Bozhan Robotics Raises Tens of Millions in Funding Led by Dalton Venture, Pushing Underwater Robots from Human Substitution to Autonomous Operations | Dalton News

Background

Recently, Bozhan Robotics completed a tens-of-millions-of-yuan Series A institutional funding round led by Dalton Venture, with follow-on investment from Starboard. The proceeds will primarily go toward product R&D, scaled manufacturing, and expansion of its global service network.

The Trillion-Dollar Ocean Economy, Held Back by Manual Labor

Momentum in the ocean economy keeps building: marine new energy, deep-sea development, port operations, ship services — nearly every segment is expanding. But automation below the surface has lagged far behind. There's no GPS underwater. Turbid seawater blocks visibility. Currents constantly buffet equipment. The same task is orders of magnitude harder underwater than on land. So to this day, a huge amount of subsea work still relies on human divers — high-risk, low-efficiency, and difficult to standardize. Underwater robots aren't new, but the vast majority remain remotely operated, requiring shore-based operators to monitor them throughout. They're essentially just extensions of human hands and eyes; the human isn't actually freed.

Of all underwater tasks, hull cleaning has the most rigid demand. After a few months at sea, an oceangoing vessel's hull becomes coated with barnacles and algae. Don't underestimate this buildup: even a 0.5-millimeter layer, thinner than a credit card, can increase fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions by roughly 25%. Under severe fouling, fuel consumption can spike by over 40%, costing a midsize oceangoing ship tens of millions of yuan in extra fuel annually. To save fuel, ships need regular "baths" (Data sources: International Maritime Organization, GEF-UNDP-IMO GloFouling Partnerships research, and public estimates).

"Bathing" is also shifting from a financial calculation to a compliance requirement. From tightening carbon emission and biofouling regulations by the IMO and the European Union, to increasingly stringent port entry cleanliness requirements in countries like Australia and New Zealand, hull cleanliness is directly affecting vessel operations. Non-compliant ships face fines, mandatory cleaning, port detention, even entry bans. Domestic standards and policies are accelerating too; the industry expects more systematic regulatory requirements around 2028, leaving ship owners little room to keep kicking the can down the road.

The demand is there, but supply never caught up. The work still heavily depends on manual diving. Existing underwater robots mostly still require full shore-based remote control. The industry has long lacked an underwater robot that can complete tasks autonomously and support scaled commercial deployment.

From Remote Control to Autonomy:

No Lab Prototypes, Only Production Tools That Work in Ports

Many underwater robots post impressive specs in lab conditions with still water. But put them in a real port with turbid water, currents, and curved hull surfaces, and they fail repeatedly.

For ship owners and service providers, flashy tech concepts and impressive parameters don't matter. The core questions are simple: Can the equipment be deployed directly at port? Can it run stably for long periods? Are results reproducible? Is maintenance straightforward? The industry's common approach has been to build a technical prototype first, then find scenarios to fit it. Bozhan flipped this sequence from day one — it embedded itself in real port operations first, thoroughly understanding every on-site challenge, then built a complete, deployable, replicable industrial-grade system around the full operational workflow.

True Autonomous Operation:

From "Humans Watching Equipment" to "Equipment Working on Its Own"

Traditional remotely operated vehicles are more like "extensions of the shore operator's hands and eyes": poor underwater visibility means the operator can't see clearly; strong currents destabilize the equipment; whether the path is correct or the cleaning is complete depends entirely on operator experience. A skilled operator takes years to train, and is susceptible to fatigue and other human factors, causing huge variability in work quality and efficiency.

Bozhan Robotics took a fundamentally different technical approach. First, through stable adhesion technology, the equipment firmly attaches to the hull, unaffected by water flow, establishing a stable physical foundation for subsequent perception and positioning. On top of this, it achieved centimeter-level precise underwater positioning. Combined with real-time hull modeling, the robot knows exactly where it is on the hull, which areas have been cleaned and which haven't. Finally, based on this positioning capability, it performs autonomous path planning, completing the cleaning of designated areas automatically without any human control. Stable adhesion — high-precision positioning — autonomous path planning — autonomous cleaning: this chain forms Bozhan's core underwater autonomous operation technology.

Beyond autonomy, to truly serve ship owners' practical operations, the system must also address efficiency, cleaning quality, and result verification. Metis ultimately delivers a complete cleaning capability:

• Operational efficiency reaches 7x that of traditional divers, no longer constrained by human stamina or underwater visibility;
• Thoroughly removing stubborn attachments like barnacles and shellfish while keeping damage to the hull's anti-fouling coating minimal, solving the industry pain point of traditional brushing and scraping damaging paint;
• Synchronized digital recording of the operation process, automatically generating cleaning reports upon completion, with coverage and results traceable and verifiable — no longer relying on human judgment of "whether it's actually clean."

This complete technical system represents the industry's first fully autonomous underwater cleaning operation, and is Bozhan's core breakthrough — truly upgrading the underwater robot from a "remote-controlled tool" to an "autonomous operation system."

Industrial-Grade Thinking for Products That Can Deploy

This "scenario first, product second" approach directly reflects the founding team's background.

Bozhan Robotics' founder has hands-on engineering experience spanning aviation equipment, automotive manufacturing, and underwater operations. What aviation and automotive share is that products must survive countless extreme-environment validations before mass production, with system reliability and field delivery as top priorities. This systems integration and standardized management thinking was carried over wholesale into underwater robot R&D and production.

From the start, the team treated the Metis robot as an industrial product meant for real job sites. Engineers spent long stretches embedded at frontline ports, using problems exposed in real operations to rapidly drive product iteration, while simultaneously considering mass manufacturing, assembly maintenance, and field delivery across the full process.

What Bozhan ultimately aims to build is the transformation of autonomous operation capability into a mass-producible, maintainable, repeatably deliverable industrial product system — harder to replicate than any single leading technical metric.

Customers Vote with Their Feet:

From Domestic Leading Ship Owners to Overseas Specialist Service Providers

Currently, Bozhan Robotics has completed multiple rounds of real-vessel validation at core domestic ports including Ningbo, Guangzhou Nansha, Beibu Gulf, and Qingdao, establishing multiple normalized operation bases with accelerating commercial deployment.

In the domestic market, the company has partnered with a major domestic energy ship owner, deploying real-vessel operations at Ningbo-Zhoushan Port, marking its formal entry into leading ship owners' normalized maintenance operations.

In overseas markets, a Singapore-based veteran operator with over 30 years of underwater ship service experience, after comprehensively evaluating products and actual operational performance from multiple mainstream global manufacturers, ultimately selected Bozhan Robotics' solution. It plans to gradually replace all its cleaning systems with Bozhan's automated system within three years. For a specialist service provider with decades in the industry, this decision itself is the hardest possible endorsement of product capability.

Hull Cleaning Is Just the First Stop

For Bozhan, hull cleaning is the first commercial scenario to enter the underwater market, and the starting point to validate its complete capability set.

The company's true core moat lies in deep understanding of real underwater operational scenarios, mature engineering delivery capability, and a market-validated autonomous operation underlying system. This capability, honed through real working conditions, can be extended and reused for more underwater maintenance scenarios including inspection, upkeep, and rust removal — upgrading from a single cleaning tool to an underwater intelligent operation platform covering the full vessel lifecycle.

Meanwhile, spatial and structural data accumulated during operations will gradually build into digital archives for vessel underwater maintenance, not only supporting single-delivery verification but also providing credible data foundations for fleet energy efficiency management and carbon reduction accounting — extending from hardware services as a starting point to long-term data assets.

It is precisely this long-term growth potential of the underwater autonomous operation track, combined with Bozhan Robotics' solid engineering deployment capability and scenario understanding, that led Dalton Venture and Starboard to participate in this round.

Dalton Venture stated: "Underwater hull cleaning has clear customer demand and economic value, but to get robots into real operational scenarios, a team needs simultaneous capabilities in technology R&D, engineering manufacturing, and field delivery. We favor Bozhan's path of combining industrial system experience with underwater robotics technology. Its domestic real-vessel applications and overseas customer orders further validate the team's ability to move from autonomous operation to commercial delivery."

The underwater world is among the hardest-to-reach and most worthwhile-to-transform parts of the ocean economy. When robots begin entering the underwater world at scale — a place humans have struggled to reach consistently and stably — the possibilities are themselves imaginative enough. And Bozhan's chosen path is not complicated: first go deep on one real, high-frequency, sufficiently difficult scenario, then replicate the validated capabilities outward.

The deep ocean is far away, but every underwater story must start with the first thing truly done.

END

ID: daltonventure

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