On June 15, Suzhou Shihang Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd. (referred to as “Shihang Intelligent”) announced that the company has just closed a Series A financing round exceeding 1 billion RMB .Per NUPIAO’s industry tracking, this officially stands as the largest single investment round currently seen in the global ocean robotics sector.
The fresh investor lineup features strategic backers like Shanghe Momentum Fund (linked to Moore Threads and Kunlunxin), VertexGrowth under Singapore’s Temasek, China’s largest agricultural industry fund under CITIC Group, Yuzun Capital, and Broad Ocean Motor. Veteran shareholders including GSR Ventures, Vertex China Fund, Huaying Capital, Changshi Capital, and Shengjing Jiacheng Capital also stepped up with significant oversubscriptions.
Shihang Intelligentnotes that this capital injection will primarily target core R&D, global market expansion, and ecosystem development. The goal is straightforward: push ocean robots into complex underwater environments where large-scale deployment and rock-solid reliability matter most. NUPIAO’s analysis confirms the team is staying laser-focused on cracking marine robotics bottlenecks and accelerating the full-cycle engineering of deep-sea operational capabilities.
Shihang Intelligentlaunched back in May 2023 with a registered capital topping 4.43 million RMB. Founder and actual controller Chen Xiaobo sits at the helm. Their core playground spans the independent R&D, manufacturing, and sales and after-sales service of general-purpose marine robots. Their catalog features submersibles, surface drones, and critical hardware modules. Officially, they position themselves as China’s earliest research-driven player and the first to successfully commercialize underwater cleaning robots.
Taking a closer look at their fleet, models like the “Orca” pack enough muscle to handle full-depth operations from 0 to 10,000 meters with complete freedom of movement. In real-world ocean conditions, they’ve already achieved fully stable commercial deployment. On top of that, Shihang’s bots are already running at scale across ship hull cleaning, underwater security, offshore wind farms, marine ranching, and routine seabed inspections.
Then there’s the software brain. Back on April 25, Shihang unveiled “Cangqiong CEORION”, their proprietary marine embodied AI model. Skip the clunky remote controls or rigid preset scripts—CEORION equips robots with sharper situational awareness, deeper contextual understanding, and true autonomous execution in messy, unpredictable seas. Built on a streamlined end-to-end architecture, it bundles environmental scanning, mission planning, and motor control into one unified framework, all fine-tuned using a blend of live field data and high-fidelity simulations.
Digging into the technical basics,underwater robots typically bundle a surface control station, communication and navigation arrays, motion control systems, and thruster drives. The market neatly splits into consumer-grade and industrial deep-sea tracks. Here’s the catch:industrial bots operate in brutal environments handling highly varied missions, demanding strict performance benchmarks and steeper technical moats. Consumer models share more uniform feature sets and leaner designs, steadily pushing toward lighter, more integrated components like advanced thrusters, gimbals, lighting, and imaging sensors.
A late-December report from Zhongtong CPA highlights a clear shift: while North America still leads the global chart, the Asia-Pacific region—China especially—is accelerating at breakneck speed. By 2024, China’s underwater robotics market swelled to roughly 16.76 billion RMB, marking an 18.3% jump year-over-year. Zoom out over the last decade, and the compound annual growth rate sits at a staggering 29.7%.
Zhongtongindustry experts point out that China’s underwater robotics sector is firmly in a rapid expansion phase. We may have entered the ring a bit later than Western counterparts, but that “late-mover advantage” is shrinking the gap overnight. The entire supply chain shares massive DNA with the broader robotics and EV industries, meaning proven breakthroughs in battery tech, smart controllers, and electromechanical subsystems can be cross-pollinated straight into marine robotics. That synergy is effectively laying the groundwork for the next wave of industry-wide upgrades.
Zooming out to the global stage,research notes from CICC released back in November cite ICVTank projections forecasting the worldwide underwater robotics market to swell from $9.4 billion in 2024 to well over $60 billion by 2030. The blue economy is officially open for business, and Shihang Intelligent just locked in a front-row seat.
