Machine Vision-Powered Smart Manufacturing for Vision Care and Ophthalmic Products: Pingfanghe Technology Secures Nearly RMB 1 Billion in Series B+ Financing | 36Kr Exclusive

Text｜Hu Xiangyun

Editor｜Hai Ruojing

36Kr learned that Sigma Squares (Beijing) Tech Co., Ltd. ("Sigma Squares Technology") has recently completed a nearly RMB 100 million B+ round of financing. This round of financing was exclusively invested by the Beijing Advanced Manufacturing and Intelligent Equipment Industry Investment Fund. The funds will be mainly used for research and development, expanding, and implementing new industry applications.

Notably, in October 2024, Sigma Squares (Beijing) Tech Co., Ltd. has just completed a financing round worth hundreds of millions of yuan. The new investors in this round include TC Capital, Oriza Ventures, Yahu Investment, and Xiangcheng Financial Holdings, while existing shareholders Cloudview Capital, Boxin Capital, and Entropy One Capital continued their support. This marks another significant financing round completed by the company within a year.

Sigma Squares was founded in 2018, focusing on providing intelligent solutions based on computer vision systems. Dr. Zhonglun Cai, the founder, previously worked at CooperVision and has over 10 years of development experience in the field of industrial vision systems. At this stage, the company's main service areas are concentrated in the optometry and ophthalmology industry, high-end medical devices, and pharmaceuticals. Its clients include leading contact lens manufacturers such as CooperVision, Hicon Group, Tiluo Group, Aiborn Group, and Consigma Group, as well as domestic and international pharmaceutical and medical device companies like Sinopharm Group, Novartis, Daiichi Sankyo, Yangtze River Pharmaceutical, Kelun Pharmaceutical, Jafron, and Weigao.

In 2024, Sigma Squares (Beijing) Tech Co., Ltd. has achieved an income of several hundred million yuan.Among them, the businesses related to contact lenses and optometric consumables account for the majority. The company predicts that within the next 2 to 3 years, the contact lens business will remain the main operation, but the intelligent upgrade of pharmaceuticals and other medical devices will be the primary direction of development.

Cai Zhonglun introduced that in recent years, the transformation of traditional manufacturing to intelligent manufacturing has been a major trend, but existing solutions often remain at the "simple application stage of robots or automated equipment." "We believe that true intelligent manufacturing can only be achieved when automated equipment serves as the carrier, enhanced by artificial intelligence technology and industrial software to continuously provide feedback, thereby assisting in process improvement and production optimization. This is precisely where Sigma Squares' strength lies."

Specifically, in the细分赛道 of the contact lens business, first, its production volume often needs to be very large to maintain effective profits. For example, a traditional production line with an annual output of 10 million lenses requires nearly a hundred workers. Using the traditional "labor-intensive" approach, achieving an annual production of 100-200 million lenses would require expanding to 20 production lines and hiring thousands of workers. Considering current labor costs and other factors in China, this method is quite difficult to achieve. "However, if intelligent production lines are used, a single line would only need about 10 workers. Therefore, this will become the main method for related companies'后期扩张."

On the other hand, the machine vision inspection technology for optometric products made of transparent materials, such as contact lenses and optical lenses, is relatively more challenging. Specifically, first, many defects on transparent materials require special optical imaging systems to be visible. Second, this involves a multi-medium concept; since finished contact lenses need to be stored in liquid, distinguishing defects on the lenses from impurities in the container or liquid is also an industry challenge. Third, 90% of products in the Asian region are cosmetic lenses with printed patterns, and detecting these printed patterns has been a long-standing industry difficulty. Additionally, these patterns often overlap with or resemble physical defects, necessitating the development of more optical systems to minimize their impact. When these challenges are compounded by the time sensitivity and cost control required in industrial production, the integration and implementation of numerous emerging technologies become essential to achieving breakthroughs.

Traditional manual detection methods have problems such as low efficiency, high training costs, and significant quality control fluctuations. In comparison, machine vision detection can effectively address these shortcomings. Moreover, it can provide effective and real-time feedback data, which is highly beneficial for the continuous improvement of production and manufacturing.

"Although our current perspective starts from the quality inspection stage, we have already integrated machine vision into the entire production process, enabling tasks such as defect attribute classification. This allows the inspection work to go beyond the simple concept of ensuring good products and eliminating defective ones. It can feed relevant data back into the production process. For example, by analyzing which batches certain defects are more concentrated in, we can identify issues in the production process, helping to improve future production work and increase efficiency. These are the true areas where the intelligent manufacturing system empowers industrial production," explained Cai Zhonglun.

According to the introduction, Insvis, the proprietary brand of Sigma Squares (Beijing) Tech Co., Ltd, mainly focuses on providing defect detection for transparent material products in the medical device and pharmaceutical fields (such as contact lenses, optical lenses, and medical consumables). Particularly in the inspection of contact lenses and transparent materials, the company has gradually expanded to various process stages of the production process. From detecting physical defects/surface flaws in contact lens production, it has progressively extended to cover the entire industry chain, including printing, injection molding, demolding, cleaning, and final packaging inspection. Combined with a range of digital and intelligent manufacturing equipment and industrial data platform software designed and developed by the company itself, a complete intelligent system for the contact lens industry has been successfully established.

In June 2023, Sigma Squares (Beijing) Tech Co., Ltd. launched the "Full-Process Intelligent Contact Lens Production Line" for the first time in the Asian region. Through a fully automated, no-touch, traceable, high-capacity, and intelligently scheduled production process, it achieved the transformation of contact lens products from traditional manufacturing to intelligent manufacturing.It is reported that after this, all major customers in China's mainland contact lens industry adopted a similar layout.

Sigma Squares Tech believes that, according to calculations, in the next 3 to 5 years, the number of new production lines for contact lenses in mainland China alone "will be around 200, corresponding to a market potential worth billions of yuan." If the entire Asian and European and American regions are considered, the potential market scale could be even larger.

Based on this, the business of Sigma Squares (Beijing) Tech Co., Ltd. is gradually expanding from mainland China to Taiwan, China, as well as to other surrounding Asian regions such as Southeast Asia, Japan, and South Korea, "because the development of the cosmetic contact lens industry in Asia is relatively faster." Once the business in these areas becomes relatively mature, the company will also consider focusing on expanding into Europe and the United States.

In addition, Sigma Squares is also simultaneously expanding and laying out the market in the fields of biopharmaceuticals and medical device/consumables testing. Taking biopharmaceutical testing as an example, Sigma Squares has independently developed the Pharmvis pharmaceutical product line and the Medivis medical product line, which can be applied to various testing scenarios for solid and liquid medicines, as well as the production, manufacturing, and testing of various medical devices and consumables.

Cai Zhonglun admitted that the competition in these fields is relatively fierce, and it is necessary to balance the issues of product performance and cost-effectiveness, "in order to cope with the current 'involution' situation in the entire pharmaceuticals industry. However, we will reduce costs through technological advancements, rather than merely cutting prices to gain market share."