RobotPlusPlus Raises Series C to Scale Hull-Derusting Robots Globally

RobotPlusPlus (ROBOT++), a Beijing-based industrial robotics company, has closed a Series C round worth hundreds of millions of RMB (tens of millions of dollars) to accelerate global expansion and embodied AI development. Qianggang Capital Fund led the round, joined by GIG Capital Group, Sealand Innovation, and Juntong Capital, with existing investor Fosun RZ Capital increasing its stake.

Founded by CEO Dr. Hua-Yang Xu, RobotPlusPlus builds special-purpose robots for dangerous industrial maintenance work, including shipyards, oil-and-gas facilities, wind farms, and building facades, tasks that traditionally put skilled workers on scaffolding and other hazardous structures. Its hull-derusting robots have been deployed at more than 100 shipyards with market share above 70%, working on over 10,000 cargo vessels, improving efficiency five to six times and reducing costs by 30% to 50% compared with manual methods.

A narrow starting point built for genuine global scale

RobotPlusPlus operates across more than 18 countries, with customers including NOSCO Shipyard, Drydocks World, ST Engineering Marine, Saudi Aramco, and Vopak. More than 60% of its workforce sits in R&D, with R&D spending above 20% of revenue for three consecutive years, and its robots have accumulated over 2 million operating hours, data the company uses to strengthen vertical AI models for industrial environments. Fosun RZ Capital first invested in 2022 and has continued increasing its position through four years of the company's growth.

A hard-to-copy market position built on physical deployment, not software alone

Market share above 70% across more than 100 shipyards is an unusually dominant position for a robotics company at the Series C stage, and it is the kind of number that is difficult to reproduce quickly precisely because it required years of iterating the hardware and safety systems in genuinely hazardous physical environments, not just refining a software model in a lab. A new entrant attempting to compete for hull-derusting contracts would need to rebuild that safety and reliability track record from zero, while RobotPlusPlus continues compounding its operating-hours data advantage with every additional vessel serviced. The customer roster, spanning Saudi Aramco's energy operations to ST Engineering Marine's defense-adjacent shipyards, also suggests the company has cleared security and procurement bars that typically take incumbents years to satisfy, a further layer of defensibility beyond the underlying technology itself.

What this means for founders

RobotPlusPlus's path, a decade spent perfecting one narrow, dangerous, high-value task before expanding into adjacent industrial applications, is a useful counterpoint to the more common embodied-AI pitch of building a general-purpose humanoid robot first. Ten years of deployment data across 10,000-plus vessels is a moat that's difficult for a newer, broader competitor to replicate quickly, and it's the kind of proof point international investors like Fosun RZ Capital have rewarded with a fifth consecutive year of continued investment. For founders in industrial or physical-world robotics specifically, a narrow, dangerous, well-defined task with a clear efficiency and cost case is often a stronger initial wedge than a broader platform ambition.

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