36 Krypton learned that X3000 Inspection Co., Ltd, an intelligent inspection equipment company, recently announced the completion of a Pre-A round of financing in the amount of tens of millions of RMB, co-led by Atomic Ventures and Guolian Gold Investment Zhiyuan, and followed by Huagong Technology. This round of financing will be mainly used for batch delivery of equipment, enhancing technology reserves, and expanding R&D and sales teams.

As a company long tracked by 36 Krypton, X3000 Inspection Co., Ltd was founded in 2021, targeting the demand for product internal defect detection in the industrial market and providing customers with high-efficiency and high-precision X-Ray online automatic inspection equipment by combining artificial intelligence with X-ray flaw detection technology. In the past year, GongYuan SanQian has focused on two major lanes in the lithium battery and electronic semiconductor industries and reached in-depth cooperation consensus with many head customers.

In fact, since X-ray inspection technology can visually reflect the internal structure of products in the form of images, X-Ray has been commonly used in the lithium battery industry for 20 years to inspect the alignment of electrode cells. Today, with the leadership and support of industry leaders, the high-end consumer electronics and lithium battery industries are importing X-Ray online full inspection in large quantities, and the industrial X-Ray equipment industry is beginning to usher in a period of rapid growth.

Relevant data shows that in the past three years, the lithium battery X-Ray inspection equipment market has grown by more than 30% per year, and the X-Ray inspection equipment market in the electronics industry has grown by more than 20% per year, and the overall market size has exceeded RMB 10 billion.

Zuo Jiaming, founder and CEO of X3000 Inspection Co., Ltd, told 36 Krypton that service life, detection efficiency and detection accuracy are the three basic indicators that determine the comprehensive use efficiency of industrial equipment. However, the company found in its market research that the mainstream X-Ray equipment companies have only completed the integration of equipment and entered the market relying on better supply chain management and prices, but have not conducted in-depth research and development in industry core aspects such as X-Ray imaging solutions, mechanical automation design and automatic detection algorithms.

Therefore, many devices in the current market can only do basic information acquisition, and it is difficult to carry out deep learning of high-definition processing of images, not to mention the inability to achieve high-precision automatic detection, which leads to a high rate of missed detection and false alarm of the overall equipment, affecting the comprehensive use efficiency and productivity of the equipment.

For example, in lithium battery pole piece inspection, X-Ray images are grayscale maps, and the defects detected are similar in color to the product body, with relatively faint features, plus many background interferences, which has been a major pain point for X-Ray equipment inspection. The current mainstream detection method is human eye comparison + traditional image processing assistance, and the actual delivery of false alarm rate often exceeds 15% or even 20%.

Facing this pain point, X3000 Inspection Co., Ltd has proposed a multi-dimensional joint model based on image segmentation based on years of AI algorithm accumulation to achieve accurate and robust detection results. In the pre-startup stage, the company has already modified the X-Ray equipment of many head lithium battery manufacturers to reduce the overall NG ratio to within 2%. At present, the company has basically completed the development of most models of 2D X-Ray in-line equipment, covering applications such as coiled cells, stacked cells, circuit boards and power semiconductors.

From the business level, in 2022, the company will mainly help customers to carry out X-Ray equipment modification, while carrying out technology reserve for mass production, with the core of building a multi-dimensional joint model for lithium battery scenarios. The company's X-Ray products have entered the customer introduction stage and are being shipped one after another, and the order volume is steadily growing. Talking about the target for 2023, Zuo Jiaming mentioned that he hopes to achieve scale delivery this year while continuing to promote cooperation with head customers.

"X-Ray is a more general technology, but its application scenarios are not limited to the lithium battery and electronic semiconductor industries." Zuo Jiaming talked about how X3000 Inspection Co., Ltd will further explore more application directions for X-Ray technology in the future, such as 3D printing, MiniLED, silicon carbide modules, etc.

What the investors say:

Yang Zhao, Vice President of Atomic Ventures, said, "X-Ray NDT technology has great industrial application value and has become an indispensable key inspection technology for high-end manufacturing. With the rapid development of China's high-end manufacturing industry, the market demand for industrial X-Ray is exploding, and there is an urgent need to break the foreign monopoly. At the same time, talents are scarce in this field, and X3000 Inspection Co., Ltd. has accumulated many years of technology in the field of industrial X-Ray online inspection, and its products have been successfully delivered to customers. We are very optimistic about the team and the development prospect of Gong Yuan San Qian."

Zhang Lin, Investment Director of Guolian Gold Investment Zhiyuan, said: "Intelligent manufacturing is constantly giving new energy to traditional industries, giving manufacturing more efficiency and better results, and bringing the world into a new era where technological revolution and industrial change meet. X3000 Inspection Co., Ltd, as an excellent start-up in the field of intelligent manufacturing, combines artificial intelligence and X-ray inspection technology to realize industrial X-ray online inspection, which completely eliminates the hidden danger of product quality while liberating labor. We expect X3000 Inspection Co., Ltd to continue to cultivate intelligent manufacturing, cover more application scenarios and contribute to the quality optimization of China's manufacturing industry."

Zhu Jianfeng, Investment Director of Huagong Technology, said, "As a listed company engaged in the new energy and intelligent manufacturing industry, Huagong Technology is very optimistic about the future wide application of AI+X-Ray technology solutions in industrial image inspection. With further refinement and integration in the new energy battery industry, as well as trends such as 3D stacking in the integrated circuit and electronics manufacturing industry, this track will see rapid development. The current X-Ray equipment for industrial image inspection has the pain points of high false detection rate, high leakage rate and low efficiency. X3000 Inspection Co., Ltd's self-developed high-speed reconstruction algorithm can significantly reduce the amount of back-projection operations, improve the efficiency of simulation acceleration, and quickly reconstruct the tomographic data of products in a short period of time to solve the pain points of industrial customers."