36氪 First Release | A former DJI engineer started a business to make a smart tennis ball machine, and the product has started batch delivery in overseas markets

Author | Qiao Yujie Editor | Yuan Silai Hard Krypton learned that the smart sports hardware company "AceiiLab" has started batch delivery. It has previously completed an angel round of financing of more than 10 million yuan, invested by Zero Capital, Variable Capital, and Haiyi Capital. The funds will be mainly used for product research and development iteration and market expansion. Yisi Intelligence was founded in December 2024. Starting from AI tennis robots, it attempts to build an intelligent training ecosystem covering hardware, software, data, AI coaching and sports services. The founder of the company, Liu Liqian, has more than ten years of experience in robot R&D and products. He has been engaged in R&D work in companies such as DJI and KUKA. Co-founder Chao Guang has previously worked for investment institutions and robotics companies, and has long been concerned about investment and operational growth in the field of intelligent hardware. The team covers drones, unmanned vehicles, commercial cleaning, lawn mowing, swimming pool cleaning and other robotic directions. It has accumulated rich experience in overseas consumer hardware and has complete link capabilities from product definition, research and development to market promotion. As AI capabilities, robotics and sensor technologies gradually mature, a trend of intelligent upgrading is emerging in the field of sports consumption. Compared with traditional sports equipment, smart sports hardware is developing from recording data to assisting training and improving experience, covering multiple scenarios such as smart fitness equipment, sports wear, and AI sparring. Among them, sports with strong training attributes such as tennis, badminton, and golf have become an important direction for intelligent hardware exploration due to their high technical threshold and repeated training requirements. According to Yisi Intelligence, traditional tennis ball machines provide "fixed-point serving", but what tennis training really needs is continuous rhythm, stable ball delivery and feedback at different spatial positions. Therefore, the company did not choose to let the robot complete the complete "serve-receiving" process. Instead, it proposed the product logic of "multi-space serving instead of hitting". Through stable serving rhythm and variable serving position, the company simulates real high-frequency pulling to help users build a training experience and improve training efficiency. "Playing tennis is essentially a judgment of rhythm and spatial position. The tennis court is very large, and the success rate of catching the ball will be a consideration that affects the user experience. However, catching the ball will change the rhythm of serving, and will also affect user training, and may also cause