)--Linking the technological frontier, serving business innovationRecently, LLVISION, a leading AR+AI platform in China, announced the completion of a strategic investment of RMB 100 million in its Series C1 round. Against the backdrop of rapid structural shifts in the industry, the company has taken the lead in entering the acceleration track, spearheading the digital empowerment and upgrading of the industrial chain. This financing round was jointly backed by Yizhuang Sci-Tech Innovation, UMC Capital, and Essence Securities, with Scale Partners serving as the exclusive financial advisor. This underscores the capital market's confidence in both the AR sector and LLVISION.
Wu Fei, Founder and CEO of LLVISON, stated, "Following this round of financing, the company will continue to leverage core AR+AI technologies such as natural interaction, machine learning, and AR smart hardware, striving to become a builder of enterprise metaverse gateways. Together with upstream and downstream industry partners, we will explore and support the construction and development of the enterprise metaverse industry across technology, standards, and applications."
Investor: Only industry chain companies can trigger a butterfly effect.
Founded in 2014, LLVISION has consistently served as a pioneer in the AR+AI platform sector, providing related hardware products and software services that are widely applied across the industrial, security, and healthcare industries. It has become the first enterprise in the industry to achieve a "closed-loop" development model, and is also the first AR company in China to successfully complete Series B and B+ funding rounds.
Mr. Deng of Yizhuang Sci-Tech Innovation stated that the organization highly appreciates LLVISION's vision of building a gateway to the industrial metaverse, acknowledges its achievements to date, and remains optimistic about and supportive of LLVISION's future development. Yizhuang Sci-Tech Innovation will continue to deepen industry engagement alongside LLVISION, leveraging flagship projects to foster upstream and downstream synergy across the industrial chain, and through cumulative efforts, help turn the industrial metaverse into a reality.
Looking back at the history of the Internet revolution, whether it entails the succession of dominant forces during the transition between old and new eras or positions the metaverse as the ultimate form of the Internet, it all points to the competition for discourse power and a commanding position in the industry value chain. Li Fan, Managing Director of Investment at Essence Securities Co., Ltd., stated: “Looking across the entire AR sector, LLVISON is building a higher-dimensional digital platform with superior resource allocation efficiency. We place particular emphasis on its technological advancement and the scarcity of its product model. We firmly believe that under the leadership of Wu Fei, LLVISON will achieve rapid and sustained growth.”
Shen Jinyao, President of Jue Capital, manager of the Liandian Fund, stated: “The LLVISION team possesses a profound technological foundation, through which it has delivered AR digital products offering an exceptional user experience to the industry. Building on this, the LLVISION team remains grounded in the core fundamentals of the sector and, in collaboration with various industry stakeholders, is constructing an industry-leading innovative ecosystem platform. As an industry chain partner of LLVISION, we are honored to have witnessed the company’s rapid advancement in both technology and commercialization. We have every reason to believe that LLVISION will deliver exceptional value creation for the industry.”
Liu Yinghang, Partner at Scale Partners, stated, "Drawing on our years of deep involvement in the technology sector and experience collaborating with standout startups, we believe AR is poised to usher in a new wave of global development opportunities. It is expected to serve as a gateway to the metaverse, fostering entirely new interaction paradigms and platforms. LLVISION, having built substantial expertise over the years and now reaching a breakthrough, boasts a full-stack solution integrating AR hardware, software, and AI. Its industry deployments have already garnered recognition from numerous lighthouse clients. With the successful completion of this funding round, the company will step into a new stage of accelerated growth. Scale Partners is honored to participate in this round, providing in-depth capital services to LLVISION to help accelerate its development."
AR Gains Momentum: Entering the Golden Era of B2B Development
With the maturation of large-scale infrastructure such as 5G, AI, and the Internet of Things (IoT), China's AR sector has demonstrated strong growth momentum over the past two years. According to Greenlight forecasts, the global AR market size reached RMB 45 billion in 2020, and global investment in related products and services has sustained rapid growth. Additionally, IDC data indicates that AR/VR technology-related investment in the Chinese market will reach USD 5.76 billion in 2020, accounting for over 30% of the global market share and making China the country with the largest expenditure in this sector.
In just 2–3 years, the AR industry has transitioned from a downturn to a resurgence and then to robust growth, driven by two key factors:
On the one hand, AR enterprises represented by LLVISON are content to remain steadfast in obscurity. During the industry's downturn, they diligently focus on technological breakthroughs and expertise accumulation, firmly laying solid groundwork in critical areas, and await the opportune moment with a proactive yet composed demeanor.
During the “downturn”, LLVISON remained undisturbed by external conditions, dedicating itself to the continuous practical transformation of AR across core technologies encompassed by the AR sector, including optics, computing, operating systems, interactive applications, and cloud platforms. By successfully integrating an end-to-end technology stack spanning critical optics, edge computing, and functional platforms, the company propelled the AR industry into a phase characterized by usability, ease of use, and practical excellence, thereby laying a solid foundation for large-scale commercialization for both itself and the broader industry.
On the other hand, it has accurately pinpointed its strategic foothold. As a next-generation revolutionary interaction technology, AR will struggle to build user retention if it relies solely on novelty-driven experiences and gaming before truly disrupting the human-computer interaction experience. To achieve widespread adoption, AR must answer a core question: What tangible value can it ultimately deliver to consumers? This should be evaluated across three dimensions:
Uniqueness: Only AR can do this;
Advantage: This task can be performed more effectively and efficiently with AR;
Target Audience: Who can benefit the most from AR technology.
Looking back from the present, the answer is readily apparent: the enterprise sector is the true starting point for the commercialization of the AR industry. As indicated in 《2021 In-Depth Report on the VR/AR Industry》 jointly released by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), Essence Securities Research Center, and VRPC, due to technical constraints, sales of consumer-facing products such as Google Glass and Magic Leap One fell far short of expectations. Subsequently, most manufacturers adjusted their product strategies, shifting from the consumer (To C) market to the enterprise (To B) market. An event from June of this year remains vivid in memory: Magic Leap, once the premier publicly listed company in the AR industry, took decisive and drastic measures to salvage its business, pivoting to enterprise services through corporate restructuring.
According to Accenture's workforce data covering 14 G20 countries, 14 industries, and 432 occupations, nearly all industries can benefit from significant productivity growth driven by augmented reality (AR), particularly in healthcare, education, manufacturing, and mining.
As early as 2016, LLVISION proposed a four-phase strategic roadmap encompassing Large-B, Small-B, Large-C, and Small-C segments. Wu Fei believes that the AR business will inevitably and necessarily transition from a B2B to a B2C model—first addressing the needs of specific user groups before scaling to meet the demands of the broader public. Driven by this precise forward-looking judgment and targeted technological deployment, LLVISION’s hardware products and software services have been widely applied across the industrial, security, and healthcare sectors, establishing it as the AR enterprise with the most extensive and robust real-world application scenarios to date.
AR's Next Chapter: How to Become the Gateway to the Metaverse
In 2021, the top buzzword in the technology and investment sectors was undoubtedly settled: the "Metaverse." Although a unified definition of the metaverse may not emerge today or even for a long time to come, it is virtually certain that the metaverse represents the ultimate vision of the digital world, and AR/VR serves as the optimal gateway to it.
How to unlock this entry point, and how to determine the strategic direction?
Approximately 13.7 billion years ago, a singularity emerged. Infinitesimally small in volume yet infinitely massive, it contained all the fundamental elements of the universe. One day, this singularity exploded, giving birth to a universe. The genesis of the metaverse will follow precisely the same trajectory.
Wu Fei believes that only by forming an ecosystem centered around a "bottom layer - middle layer - top layer" technology and product architecture, where different enterprises participate in each layer, and ultimately establishing an ecosystem revolving around AR/AI technologies, products, and services, can this singularity be realized.
Over the seven-plus years since LLVISION's founding, founder Wu Fei notes that the company has successfully completed its first phase—bridging augmented reality (AR) with data platforms—and is now advancing into its second phase, coupling AR capabilities with established, mature ecosystems across various industries. Wu Fei stated, "This provides the foundation for our confidence in becoming a gateway builder for the enterprise metaverse. We are not merely delivering integrated solutions to clients; instead, we are collaborating with them to co-create a more efficient and intelligent enterprise metaverse."
Furthermore, when elaborating on the "Immersive Internet," Tencent CEO Ma Huateng pointed out the transition from the virtual to the real and vice versa, aimed at helping users achieve a more authentic internet experience. Most perspectives also hold that current technological advancements have defined the practical feasibility of the metaverse as "leveraging software and hardware technologies such as AR/VR to create a virtual space that enhances the realism of this virtual world."
"Reality" is the most significant difference between the metaverse and previous digital worlds.
Wu Fei stated that, just as Microsoft was to the PC era and Apple to the mobile internet era, the AR era must have its own display and interaction paradigm. This means all digital content displayed within the field of view will be highly realistic, and users can interact with it naturally through body language and voice. "Upgrading integration and blending with reality—this is the new phase we will embark upon following this round of funding."