Gifts / Sports & Toys

Nanjing STEAM educational robot company broke through the predicament of the education industry and won the investment against the trend!

On September 1, LANDZO Technology, an educational robot and STEAM play aid company, announced that the company had completed a round A financing of 189 million yuan in June this year. The investors were Zhilin Capital, the cultural industry listed capital, China TV Golden Bridge, and the Nanjing Municipal Government. Fund, Gengxin Capital acted as the long-term exclusive financial advisor.

According to relevant information, Blue Universe Technology was established in 2011 and is a STEAM education solution service provider. Based on its own open source software and hardware technology platform, on the one hand, it provides teaching aids and supporting courses, teacher training and AI smart classroom construction services for schools and training institutions; on the other hand, it launched the "Blue Planet" toy brand for C-end users , Provide STEAM puzzle, programming and AI application toy products, and also match the corresponding STEAM course and learning platform corresponding to the toy attribute. In 2020, Lanzhou Technology will invest in the development and production of children's AI artificial intelligence educational robots.

According to disclosed data, in 2019, the revenue of Blue Universe's home-end AI robot and toy business was 30 million, and it has exceeded 200 million in 2020, an increase of nearly 8 times a year, and rapid development.

Since the "double reduction" policy was promulgated on July 24, the traditional education and training industry centered on subject education has been hit hard, and they have sought the direction of transformation. As a member of quality education, will the STEAM education industry usher in an explosive period in the next time and become a new track of "elephant turn"?

Ten years of exploration: from toys to children's programming

From focusing on college students, programming education in primary and middle schools, and then laying out the STEAM education system, the founder Wang Jiang took Lanzhou Technology to explore for ten years.

In 2010, after graduating from university, Wang Jiang joined the Chery Automobile Group. In two and a half years, he was promoted from an intern to Assistant General Manager of New Energy. In 2012, Wang Jiang resigned and started a business with three seniors. Initially, Wang Jiang started from his professional automotive electronics industry. After the company stabilized a bit, they thought: Can they do something they like? Wang Jiang immediately thought of programming in his mind. He wanted to make some products based on his previous learning experience and teach them to college students.

He deliberately used the name of their science and technology team in college, "Lan Zhou" as the name of the project. The team wrote textbooks, developed products, and quickly copied the previous learning model to one or two hundred colleges and universities across the country.

In the process, they found that foreign countries have done more advanced and simpler programming education, and primary and secondary school students can learn programming. So they began to think: in the future elementary and middle school students will be able to program, do college students still need to teach it? After the discussion, they decided to transform and sink into the education of primary and middle school students.

Wang Jiang, founder of Lanzhou Technology

In 2014, the Lanzhou team developed a smart car product that can be used for programming, playing games, planning paths, etc. Wang Jiang was very satisfied with this product, but when he launched the product to the market, he was quickly poured cold water by reality. "The sales situation is very bleak, only sold dozens of units a month."

Through analysis, they believe that the reasons come from two aspects: First, in terms of the programming education market environment, due to the small relationship with subject education, the rigid demand attribute of domestic primary and middle school programming education is not high, and the willingness of parents to pay is not very strong. . Programming products are difficult to sell directly to consumers, and can only be sold to them through training institutions or online training.

Second, in terms of its product positioning, is this product a toy? Or teaching aids? If it is a toy, the threshold is too high, and the child will not play; if it is a teaching aid, the parents will first think about what problem this product can solve. If it is not helpful for learning, the parent is not willing to spend money.

The Kema Family Laboratory independently developed by Lanzhou

After the analysis, Wang Jiang shifted the positioning of the product to the education equipment market, and sold it as a teaching aid to training institutions and primary and secondary schools. At the same time, Lanzhou launched the "Lanzhou Planet" toy brand, turning its attention to the direction of toys.

"Toys have natural traffic attributes, which are just needed in the process of children's growth, and are more conducive to brand recognition." Wang Jiang said.

In the C-end toy market, Lanzhou has achieved a good result. According to statistics from i Dark Horse.com, from 2017 to 2020, Blue Universe's turnover has maintained an annual growth rate of more than 200%. During Double Eleven in 2020, on the JD.com platform, Lanzhou surpassed internationally renowned toy brands such as BANDAI and babycare with a sales record of over 10 million on the JD.com platform, occupying the top three in the JD toy category store sales list and cumulative list of the day.

Through the "Blue Universe Planet" toys, Blue Universe has accumulated a large number of online fans, and at the same time, the corresponding toy attributes match the corresponding STEAM courses and learning platform and other derivative services to convert customers who purchase the products. This business model has low customer acquisition costs and high user stickiness, and Lanzhou has successfully entered the field of children's programming education with this.

At the same time, Lanzhou also won the official agent of the world's three largest open source hardware companies, and achieved the first domestic open source hardware sales in 2017. In the same year, Lanzhou began to transform and deploy the STEAM education ecological industry based on the open source hardware technology platform.

Blue Planet STEAM Industry Jigsaw

STEAM education is an exotic product. The five letters stand for Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics. It is a new type of quality education concept. Since entering China in 2014, domestic education practitioners have been continuously exploring the issue of how STEAM education can be implemented in China. At this stage, the products explored by Lanzhou Technology include: industrial-grade hardware + artificial intelligence software + consumer-grade products + STEAM content.

In terms of hardware, in addition to the three main open source hardware agents, Lanzhou also jointly develops independent hardware by well-known hardware companies in the United Nations. Its business involves open source hardware and related development boards, self-developed domestic chips and domestic module trade.

At the same time, in order to break the foreign monopoly on programming software platforms, Lanzhou cooperated with top universities to develop domestic programming software platforms. For example, in conjunction with Soochow University to develop a learning and development platform for intelligent products for all ages. Through self-developed visual programming software and open source hardware, the two are combined to build the underlying technology platform.

It is understood that Lanzhou currently has 65 core self-developed product patents, including more than 10 invention patents.

The flow-based products launched by Lanzhou are scientific and technological educational toys that directly reach users. In the C-end market, Lanzhou's business model is a two-way transformation of toys and courses. Courses are transformed and realized in the process of making STEAM teaching and a new toy retail brand. Realize the high stickiness of children, Lanzhou smart terminal, and Lanzhou curriculum system.

In addition to the C-side teaching aids, Lanzhou also continues to expand the B-side service capabilities, providing comprehensive solutions and subject innovation services for smart campuses for kindergartens, primary and secondary schools, universities, vocational schools and educational institutions.

Lanzhou self-developed educational product-AI smart classroom

At this stage, based on the self-developed open source hardware and programming software system's underlying technical architecture, Lanzhou has launched a series of self-developed innovative toy products, such as Corma family laboratory, Quincy Kunxi painting robot, smart magic box, programming Building blocks, etc. In the future, Lanzhou Technology said it will continue to make breakthroughs in technological innovation, use AI technology to serve the family and children's education, and continue to deploy and improve STEAM holistic education products.

Is STEAM education a new trend in quality education?

Since the promulgation of the "double reduction" policy on July 24, the traditional education and training industry centered on subject education has been hit hard, and they have sought the direction of transformation. Among them, vocational education and quality education have become popular tracks for transformation. Blackboard Insight data shows that in the first half of 2021, quality education has raised 31 financings, with a total financing of more than 5.055 billion yuan, ranking second in the number of financings for various sub-tracks in the education industry this year.

Data from the Prospective Industry Research Institute shows that STEAM education accounts for the highest proportion of financing in the field of quality education, at 18.75%.

The enthusiasm of the STEAM track has attracted a large number of participants, including major education and training industries. On July 28th, only four days after the "Double Reduction Policy" was released, Yuanjiao launched the STEAM product "Pumpkin Science", and launched a competition for quality education. Prior to this, the competition for quality education was not unintensified. Children's programming alone attracted byte and Tencent to enter the game early. However, in the past, under the monopoly of subject training, online education companies were not satisfied with the erratic quality education. Full of confidence, trial and error through continuous online and offline product services.

As far as the history of STEAM corporate financing is concerned, nearly 90% of financing projects are currently distributed in the early stage. Even the current leading companies are in the growth stage and are still trying various business models. At this stage, the turning point of revenue scale and profit scale has not yet arrived, and the ability to continue operations has yet to be tested by the market.

Perhaps STEAM will become a battleground for leading online education companies to "live" and new players to overtake. At the same time, quality education will permeate all walks of life, creating innovative and differentiated advantages in the form of business integration, such as Oddrobo, the educational application development team under NetEase, continues to promote the development of children's enlightenment games, and Tencent is also vigorously focusing on enlightenment functional games.