BlueRun Ventures Leads Investment in PhaBuilder's Multi-Million Dollar Pre-A+ Series | BlueRun Ventures

On June 15, service robotics innovator Wanxun Technology announced the completion of its Pre-A+ series funding round, raising nearly $10 million in total, led by BlueRun Ventures and Shunwei Capital, with existing investor Wanwu Capital following on. The completion of this series of financing will further accelerate the R&D of new service robot products and the building of a high-caliber team at Wanxun Technology, strongly boost multi-scenario commercial deployment, and fortify technical moats to expand its technological edge in interactive robotics.

Cao Wei, Partner at lead investor BlueRun Ventures, said: Frontier innovation in robotics is a key focus area for BlueRun. Currently, the cost, flexibility, and safety limitations of traditional rigid robotic arms have constrained their large-scale deployment across many scenarios. After years of R&D, the Wanxun team has pioneered a modular, low-cost, and highly safe compliant robotic arm and gripper solution, with its technology and products already gaining recognition from multiple heavyweight clients. We are very optimistic about the Wanxun team's ability to bring compliant robots into more application scenarios, delivering entirely new experiences for users.

Founded in 2019, Wanxun Technology is an innovation-driven high-tech enterprise committed to providing flexible, dexterous, and safe operational interactive service robot solutions for industries and households. Its founder and core team hold solid technical backgrounds from top institutions worldwide, including Harvard University, Technische Universität München, Nanyang Technological University, The University of Hong Kong, Tsinghua University, Harbin Institute of Technology, and Southern University of Science and Technology. The team has built full-stack robotics capabilities through independent innovation, developing an integrated intelligent operational robot solution centered on lightweight compliant robotic arms that meets diverse demands across service scenarios for safe, flexible mobile, and interactive operations, with products widely deployed in public services, security and power, energy and chemicals, disinfection and epidemic prevention, smart parks, and other sectors.

01

Foundational Breakthrough: "Compliant Robots" Redefine Safe Interaction

Robotic arms represent one of the longest-standing, most mature, and most widely applied product forms in robotics. From industrial arms to collaborative arms, they have continuously improved safety to enable effective human-robot collaboration. However, traditional arms designed for manufacturing scenarios prioritize "high precision, fast speed, and heavy payload" as core metrics. In service scenarios, especially applications involving close-range direct physical interaction with humans, they require extensive hardware and software modifications and constraints to achieve necessary compliance, safety, and interactive control. This significantly limits the expansion of robots from industrial to service settings.

Driven by demographic aging and accelerated by the new normal of pandemic conditions, the demand for unmanned, intelligent robotic operations and labor shortages in service industries will inevitably fuel rapid demand for interactive operational robots. Yet at the most critical component — the operational arm — effective solutions remain severely lacking to meet service robots' multifaceted requirements for operational capability, safety, and cost.

Addressing this market reality, Wanxun has drawn on deep understanding of full-stack robotic arm technology to independently develop serialized lightweight and ultra-lightweight compliant robotic arm units and intelligent control algorithms through disruptive innovation at the foundational level and multiple rounds of systematic optimization and iteration. The company has successively launched its K-series and S-series compliant robotic arms and grippers, which are flexible and easy to use. Based on active-passive safety technology, they enable all-weather, all-around safe compliant operations in unstructured environments where collisions may occur.

With "dexterity, lightness, compliance, and safety" as core characteristics, compliant robotic arms face virtually none of the installation and operational constraints of traditional arms, making them well-suited for mounting on various mobile robot platforms. Whether indoors or outdoors, in extreme heat or cold, airborne or underwater, or even amid ultra-high voltage and corrosive radiation, they respond with ease — delivering diverse operational services from cleaning and disinfection to inspection and maintenance through outstanding operational capability and strong interactivity.

02

From Full-Stack Technical Integration to Product Commercialization

Deploying interactive service robots requires breakthroughs across the full technology stack. A physically interactive service robot is a complex system requiring effective coordination between chassis, arm, and end-effector, with deep synergy among navigation, vision, and arm control software algorithms, to achieve stable overall operation. For interactive service robots operating in generalized environments beyond assembly lines, the system must eliminate "black boxes" and achieve贯通式 end-to-end optimization to address weak links and unlock systemic advantages.

Building on early R&D in lightweight robotic arms, the Wanxun team gradually expanded technical boundaries upward and downward, spending three years laying solid foundations. The team achieved full-stack technical integration across both hardware — mobile/hanging chassis, dexterous arms, and end-effectors — and software, including joint drive control, arm kinematics, navigation planning, intelligent recognition, and intuitive teleoperation. On this basis, Wanxun launched the integrated motion control platform MIU and intelligent kinematics platform PASI, providing unified, stable, and highly compatible hardware foundations for its full product line that significantly accelerated product iteration and standardization.

On the product side, Wanxun adopted a modular strategy emphasizing portability and replaceability based on early single-product development. The team rapidly iterated a series of uniquely distinctive mobile interactive service robot solutions for mobile inspection, energy operations and maintenance, and other scenarios, initially building a product matrix centered on compliant robotic arms with outstanding market competitiveness in interactivity, flexibility, and safety. Leveraging its full-stack technical integration advantages, Wanxun's robotic products can be more rapidly re-iterated to address core clients' actual needs, helping the team expand multiple lighthouse customers to achieve "zero-to-one" breakthroughs in robotic applications, laying solid foundations for scaled replication.

03

Endless Innovation: A New Starting Point Toward the Stars

Going forward, Wanxun Technology will continue to take lightweight compliant robotic arms as its technical core, providing integrated solutions for interactive service robot applications, deepening and expanding scenarios, refining and iterating products, and gradually enriching its product line to launch a series of signature products. Standing at a new starting point of scaling and mass production, Wanxun will introduce the new dimensions of "dexterity, lightness, compliance, and safety" into interactive operations for service robots, delivering professional, reliable, safe, and affordable robotic solutions for clients across industries.

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BlueRun Ventures was established in Silicon Valley in 1998. BlueRun Ventures China was founded in 2005 and is a venture capital firm focused on early-stage startups.

Currently, BlueRun Ventures China manages multiple USD and RMB dual-currency funds with assets under management exceeding RMB 15 billion, making it one of the largest early-stage funds in China. The firm invests primarily at Pre-A and Series A stages, covering hard tech and innovative interaction, enterprise technology, new consumption, and healthcare. It has cumulatively invested in over 150 startups, including Li Auto, Waterdrop, QingCloud, Guazi.com, Qudian, Songguo Mobility, Ganji.com, Energy Monster, Yuntu Semiconductor, Machenike, Cloud Saint Intelligence, Anxin Wangdun, and BioMap.

BlueRun Ventures has been ranked #1 in Zero2IPO's "China Top 30 Early-Stage Investment Institutions" and ChinaVenture's "China Best Early-Stage Venture Capital Institutions TOP30," and was named among Preqin's Top 10 VC fund managers globally for sustained high-return performance.

Additionally, BlueRun Ventures has received consecutive honors from Forbes China, 36Kr, Cyzone, Caixin Media, CBNweekly, Jiemian, and other media organizations as "China Early-Stage Firm of the Year," "China Top-Tier Venture Capital Institution," "Most Entrepreneur-Friendly Early-Stage Firm of the Year," and "Most Influential Early-Stage Firm of the Year."