Gamma Robotics has registered in Shanghai’s Xuhui district and moved into Modu Space, the city’s AI incubator cluster. It is the first market-facing company incubated by China Telecom’s AI institute, TeleAI, and it is backed by the operator’s Shanghai AI industry private equity fund.
Li Xuelong, China Telecom’s group chief technology officer, chief scientist and TeleAI president, is scientific adviser. Bai Chenjia, who ran TeleAI’s general embodied intelligence institute and helped build the operator’s embodied team, is founder and chief executive. He leads a national key R&D programme project, holds National Natural Science Foundation grants, has taken part in drafting China’s humanoid robot standards, has published more than 100 papers and supervises doctoral students at Fudan and Shanghai Jiao Tong.
What the company is actually building
The target is a self-evolving base brain for humanoids: whole-body motion and dexterous manipulation trained through a data pipeline, with a model that keeps learning from real interaction instead of freezing at deployment. The commercial entry point is state-owned enterprises, where China Telecom already holds network, compute, data and a set of high-value sites, alongside AI Flow, its next-generation network architecture.
Gamma will run a joint humanoid laboratory with TeleAI to move research into products, and it is starting from an existing loop between decision-making, execution and synthetic data.
Telecom operators entering robotics is a specific signal rather than a slogan. They bring compute and connectivity, the two inputs a robot brain consumes at scale, and they bring procurement relationships with the enterprises that will buy the first industrial humanoids. What they do not bring is a hardware culture.
The track is crowded with better-funded humanoid makers, and the article that reported the spin-out notes as much. A state-backed entrant wins on deployment, not on demonstrations.
In China the national team does not wait for the market to pick a standard. It builds one.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original Gasgoo report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience. The full original (in Chinese) is at https://www.gasgoo.com/apps/e060bad9eca91db7f01403fc7120041f/robot/news/70475521-teleai%E5%AD%B5%E5%8C%96%E4%BC%BD%E9%A9%AC%E6%99%BA%E8%83%BD/.