Laiye picks up $42m

Laiye Technology, an AI interactive platform, has secured $42 million in funding. Lightspeed Venture Partners and Lightspeed China Partners led the round with participation from Cathay Innovation and Wu Capital.

PRESS RELEASE

Recently, Cathay Innovation portfolio, Laiye Technology, announced the completion of C round of $42M financing. This round of financing was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Lightspeed China Partners. Cathay Innovation and Wu Capital continued to follow. The company is now the best funded in China’s RPA+AI market.

Guanchun WANG, Chairman and CEO of Laiye said, “The funds will allow Laiye to recruit the best AI talent across the globe to strengthen our business development and technology. Over the past year, Laiye has established a nationwide sales network, and acquired dozens of Fortune China 500 customers. Over 75% of large enterprises in China have expressed interests in enhancing their RPA projects with AI capabilities.

According to Wei LI, Co-CEO and President of Laiye, the company is the undisputable leader in building China’s RPA ecosystem with more than 200 partners and 200,000 developers that have registered for Laiye’s RPA platform product UiBot.

It is noteworthy that Laiye also announced that Jiaqi WENG，a veteran in China’s AI industry and former CTO of Emotibot, recently joined Laiye as Vice President of Solution Engineering. Currently, UiBot already allows integration with Laiye’s native and 3rd party AI capabilities, such as natural language processing, optical character recognition, computer vision, chatbot and machine learning.

Since January, Laiye has provided community-level government agencies free software robots to combat the epidemic by helping automate the process of calling the residents to collect health information and aggregate data for reporting. Guanchun WANG also promised to donate 1% of their annual profit to philanthropic projects in the future upon the annoucement of this round of financing.

Lanchun DUAN, Cathay Capital’s managing partner said:” Cathay has always been concerned about and optimistic about the field of toB services, and has invested in a number of related innovative companies in China, Europe and the United States. As a representative of China’s RPA + AI industry, Laiye showed good professional ability and influence when competing with similar international products. Especially during this epidemic period, Laiye launched applications such as the epidemic management process automation software robot platform and community health greeting robot in a short time. Which not only shows the company’s social responsibility, but also the solid technology accumulation behind it for many years. Cathay will continue to use its cross-border resources to promote cooperation and help Laiye to be at the forefront of labor transformation in the intelligent era.”

Laiye Corporation is regarded as“the UiPath’s equivalent” in China by some domestic press, “with more local AI capabilities and comprehensive services”.