Orange Cat Universe completes tens of millions Pre-A round financing, Gao Bingqiang invests in three consecutive rounds

Author | Huang Nan

Editor | Yuan Silai

Hardware Kr has learned that pet smart hardware company "Orange Cat Universe" recently completed a Pre-A round of financing worth tens of millions of yuan, with continued participation from Professor Gao Bingqiang and his Gaofeng Patience Fund, Qianhai Innovation Investment (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd., and Changlei Venture Capital. The funds will be mainly used for technological innovation, product iteration, patent system development, and expanding the global offline channel network, as well as advancing deep production line integration and mass production delivery.

Previously, the company had completed two consecutive early-stage financing rounds, with investors including Professor Gao Bingqiang and his fund Brizan Ventures II, Gaofeng Patience Fund, Professor Gan Jie, Future Technology Fund, Beyond Venture Fund, and others. Cangzhu Capital served as exclusive financial advisor.

Founded in 2023, Orange Cat Universe focuses on the pet smart hardware track. Its first product is a powerless passive cat bed grooming hair collector. Its self-developed dedicated molding tools and processing techniques, mastering technologies such as comb tooth structure and felt integrated molding, have completed PCT global patent certification. The product has been validated on overseas crowdfunding platforms and has entered leading European pet retail chains.

Orange Cat Universe powerless passive cat bed grooming hair collector (Image source/Enterprise)

Founder Tian Youren has extensive full-stack software and hardware development capabilities. During university, he participated in robot competitions such as the China Engineering Robot Competition and the RoboMaster Robotics Competition, winning national-level awards multiple times; other core members cover directions including robot engineering R&D, consumer hardware going global, and brand marketing, combining both technical implementation and global commercialization capabilities.

The pet hardware track has long been dominated by the inertial logic of "addition." Mainstream players attempt to add various electronic control modules, connect networking functions, and expand perception and collection dimensions, directly equating feature stacking with intelligence, thereby building differentiated barriers.

But complex electromechanical stacking instead becomes the most prominent source of product risk.

For example, for cat owners, the seasonal shedding problem has always been a high-frequency pain point for users. When cats enter their shedding cycle, hair scatters in large amounts all over the house and is very difficult to deal with. Existing solutions each have shortcomings: manual grooming consumes the owner's energy, and many cats themselves resist being groomed; electric pet grooming devices on the market continuously face safety and reliability hazards such as mechanism jamming and operational failure.

"What users truly need is not nominal 'intelligence,' but a concrete result of how to make cat hair at home decrease." said Tian Youren, founder of Orange Cat Universe. Pets cannot speak and cannot proactively avoid risks. Once a complex electronic control structure experiences a mechanical abnormality, it can very easily turn into direct physical harm.

Based on the principle of safety, Orange Cat Universe chose to subtract on the engineering path. Its first product, the cat bed grooming collector PawSwing Neo, adopts a passive pure mechanical structure, with no motor, battery, or sensor, and the entire hardware does not carry any circuit design.

Behind this extreme simplification is a product logic that returns to common sense: the intelligence of pet hardware should first serve pets. Only when pets are comfortable and at ease will pet owners be relaxed and at ease.

Passive pure mechanical structure (Image source/Enterprise)

Taking grooming a cat as an example, rather than chasing the cat around and forcing it to be groomed, which brings trouble to both the cat and the user, it is better to leverage the cat's natural habit of liking to burrow and enter and exit the cat bed, letting the cat complete grooming itself.

To this end, the Orange Cat Universe team cleverly embedded the grooming and collection structure into the entrance and exit of the cat bed. In this way, each time the cat enters and exits, shed hair is combed off and collected along the way, requiring no forced intervention from the owner and bringing no sense of pressure from being held down to the cat.

In the grooming module, the team simulated the barb structure on the surface of a cat's tongue and made extensive independent optimizations to the microscopic morphology and mechanical parameters.

Tian Youren told Hardware Kr that a key quantitative indicator of structural optimization is "grooming efficiency": how many milligrams of cat hair can be combed off for every joule of work the cat resists. Conventional manual combs on the market can comb off about 0.5 to 1.5 milligrams per joule, while PawSwing Neo achieves 3 to 4 milligrams per joule. "We are not simply doing bionic replication, but using bionic ideas to complete optimization at the engineering level."

At the same time, the hook-and-spine structure of the cat tongue itself also carries physiological functions such as saliva attachment and assisting body temperature regulation, which have no value for a grooming tool. Therefore, the team proactively made trade-offs in structural design, retaining only the core mechanism for grabbing shed hair.

The more critical trade-off occurred in the safety logic. The Orange Cat Universe team also considered an "active adaptation" approach, using a motor to drive the opening and closing of the grooming module and automatically adjusting the passage size according to the cat's body shape, but this plan was ultimately abandoned. The reason lies in the "long-tail effect" of electronic control failure rates: once the motor jams while the cat is passing through, the consequence is not simply "experience degradation," but direct physical harm.

Therefore, Orange Cat Universe proposed a passive structure, in which the contraction force of the passage comes from the cat's own momentum when entering and exiting, and the pressure exerted by the grooming module on the cat's body is designed as a constant force. Regardless of whether the cat is fat or thin, or how strong the squeezing force is, the pressure on the contact surface always remains constant.

Under this passive architecture, the entire grooming function chain has no electricity and no active moving parts, and the failure rate is forcibly reduced to zero at the physical level. Orange Cat Universe sacrificed the sense of intelligence of "automatic adjustment" in exchange for the most extreme safety bottom line of pet hardware.

Orange Cat Universe's pioneering passive structure (Image source/Enterprise)

On the commercialization side, Orange Cat Universe's first product is priced at about 200 US dollars, with an overall return rate of less than 3%, far below the average level of the pet hardware track; at the same time, the team has established a mature community operation system to expand brand awareness, improve user stickiness, and increase repeat purchases.

In 2026, the company secured Europe's largest professional pet retail chain, with more than 3,000 offline stores stocked, and is simultaneously accelerating layout in markets such as North America and Australia.

In the current pet hardware track, as the costs of large models and sensors continue to decline, adding screens, IoT modules, and AI voice to products is becoming very easy, but simple feature stacking cannot build a moat. The real barrier is often the systematic capability from cognition to product design.

Orange Cat Universe chose to do subtraction; its technical threshold does not lie in the circuit board, but in materials, mechanics, and manufacturing processes. By raising the physical upper limit of grooming efficiency, using passive structures to achieve safety redundancy, laying out a broad PCT patent net, and deeply penetrating the supply chain, starting from a "non-electrified" product, Orange Cat Universe attempts to validate a pet hardware path centered on structural innovation and category definition rather than selling points of stacked smart features.

According to the plan, Orange Cat Universe will launch a new pet hardware product at the end of this year and will release the flagship model of the second-generation grooming platform in 2027.

The inlet and outlet width can be adjusted according to the cat's body size (Image source/Company)

The following is an excerpt from an interview between HardTech and Tian Youren, founder of Orange Cat Universe (edited):

HardTech: As a smart pet hardware company, Orange Cat Universe's first product is a purely mechanical device with no electricity and no data. What is the product thinking behind this? Are you worried that the brand will be labeled "non-smart"?

Tian Youren: Intelligence should be the result of solving user pain points, not an a priori goal. In judging whether to introduce smart modules, what we value is whether the technical solution can find the optimal solution among cost, safety, and experience, rather than stacking hardware to cater to a concept.

Regarding data return, the current purely mechanical version indeed does not have user-side data closed-loop capability, but this does not mean we have departed from data-driven development. Our early iterations relied on benchmark testing in a self-built controlled experimental environment. In a closed scenario with controlled variables, long-term tracking based on a small number of test cats can extract underlying physical data with an extremely high signal-to-noise ratio. This high-quality structured data often has more iterative value than massive but noisy C-end crowdsourced data. The data flywheel does not have only one path: device return.

In addition, our team has a deep R&D background in robotics and multimodal perception, and we will subsequently launch advanced versions with sensing and visual recognition. But at the underlying architecture level, we adhere to the Fail-safe engineering design principle: even if sensors fail or the system crashes, the purely physically contacting mechanical structure can still guarantee absolute physical safety. Intelligence can be gradually layered on through OTA or version iterations, but safety redundancy must be front-loaded into the lowest-level design.

On brand strategy, we are not anxious about being labeled "non-smart." The core perception we want to convey to the market is that Orange Cat Universe is a hardware company driven by underlying engineering innovation and extreme product definition. Intelligence is only a tool; making products that truly solve pain points and have commercial viability is the long-term moat of hardware entrepreneurship.

HardTech: As a completely new category going overseas, what pitfalls did you encounter in the early stage in user perception and business models that mature categories would not encounter? How should hardware companies plan the moat from early patents to later channels?

Tian Youren: For a completely new category, the biggest pain point is that there is no reference point, and the market must be educated from zero.

When the product first went overseas, many overseas users' first reaction was to question "Is this an IQ tax gimmick?" and some even worried, "Will the machine hurt the cat?" Mature categories do not need to explain these common-sense points, but we had to dispel them bit by bit. In the early stage, really only a very small number of people willing to try new things bought it, and we had to endure until the market continuously validated it before public perception gradually took shape. The advantage is that once perception is established, marketing costs will drop rapidly.

Second, we did pay tuition on the business model. At first, we calculated the cost structure of going overseas too naively; the first-generation product did not calculate the overseas chain in enough detail, pricing was too conservative, and after deducting shipping, platform commissions, returns and exchanges, and marketing expenses, there was only a tiny profit. Later we recalculated and raised the price, and sales actually became better. This shows that going overseas with a new category cannot focus only on BOM hardware costs; all hidden costs across the entire chain must be calculated clearly, otherwise it is easy to fall into diseconomies of scale where the more you sell, the more you lose.

As a hardware company, the moat must be viewed in stages. In the early stage, we spent heavily on a global PCT patent layout when defining the product, to win a golden development window for the company. Once the company scale grows, patents are no longer enough, and the moat will shift to offline channels. Especially overseas, about 85% of consumption occurs offline. Those leading chain retail channels have extremely strict product selection standards; they favor only products with world-leading innovation.

So our team's approach is very clear: first use existing hit products to knock on the doors of these leading channels; after cooperation is established, the moat becomes the "channel network." In the future, Orange Cat Universe will continuously introduce other new products in its matrix into these already-opened networks, further amplifying momentum through cross-selling.