The Cathay Smart Energy Fund invests in the industrial IoT solutions provider ALLSENSE Technology
July 20, 2020
Asia
The Cathay Smart Energy Fund recently announced the successful completion of an exclusive Series A+ funding round worth tens of millions of RMB in ALLSENSE Technology, an industrial IoT solutions provider. ALLSENSE Technology specializes in integrating cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology with production processes in order to upgrade traditional industrial operations and so maximize efficiency, safety, energy-consumption, and intelligent design through industrial Internet solutions. The additional funds will primarily go to marketing and product development.
China is the largest producer and consumer of thermal power in the world, with three main applications: industrial heat cogeneration, urban heating and electricity generation. The difficulty in transporting heat over long distances has given rise to a large number of firms specialized in heat production technologies like boiler rooms and cogeneration. These companies are widely dispersed, they have low production and management controls, and are confronted with serious difficulties relating to high costs, low energy efficiency, high pollution and dependence on manual expertise. It is thus crucial to optimize the thermal power industry from production to transmission and consumption with the latest data technologies and intelligent controls in order to save energy, improve quality and efficiency, and reduce pollution.
In response to the bottleneck facing the thermal power industry and the “Made in China 2025” initiative, ALLSENSE Technology, founded in 2016, integrates thermoelectric production mechanisms with expert knowledge in IoT, big data and artificial intelligence technologies to offer a complete industrial Internet solution to the thermal power ecosystem. Customers have already saved millions of RMB thanks to state-of-the-art intelligent data collection tools monitoring thermoelectric production, transmission and consumption processes in real time, which in turn enables the conception of a digital twin of these energy systems in the cloud, and the live calculation of optimal control parameters.
In 2019, ALLSENSE Technology’s products were made compatible with nearly all thermal power processes. Benchmark projects were also developed in the provinces of Shaanxi, Jiangsu, Shanxi as well as other provinces and cities, with many more projects under construction.
The Cathay Smart Energy Fund invests in new technologies and innovative business models in China’s energy industry. ALLSENSE Technology is the first investment of the Cathay Smart Energy Fund since its closing at the end of last year and will serve as reference for the thermal power industry. Cathay will continue to develop and explore new technologies and business innovations emerging to transform the traditional energy industry, especially in the fields of digital transformation, Internet of Energy, battery and energy storage technologies, the optimization of energy distribution systems, new materials, etc. These technological and organizational upgrades to entire industrial ecosystems will accelerate the transition toward smart cities, smart factories and energy systems which are diversified, sustainable and low-carbon.
Zhang Li, Partner of the Cathay Smart Energy Fund, said: “We strongly believe in the potential of industrial IoT to transform the sectors touched by industrial automation. ALLSENSE Technology’s IoT solutions aim to bring about an intelligent thermal power industry founded on its deep sectorial expertise and its penetration of all industrial production processes. This greatly improves efficiency, saves costs for customers and removes the most troublesome problems facing industrial actors and customers. Moreover, thanks to the data it accumulates and to its deep technological know-how, ALLSENSE may in the future scale its business to even more useful applications in other energy-consuming industries and thus further contribute to roll out intelligent industrial processes.”
Dr. Xia Jiantao, Founder of ALLSENSE Technology, said: “ALLSENSE Technology currently focuses on providing China’s thermal power industrial actors with intelligent digital services leveraging big data, AI and cloud technologies in order to help clients create value through improved quality, energy savings and reduced consumption, and to accompany their progress toward more eco-friendly power production. Customers can save millions of RMB every year while contributing to cleaning China’s skies. In the future, ALLSENSE Technology will provide intelligent services for more energy-intensive industrial processes to reduce energy consumption and improve quality. The Cathay Smart Energy Fund focuses on transforming, upgrading and cleaning the processes of the energy industry, which matches perfectly with ALLSENSE Technology’s own mission. Our partnership will considerably accelerate the development of ALLSENSE Technology.”
The Cathay Smart Energy Fund is Cathay’s third fund denominated in RMB. Its first closing welcomed cornerstone investors including the Total Group and Hubei High Technology Investment Guiding Fund Management Co., Ltd., as well as prestigious investors such as France’s shipping giant CMA CGM Group and Wuhan Jingkai Industry Investment Fund Management Co.,Ltd.. The Cathay Smart Energy Fund focuses especially on fields including the Internet of energy, energy storage, distributed energy, energy solutions for green vehicles, renewable energy and low-carbon technologies. It invests mainly in companies in their early, middle and expansion growth stages with single investment tickets over 30 million RMB. By supporting innovative companies exploring the Internet of energy, digitalization or platform-driven technologies in China, Cathay uses its capital, industrial resources and international influence to foster the leap forward of its participations with the overarching objective of transforming China’s energy sector through digitalization and low-carbon technologies.