Thunderbird Innovation received a new round of 100 million yuan in financing, and the AR glasses industry accelerated its supply of "ammunition"

On March 4, AR glasses company Thunderbird Innovation announced the completion of a new round of 100 million yuan in financing. This round of financing was jointly invested by Huatai Zijin, Yanchuang Group and other institutions. The company said that the financing amount will be used for the technology research and development, mass production and market popularization of the new generation of consumer-grade AR glasses, as well as promoting the ecological construction of AI+AR glasses.

In the past year, this Shenzhen-based company has completed three rounds of financing. Major investors include Fosun Fortune, Rongyi Investment, Ganbei Fund, Inno Angel Fund, Sanqi Interactive Entertainment, Runxing Ruihua, Doctor Glass, Yecao Venture Capital, Hainan Yingtian, etc.

Benefiting from the XR craze brought by Apple’s Vision Pro, the pace of new product releases and financing of Chinese AR glasses companies has significantly accelerated.

At present, the leaders of the domestic AR industry are basically startups. Since 2024, they have announced large-scale financing: on January 9, Rokid received nearly 500 million yuan in financing from the Hefei Municipal Government, with a cumulative financing amount exceeding 2 billion yuan; on January 30, XREAL (formerly Nreal) completed a strategic financing of 60 million US dollars, with a cumulative financing amount of 300 million US dollars.

AR popularity has been reflected in specific sales. IDC data display , China’s AR headset shipments will exceed VR for the first time in 2023. Throughout the year, 725,000 AR/VR headsets were shipped, of which 118,000 AR units were shipped in the fourth quarter, slightly exceeding VR’s 110,000 units.

In addition to existing startups, there is an increasing influx of new players. Meta, which has a lot of output in the field of VR, has recently been revealed to be releasing its first AR concept product this year. Domestic mobile phone manufacturer Transsion also recently exhibited its first AR glasses set. The industry generally believes that more mobile phone manufacturers will enter the AR field this year.

Thunderbird Innovation, founded in October 2021, is an internal startup company incubated by TCL Group. Its founder and CEO Li Hongwei joined TCL in 2018 and served as CEO of Thunderbird Technology, which specializes in TV OTT systems. After the AR glasses project was established, some of the early teams also came from Thunderbird Technology and the mobile phone business TCL Communication Innovation Laboratory.

Li Hongwei told Jiemian News that the company The company currently has about 200 people, two-thirds of whom are in the R&D team. In his view, for new products like AR, the number of people involved in research and development is one thing, but more importantly, whether the leaders have a high technical level.

Currently there are differences in the optical technology routes of AR headsets, which has also led to significant differences in the development focus of various startups. Different from VR's VST (Video see through, video see through), the core of AR display is to present the virtual and real world at the same time, which is OST (Optical see through, optical see through) technology.

After Li Hongwei experienced Vision Pro, he became more confident in OST. Vision Pro focuses on the VST direction, and Apple has invested a lot of energy in continuously optimizing it. However, Li Hongwei believes that when the use environment is not bright enough or the picture is far away from 1 meter, there are still problems of distortion, deformation and blur. OST has more advantages in real-world perception and analysis, while VST still needs time to improve in this regard.

AR’s optical solution includes optical systems and micro-display screens. Currently, mainstream optical systems include optical waveguides, BirdBath (AR’s compromise between convenience and display), free-form surface technology solutions, etc. The optical waveguide solution has better display effects, while the BirdBath solution has advantages in cost and mass production. In terms of screen technology, Micro LED is currently recognized as the best solution in the industry, and it has absolute advantages in various parameters.

Thunderbird Innovation has deployed BirdBath and optical waveguide technology at the same time, focusing on Mi croLED plus light waveguide. China Star Optoelectronics, a display company owned by TCL, can help the company. Its latest flagship product "Thunderbird X2" will be released in October 2023. It uses binocular full-color MicroLED optical waveguide technology and is equipped with a self-developed full-color light engine.

The company emphasized that the above-mentioned light engine is still being optimized, and the new generation will improve imaging quality, optical efficiency, etc., and its size will be significantly reduced compared to the previous generation. AR glasses equipped with a new generation of light engines are expected to be launched in the third quarter of 2024.

Li Hongwei also mentioned that some major industry manufacturers are also deploying Micro LED and optical waveguide AR glasses. This also means that even if Apple first releases the Vision Pro, which is more like VR, the industry does not regard VR as the only development direction.

Artificial intelligence is also having an impact on XR applications. Thunderbird Innovation released its self-developed large language model assistant RayNeo AI in December 2023 , and recently launched the AI+AR developer platform "RayNeo AI Studio", allowing users to develop with zero code.

According to Li Hongwei's vision, he hopes that the AI ​​language model can control all functions of the glasses. This development is still ongoing.

According to IDC data, the top four Chinese AR manufacturers in terms of shipment volume are XREAL (31.6%), Thunderbird Innovation (23.1%), Rokid (18.4%) and Shadow (11.7%). But in the online market, data from Luotu Technology shows that Thunderbird Innovation’s market share will be close to 40% in 2023, ranking first.

Strong rival XREAL has a first-mover advantage in overseas markets. In this regard, Thunderbird Innovation stated that the company will spend more energy exploring overseas markets this year, with the United States and Japan being the focus.

A number of AR manufacturers, including Thunderbird Innovation, not only need to deal with the involution of startups, but also need to guard against strong challenges from mobile phone manufacturers. IDC predicts that mobile phone manufacturers currently have a relatively complete layout of the AR track, and at the same time have strong supply chain management capabilities and offline store operation levels, which are expected to have a certain impact on the current domestic AR market structure.