Two rounds, state money in
Per Chenyuan Capital, Hangzhou Guoxun Robotics Technology has closed two rounds in the past six months totalling tens of millions of renminbi, with Jiuzhao Investment, Yueke Financial Group and Liang Venture investing. Yueke is Guangdong’s largest professional state-owned mother-fund platform and ranks among China’s top five state specialised mother-fund managers, so the state backing signals market confidence in Guoxun’s technology.
Guoxun had already drawn known investors. Before this round, Zhonghai Investment, Daosheng Capital, Shuimu Asset, Shanda Investment and Yunzhou Capital had all taken positions, repeatedly validating the track. The new money goes to R&D, operations and team building.
Built for the worst environments
Founded in August 2021, Guoxun focuses on industrial smart-safety inspection and smart-safety operation, a high-tech firm with a Chinese Academy of Sciences technical background and state-capital backing. It was first to market with multi-function smart-safety inspection robots for complex, harsh scenes, landing self-developed first-of-kind practical inspection robots in thermal coal corridors and cooling towers, wind nacelles, chemical coking furnaces, coal-mine outdoor conveyors, and LNG receiving stations.
It pioneered “composite machine vision”, iterating to raise risk-detection accuracy and recognition efficiency, and built a smart-safety robot detection product system while extending into smart-operation products. Its harsh-environment line includes corridor, standard conveyor, explosion-proof rail, coal-mine rail and explosion-proof wheeled inspection robots, plus standard distribution, wheeled and quadruped inspection robots, and specialised units for power switching and explosion-proof belt-tear detection.
On hardware, Guoxun’s rail robots handle steep climbs, tight continuous turns and V- or W-type bends, and run uninterrupted in dense dust, high heat, humidity, extreme cold and strong magnetism. Its coal-mine rail robot earned China’s first inspection-robot coal-safety licence, and its thermal-power rail robot shipments rank first in the industry.
Hardware plus software, deployed at scale
Beyond hardware, Guoxun runs a closed “hardware plus software” loop: self-developed software with advanced algorithms handles task allocation, real-time monitoring and automatic inspection records, with cloud services for data analysis, remote operation and maintenance. It can quickly build custom back-end platforms for power, mining, chemical, smelting and oil-gas scenes.
Guoxun has reached power, mining, chemical, smelting, grid, pipeline and transport sectors, serving almost all top central state-owned energy groups: China Energy, Huaneng, Huadian, SPIC, Baowu Steel, Shaanxi Coal, Shandong Energy and CRRC. At a large new China Energy thermal plant, its ceiling-mounted rail robot runs along the corridor top, inspects safely while belts run, and covers the full corridor every two hours around the clock, freeing staff from high-risk repeat work. At a north-west coal-chemical plant, its explosion-proof rail robot runs routine patrols, stops at key points, and collects temperature, vibration, gas and dust data every two hours with real-time alerts, filling the night-monitoring gap.
A market breaking out
Industrial smart inspection is replacing manual work fast. Per Zhiyan Consulting, China’s smart-inspection robot demand hit 7,738 units in 2025, a RMB 2.748 billion market, and is set to reach 9,722 units and RMB 3.185 billion in 2026. The power sector is the core track: in 2026 it takes 87.3 per cent of demand and 85.27 per cent of market value, a highly certain growth lane.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original OFweek Robotics report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience. The full original (in Chinese) is at https://robot.ofweek.com/2026-09/ART-8321204-8120-30702856.html.