After first filing with the Hong Kong exchange in February 2026, warehouse-automation leader Hai Robotics updated its prospectus on 13 September and restarted its Hong Kong IPO, positioning itself as the first ACR stock on the bourse. Before the listing it had completed fifteen rounds raising about 4.133 billion yuan, and in January 2026 it closed a Pre-IPO-plus round.
Its backers form a heavyweight roster. The XbotPark fund founded by Li Ze-xiang, Gao Bing-qiang and Gan Jie gave early seed support, later joined by Best Express, Legend Star, Source Code Capital, Sequoia China, DG Capital, Walden International and General Atlantic. After the E round its post-money valuation reached 10.9 billion yuan, squarely in unicorn territory for warehouse robotics.
Hai Robotics is a standout in Li Ze-xiang’s robotics portfolio. In 2016 Chen Yuqi founded it with alumni Fang Bing and Xu Shengdong from Hong Kong Polytechnic and ETH Zurich, with Li Ze-xiang as chief adviser. As e-commerce, new retail and smart manufacturing grew, warehouse orders fragmented, labour cost rose and old manual warehouses proved inefficient and error-prone, making automation a hard need.
Players differ in approach. Geek+ is a full-scene warehouse AMR provider across shelves-to-person, totes-to-person and pallets-to-person. Hai Robotics instead targets the most time- and labour-heavy piece-picking scene and invented the ACR, or case-handling robot, which climbs high racks, fetches single totes and runs the whole put-away, pick and move flow without moving entire shelving, lifting density and efficiency without rebuilding the warehouse.
From its first HaiPick System 1 in 2017 to the 15-metre HaiPick Climb in 2025, the world’s first mass-commercial single-side-climbing ACR, and a 2026 upgrade, Hai Robotics self-developed the robot body, localisation, control, fleet scheduling and warehouse-management system. Research spend totalled about 1.028 billion yuan from 2023 to 2025, plus 249 million yuan in the first half of 2026, and it had filed 2,495 patent applications by 30 June 2026.
Product mix keeps improving. System 1, once 92.8 per cent of revenue, fell to 29.7 per cent in first-half 2026 at 332 million yuan. System 3 rose to 54.3 per cent at 607 million yuan, Climb contributed 13.3 per cent at 149 million yuan, and System 2 just 2.1 per cent. By 2025 revenue the company served seven of the world’s top ten apparel firms and seven of the top ten 3PLs, with Anta, Li-Ning, L’Oreal, Kohler, Philips, Maersk and Panasonic on the client list.
By 30 June 2026 it had signed more than 2,000 projects and delivered over 1,600, building a mature loop of small pilot, efficiency proof and large repeat orders. New orders in first-half 2026 reached 2.353 billion yuan, up 48.8 per cent year on year and close to 80 per cent of full-year 2025, and order backlog exceeded 4.1 billion yuan, a deep revenue reserve as it heads to market.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original OFweek report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience. The full original (in Chinese) is at https://robot.ofweek.com/2026-09/ART-8321202-8120-30703100.html.