research and development of tactile and multimodal sensing technologies, and product expansion in scenarios such as robotics, smart homes, and medical care and rehabilitation.

Juqiao Industrial was founded in early 2024. Founder and CEO Zhang Jingqi graduated from the Department of Electronic Engineering at the University of York in the UK and previously served as CTO of a Xiaomi ecosystem company. The core team mainly comes from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and major smart hardware companies, with deep technical accumulation as well as experience in smart hardware product definition and mass production.

The company mainly focuses on the research and development of flexible fiber sensors, integrating sensing structures into fiber fabrics so that soft, breathable, and bendable fabrics have tactile sensing capabilities. At present, the company has applied the relevant technology to products such as tactile gloves, full-body electronic skin for robots, robotic arm skin, as well as smart mattresses and smart seats.

In terms of the technical approach, Juqiao Industrial breaks down the conductive, piezoresistive, and substrate structures in traditional thin-film sensors to the fiber level, forming a sensing network through the combination and weaving of functional fibers. Deformation caused by external contact changes the conductive pathways inside the fibers, and the acquisition system then reads the signals, which are converted into tactile data after calibration and algorithm processing.

The tactile gloves developed and designed by Juqiao Industrial are equipped with hundreds of sensing points on each hand, with a minimum point spacing of 2mm and a minimum trigger force of 0.01N, and support motion capture and robot teleoperation.

For tasks such as fine robotic manipulation, Juqiao Industrial has also launched Tactile Skin 2.0, which further expands the ability to sense force direction, sliding tendency, and tangential force by adjusting the weaving structure and combining model training.

This information can be used to identify object slippage and changes in contact state during robotic grasping, providing data support for anti-slip adjustment and manipulation strategy training. In terms of product design, its multilayer flexible sensor is less than 0.8mm thick, and the thinnest single-layer product is less than 0.3mm.

In addition, Juqiao Industrial's tactile products have been used in model solutions such as UniTacHand, EgoTouch, and TouchAnything. By fusing tactile and first-person visual data, they record contact positions, force changes, and motion information during real operations, providing multimodal data for robot manipulation model training.

Juqiao Industrial is also extending tactile sensing capabilities to the entire robot body. At present, the company's products extend from the hands to robotic arms, torso, and soles, and it has launched robotic arm skin to provide sensing information for contact detection and safe interaction.

On the commercialization side, Juqiao Industrial said it has currently served more than 400 customers, including more than 200 domestic and overseas customers in the embodied intelligence field, and has delivered nearly 10,000 tactile gloves.

On the production side, Juqiao Industrial has established its own production line in Weihai, covering processes such as material formulation, spinning, dyeing and finishing, and weaving, with a production yield exceeding 95%, and has the capacity for rapid prototyping within one day and large-area sensing fabrics.

Next, Juqiao Industrial plans to continue expanding multidimensional sensing capabilities such as pressure, deformation, and vibration, and to explore technical routes such as piezoelectric and triboelectric. At the same time, the company is advancing the construction of a data collection system that integrates tactile and first-person vision, working with industry partners to promote the construction of large-scale real-human data collection scenarios, and improving data collection, model adaptation, and development tools.