Seattle, Shanghai and Denmark based technology platform Clobotics has announced a  $30MM capital raise.

“Clobotics announced today that the company has completed its Series Pre-B-4 capital raise and received an additional $30 million of investment towards its goal of “turning sight into insight” for customers in the wind and retail point of sale industries,” says the announcement.

Clobotics uses computer vision technology to help customers in wind turbine inspection, through the use of drones.  The same computer vision technology is used for consumer packaged goods firms and retailers to manage retail inventories.

“We are grateful to our investors for the confidence they are showing in Clobotics and we are proud of our product and business results to date,” said Clobotics CEO George Yan. “This additional investment will enable important new company initiatives including expansion of our wind industry business into the Americas region under the leadership of our new Managing Director, Rogers Weed as well as significantly advancing our retail technology and product development, and increasing commercial capacity to serve new markets and clients on the ground.”

The investment round was led by Sanxia Xintai, a leading growth fund in China specializing in technology-driven companies. Other co-investors include existing shareholders as well as two more new investors.

“George and the team at Clobotics have made impressive progress in their first four years as a company,” said Fanny Cheng, Partner at CDIB Capital. “Their approach to innovation – investing in both the front-end data capture systems as well as the back end machine learning technology – is enabling important new capabilities for their customers. We are pleased to continue providing the funding support to help them scale their world class solutions to the next level.”

Clobotics is not a drone company, but may indicate a future trajectory of the industry.  The company has applied their computer vision technology to the automated drone inspection of wind turbines: a critical industrial application that offers a significant return on investment for energy companies.  Clobotics offers a customized drones for autonomous visual inspection of wind turbine blades, as well as a back end system for analyzing images to understand blade conditions and generate reports and recommendations for customers.  To date, the company reports that it has inspected over 14,000 wind turbines around the world for global brands including Goldwind, Vestas and GE Renewable Energy.