New Delhi:- In the crowded enterprise robotics market, the ability to attract key customers is a key business differentiator. In the case of Hong Kong-based Rice Robotics, a key order came from SoftBank.

Since January 2021, a cartoonishly cute, blink-eyed Rice robot has been delivering 7-Eleven products to SoftBank employees at the company's new headquarters in Takeshiba, Tokyo. These robots can carry a payload of 30 kg and have a storage space of 39 x 27 x 34 cm.

With Rice, delivery workers simply drop off customer orders at designated locations and the robot picks up the goods, eliminating the need to travel between office buildings. The robot can work continuously for 12 hours and can be charged within an hour.   

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Valuations from SoftBank and other clients have led multiple investors to back Rice's recent $7 million pre-Series A funding round. These include Alibaba Entrepreneur Fund, Soul Capital, Audacy Ventures, Sun Hung Kai & Company, and Cyberport HK. There are no major investors in this round.

Rice said the funding will enable further expansion into Japan, which is currently the company's largest source of revenue. Rice's Japanese customers include SoftBank, Toyota Motor, Japan Post, and Mitsui Group. Japan's aging population and openness to new technologies have made Japan a popular destination for Chinese robotics companies looking to expand internationally. For example, ByteDance-backed warehouse robot maker Sirius Robotics was among the first to enter Japan.

South China is home to arguably the world's top hardware supply chain. In fact, Rice builds its robots in Hong Kong rather than in mainland China, where factories are plentiful and labor is cheap.

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The four-year-old company previously built its robots through mainland original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), but has found that manufacturing locally has significantly reduced the unit cost of its robots, Rice says. founder and CEO Victor Lee told TechCrunch.

Victor Lee explained that mass production in mainland China is more economical, but the scale of rice production is too small to achieve economies of scale. Furthermore, the Hong Kong government is actively working to attract advanced manufacturing industries in order to diversify its economy, which is losing its attractiveness as an Asian financial center. 

A portion of Rice's new funding was used to build a manufacturing facility in Hong Kong. The facility covers an area of ​​13,000 square meters and has quadrupled the company's annual robot capacity from 500 to 2,000.

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Starting at his $9,000 price tag, Rice's robot uses his popular simultaneous localization and mapping technology known as SLAM for navigation. A key advantage of SLAM is that it continuously compares sensor data to a given map, allowing the system to create an accurate on-the-fly model of the environment and estimate the exact position of the robot.

In addition to service robots, Rice also offers a line of sanitizing robots, but like many other robotics companies, demand has surged during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

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Softbank has got up with an Office delivery of Rice which costs around $7 Million and Hong Kong puts this work on its cute Robots that are on it very efficiently.