Alibaba Group’s financial affiliate Ant Financial has led a D round of more than US$200 million in Shenzhen-based motion sensing firm Orbbec.
SAIF Partners, Green Pine Capital Partners, R-Z Capital and Tianlangxing Capital also participated in the round, according to local media. Ant Financial has confirmed the investment to China Money Network.
Founded in 2013, Orbbec focuses on designing, manufacturing and sales of 3D sensors, which enable functions including facial recognition, gesture recognition, human skeleton recognition, 3D measurement, 3D map reconstruction in products such as smartphones, robots and smart homes.
The company was founded by a group of engineers and researchers specializing in 3D cameras. Founder Huang Yuanhao, is an MIT Smart Center Ph.D, known for his work in laser speckle interferometry and digital speckle correlation.
In 2015, the company released Orbbec Persee, which it claims is the world’s first "camera computer." It integrates the Orbbec Astra Pro 3D camera with a ARM computer on a single device. It includes a quad-core 1.8GHz ARM CPU, 600MHz GPU with OpenCL support, Wi-Fi and high-speed Ethernet, 2GB DDR3 RAM, and an embedded 16GB eMMC Flash.
The company has about 400 staff, with 75% in research and development, including some former tech experts from Apple Inc, IBM and Advanced Micro Devices, Inc, the company said.
