According to Lanjing Capital, Beijing Boqing Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “Boqing Technology”) recently announced the completion of a several-hundred-million-yuan Series B financing round. The round was co-invested by a number of first-tier institutions including CITIC Private Equity, CITIC Jinshi, CITIC Securities, Sinovation Ventures, Beijing Venture Capital and Nantong Investment Management, with Lanjing Capital serving as the financial advisor for this round and on a long-term basis.
In fact, Boqing Technology has long been a “potential stock” in the eyes of investors. Prior to this round of financing, well-known investment institutions such as GD Capital, Chuanggu Capital and Way Capital have successively placed bets on it. In January 2022, Sinopec Group Capital Co., Ltd. even injected nearly 100 million yuan in strategic investment into the company. This was also the first time that Sinopec Capital directly laid out its presence in the robot track, fully demonstrating the recognition of its technical value by industry giants.
In addition to financing, Boqing Technology also successfully won a procurement project for intelligent welding robots worth over 100 million yuan this month, marking a substantive breakthrough in the large-scale and commercial application of intelligent welding robots.
A Leader in Domestic Intelligent Welding Robots
In large-scale equipment manufacturing, take the welding of heavy-duty rolling mill frames as an example. The wall thickness of such workpieces is extremely large, and the workpiece needs to be preheated to an extremely high temperature far above room temperature before welding. This not only requires strict control over the uniformity of the heating process and the heating/cooling rate, but also poses great challenges to on-site operators. Workers must wear heavy high-temperature protective clothing, special heat-insulating gloves and protective masks to resist the threats of intense high-temperature radiation and splashing welding slag. Even so, the actual working environment remains extremely harsh.
Welding robots have played a role in breaking this dilemma. At that time, welding robots capable of handling such complex scenarios were almost non-existent in the domestic commercial field, and the relevant technical exploration was tantamount to entering a “no-man’s land”.
It was precisely by identifying this pain point in the industry that Feng Xiaobing, a disciple of Academician Pan Jiluan of Tsinghua University, the “guru of welding” in China, founded Boqing Technology in 2017 with the mission of inheritance and breakthrough, focusing on the R&D, production, sales and service of intelligent special robots.
Feng Xiaobing holds a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Tsinghua University and has long been focused on high-end welding equipment. Under his leadership, Boqing Technology has built a team with both theoretical depth and practical experience, which has become the core engine of technological innovation.
Boqing Technology inherits more than 20 years of research achievements from Academician Pan Jiluan’s team. Its core product, the trackless all-position crawling welding robot, is an original Chinese and world-first product, and has become a “anti-choke point” technology for the construction of major national infrastructure.
In 2018, the first-generation trackless all-position crawling welding robot took shape. Affectionately known as “Xiao Hei” (Little Black), this robot is just like a welding “special forces soldier”: relying on permanent magnetic adsorption technology, it can firmly attach to the surface of magnetically conductive workpieces and crawl freely without the need for laying tracks or manual guidance; with the help of multi-visual perception and the “perception-decision-execution” closed-loop control technology, it can easily handle all-position welding operations such as horizontal welding, flat welding, vertical welding, overhead welding and curved surface welding of large-scale structures, realizing precise multi-layer and multi-pass welding. Notably, in scenarios such as shipbuilding and steel structure assembly that require welding with fastener matching, the robot can also collaborate with the Automatic Buckle Feeding And Assembly system to achieve seamless connection between buckle feeding, positioning, assembly and subsequent welding processes, further improving the automation and integration level of the entire production line. Verified by practical applications, “Xiao Hei” not only produces beautiful and stable weld seams, but also improves welding efficiency by 3-5 times, reducing production costs while completely improving the harsh working conditions of workers.
Technological innovation has not stopped at a single product. Boqing Technology has not only conquered the core technologies of the welding robot body, but also independently developed laser sensors, forming a technical system centered on trackless adsorption crawling, high-precision stable tracking and big data of intelligent welding processes. Up to now, the company has laid out more than 900 intellectual property rights, including over 200 invention patents, building a solid technological barrier.
On this basis, Boqing Technology has further expanded its product matrix, developed multiple series of products such as building steel structure wall-climbing welding robots and pipeline welding robots, covering the full-scenario needs of six major fields including shipbuilding, oil and gas chemical industry, marine engineering, energy and power, rail transit and nuclear power engineering, realizing the large-scale application of technological achievements.
This year, Boqing Technology has taken another step forward in technological innovation by launching China’s first industrial-grade welding large model. Built based on Boqing Technology’s independently constructed million-level welding knowledge graph and ten-million-level metadata training system, this model is currently the world’s largest publicly known professional welding knowledge base. Verified by industrial field tests, it can shorten the traditional welding process development cycle by about 60% and reduce comprehensive costs by more than 40%. As of April this year, Boqing Technology has established a welding parameter library covering more than 95% of major metal materials such as carbon steel, stainless steel and titanium alloy, collected more than 30 million sets of welding operation data, and formed a quality evaluation system covering 28 dimensions including welding torch posture and motion trajectory.
Final Thoughts
Traditional automated welding has long been “inadequate” in complex scenarios, coupled with the growing shortage of welders—it is estimated that the national shortage of welders will exceed 3 million by 2026, making the “machine replacement of human labor” in the manufacturing industry extremely urgent. At the same time, the 14th Five-Year Plan focuses on advancing new-type industrialization and fostering new-quality productive forces, opening up a policy fast track for high-end equipment enterprises.
According to Verified Market Reports, the global intelligent welding robot market size was about 1.513 billion US dollars in 2024. Domestically, data from Zhongshang Industrial Research Institute is more intuitive: the Chinese welding robot market grew from 7 billion yuan in 2020 to 8.4 billion yuan in 2024, with a compound annual growth rate of 4.4%, and is expected to reach 9.3 billion yuan in 2025.
Moving forward, with continuous capital investment and rapid technological updates, intelligent welding robots are poised to usher in a “golden era of explosive growth”. Driven by the policy tailwinds of new-quality productive forces on one side, and supported by the strong demand from downstream industries such as marine engineering on the other, cutting-edge technologies such as trackless welding and industrial-grade welding large models will accelerate the filling of gaps in the domestic high-end market, pushing the welding industry from “relying on manual labor” to “relying on intelligence”.
Assembly line for mass production by artificial intelligence
