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Japan's SoftBank Group recently announced that it will establish a joint venture company with Symbotic, an American warehousing supply chain service provider, to operate the warehousing business based on artificial intelligence technology, it is understood that SoftBank Group and Symbotic will jointly invest 100 million US dollars to establish this new company, the new company name is "Greenbox System". And it will purchase $7.5 billion worth of artificial intelligence warehousing systems from Symbotic for its warehouse facilities.
Last month, holding more than 35 billion dollars of SoftBank Group founder Masayoshi Sun high-profile announced that SoftBank "from defense to attack" mode, once huge losses let Masayoshi Sun painful, while the AI this wave is still in the ups and downs, the silence for 7 months had "a few days to tears" of the man ready to roll up his sleeves.
In his first stop on the offensive, Son targeted Telexistence, a Japanese robotics startup that recently announced it had raised 23 billion yen ($170 million) in Series B funding. Investors include SoftBank, Airbus Venture Capital Fund, GLP's Monoful Partners, KDDI Open Innovation Investment Fund (a fund set up by Foxconn and CTBC Financial Holdings), and Japan's Globis Capital Partners.
Robots are a popular start-up sector in Japan, and Telexistence, founded in 2017 and headquartered in Tokyo, is a robot manufacturer that develops AI-powered robotic arms for the retail and logistics industries, and has already deployed more than 300 robots at FamilyMart stores in Japan. He is joined by LexxPluss Robotics, which raised ¥1.45 billion in the first half of the year, led by Drone Fund, with SOSV's HAX, Incubate Fund, SBI Investment and DBJ Capital.
In addition to investing in Telexistence, SoftBank will also support its commercialization in the North American market and enter into a strategic partnership with Telexistence, which already works with Foxconn to produce the next generation of remotely operated robots called Ghost.
Then, Sun Zhengyi stared at the AI intelligent logistics, SoftBank has held 5% of Symbotic company at this stage, SoftBank also bought 17.8 million shares of Symbotic Company stock from Symbotic CEO Rick Cohen, and continued to expand the proportion of shareholding. At the same time, the joint venture Greenbox is 65% owned by SoftBank. In just one month, these two investments were operated, which confirmed that Son Zhengyi had said that "from defense to attack" in artificial intelligence was not an empty shot.
According to a statement from Vikas Parekh, a senior executive at SoftBank Investment Advisors, Greenbox will continue to make efforts in areas such as AI and robotics to provide more enterprises with warehouse automation solutions. One of the major shareholders, Symbotic, is a company engaged in the development of warehousing robots for many years, and Walmart, one of the world's largest supermarket brands, is an important customer of Symbotic, which is planning to deploy Symbotic robots in 42 regional distribution centers across the United States.
Before the "from defense to attack" mode was opened, SoftBank also tried the robot track, but the friendship between SoftBank and robots did not have too many good results before. In 2018, SoftBank invested $375 million in Zume Pizza, a company with ambitions to bring robots to cars to make pizza for customers, declared bankruptcy in June this year, and raised about $500 million in total before bankruptcy. Market research firm pitchbook also gave a negative data for SoftBank, the world's 26 AI unicorn (valued at more than $1 billion) startups, SoftBank has only invested in one of them.
At the beginning of July, Bytedance announced that it would recruit troops to expand the robot team, and set two goals: one is to use robots to prioritize the e-commerce performance needs of bytes, and the other is to focus on cutting-edge technology and explore the use of AI large model capabilities to robots. CEO Zhang Yiming bluntly stated at the meeting that the industrialization goal of "1000 units" set by the team was too small, saying: "Why Tesla wants to engage in 10 billion units, we only engage in 1000 units?"
Bytedance's investment comes from having the brand of Tiktok e-commerce. In recent years, the scale of Tiktok e-commerce has continued to expand, becoming another e-commerce platform with more consumer choices after Taobao, Jingdong and Pin-duo. Robots will help reduce the pressure of insufficient logistics and warehousing manpower during the Tiktok e-commerce festival, bear the short-term high work intensity demand, and achieve the purpose of reducing costs and increasing efficiency. Despite this, many people are not optimistic about Byte's robot industry, and think that his biggest shipment may be "their own people."
And Son Justice in the field of artificial intelligence many times, this bold and bold operation, is to reverse SoftBank once in the field of robotics poor vision of the decline, or into the AI vortex more difficult to pull out, I believe that soon we can see the answer.