Gongzhi Ocean, a deep-sea embodied-intelligence robotics company spun out of Harbin Engineering University, has closed three funding rounds in a single year and secured nearly 100 million yuan in intended orders, despite a team of fewer than 20 people. Founder Guo Chunyu, a professor and director of the ministry-led underwater-propulsion laboratory, says the group has spent more than two decades solving 70 per cent to 80 per cent of the hardest deep-sea operation problems.
Its core technology couples a flexible undulating fin that mimics a flatworm’s swim with a military-submarine pump-jet, cutting radiated noise to 86 decibels against 100 to 170 for conventional propellers and dropping sediment disturbance to one five-hundredth. The robot can sprint at 15 knots with over 72 hours of endurance, then switch to a near-silent work mode in ecologically sensitive waters. Sensing uses a 5-megapixel camera and an image-enhancement model trained on 200 teraflops of compute, lifting detection range by 25 per cent with over 95 per cent recognition accuracy.
Commercial traction is concrete. At a reservoir trial the firm cut single mission cost from 5 million yuan to 700,000 and shortened inspection from six months to 20 days, a 90 per cent efficiency gain. It has won near-100 million yuan of intent orders in deep-sea mining, is building a sub-100,000 yuan ‘handbag’ ROV for COSCO, signed a Singapore service framework worth tens of millions and a 30 million yuan component deal with Canada’s APG-Neuro, and broke ground on a Qidong factory in July 2026 with capacity for about 100 units a year. Guo aims for 30 million yuan of revenue in 2026 and profitability above 100 million in 2027, and says he wants Gongzhi Ocean to become ‘the Huawei of the deep sea.’
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original 36Kr report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience. The full original (in Chinese) is at https://36kr.com/p/3977372742250756.