Suzhou Microsina Intelligent Technology raises 10M CNY angel round
What's the deal? Suzhou Microsina Intelligent TechnologyDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, known as MicroLink IntelligenceDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, has raised a 10 million CNY (about $1.5 million) angel round to build what it calls the world's first vision-based after-sales technical customer service robot. Investors include Li ZexiangDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → and Lu Qi, alongside Dongguan Clear Water Bay Phase II Venture Capital Partnership, Ningbo Institute of Intelligent Technology, and Beijing Qichuang Chuangtan Phase II Venture Capital Center. The money will mainly fund research and development.
Who's behind it? Founded in 2023, the company is led by 31-year-old Ning Dongdong, who earned his doctorate in machine vision at Zhejiang University and is one of China's early practitioners of deep learning-based machine vision. He originally worked with Li Zexiang on image-field product R&D before spotting the opportunity in e-commerce customer service.
What's the product? The robot can understand images and videos, unlike earlier AI tools that handled only text. Ning found that previous AI could answer simple questions covering less than 20% of consultations, still requiring manual review. Some firms even hire an "AI customer service trainer" costing more than 10,000 CNY a month to configure question-and-answer pairs.
Why now? The e-commerce industry employs more than 5 million manual customer service staff, a role marked by low pay of around 3,000 CNY, punishing shifts, and high turnover. During big promotions, platforms require replies within 30 seconds, straining teams that struggle to scale.
What's the endgame? Ning identified three industry pain points: long training cycles of up to a month, high labour costs, and brand after-sales risk. He estimates a mid-sized firm with 500 million CNY in annual sales needs 50 customer service staff, at a fully loaded cost of nearly 10,000 CNY per person monthly. To reach the product, he interned three months at JD and later worked pre-sales for an appliance merchant, mapping the gap between platforms and smaller sellers.
The signal: The round sits in the roughly 29th percentile for deal size, a modest early bet rather than a headline raise. But it reflects growing investor appetite in China for vision-capable AI aimed at automating labour-heavy service functions the previous generation of text-based bots could not.
Read more: 36Kr
Image credit: kyz
