Hibot seals new capital alliance with Mirai Souzou and SEKISUI CHEMICAL
(Tokyo, Aug 24) Hibot Corp., an innovative robotics start-up pioneering infrastructure maintenance applications announced that it has acquired new funding and entered into a new capital and business agreement with Innovations and Future Creation Inc. (Mirai Souzou), as a lead investor, and SEKISUI CHEMICAL Co., Ltd. (SEKISUI CHEMICAL). This is the first closing of this round of fundraising which is scheduled to be completed with the second closing by fall 2022.
Mirai Souzou additional investment as a leading VC
Mirai Souzou signed an agreement with Tokyo Institute of Technology to promote social collaboration activities in 2016, and established a venture capital fund related to the university. Mirai Souzou also built a growth team in 2022 to support Deep Tech start-up companies for growing their business from a variety aspect.
This is the second investment by Mirai Souzou in hibot as a lead investor since February 2020. Mirai Souzou will continue pursuing its goal to support hibot's growth as a leading VC.
On the capital alliance with SEKISUI CHEMICAL
SEKISUI CHEMICAL manufactures and sells various piping materials, such as water pipes, drainage pipes, and air conditioning pipes for homes, buildings, and other structures, as well as valves and high-performance pipes for factories, and is engaged in business development using repair, rehabilitation, and renewal methods to address aging infrastructure, which is a social issue. Hibot will utilize the robot technology it has developed to date, which can operate in cramped and harsh environments, to pioneer new maintenance methods in collaboration with SEKISUI CHEMICAL, aiming to promote Digital Transformation and automation of infrastructure inspection and maintenance work.
Aim of this fundraising
In addition to sales of smart tools for inspection of infrastructure, hibot offers RaaS (Robot as a Service), a total service that combines robots and software, including rental, dispatching maintenance engineers, maintaining infrastructure facilities, and analyzing and providing inspection data using HiBox.
With this fundraising, hibot will strengthen its supply chain to accelerate sales and rental of various smart tools in Japan and worldwide, starting with Float Arm, an articulated robot arm with a self-weight compensation function. Hibot will also enhance and provide HiBox, a cloud platform for storing and analyzing infrastructure inspection data, aiming to become a platform that provides comprehensive solutions for the global Non-Destructive Testing (NDT) market, which exceeds 1 trillion yen.
Comments
Hiroyuki Okada, CEO of Mirai Souzou: “As new social changes take root, remote, unmanned, and automated operations, which hibot has been challenging, are becoming widespread in our society. In addition, robots are increasingly replacing the harsh operations at workplaces, where human safety is paramount, and inspections are becoming more and more automated. These are issues that are common to the world, and there are growing expectations to hibot as a global company. I look forward to seeing hibot continue to play an active role at the center of the wave of automation in various operations.
Michele Guarnieri, CEO of hibot: "SEKISUI CHEMICAL joining hibot brings not only more resources but it helps in the acceleration of the deployment of our solutions for the inspection and maintenance of infrastructures. With SEKISUI CHEMICAL and hibot's unique solutions we are making one more step toward the realization of a safer world with robotics. I am very looking forward to the developments that we will take ahead together with SEKISUI CHEMICAL. I also thank the confirmation of Mirai Souzou leading position, which sees our growth opportunity, by supporting it with their reinvestment. With SEKISUI CHEMICAL, Mirai Souzou and other stakeholders, we are going to step up to the next business stage with our innovative solutions.”
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| Float Arm in action inside BASF plant | |
About hibot
Established in 2004, hibot is a robotics start-up originating from within the Tokyo Institute of Technology, committed to realizing a safer and more sustainable world by creating new trends in infrastructure inspection and maintenance. Hibot develops and utilizes AI-powered remotely controlled robots that allow human beings to be removed from dirty, dangerous or demanding working environments. Hibot’s robots have been applied in search and rescue missions, and have been used during decommissioning work at Japan’s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. CEO: Michele Guarnieri.
For more information, see http://www.hibot.co.jp
Contact:
Takeyuki Iijima, Takuya Takenokuchi
Telephone: +81 (0)3 5791 7526
E-mail: press@hibot.co.jp