Beijing Zhongke Huiling Robotics, which sells under the CASBOT brand, has completed an A++ round worth several hundred million yuan. The round was joined by Zhilai Investment, Yonghua Investment, Maotian Investment, Yuanhe Chenkun, Guoke Kezhi and Luning Investment. Proceeds go to volume delivery, embodied brain research for key scenarios, and market expansion.
It is the second large round in a few months. In June 2025 the company closed a near-RMB 100 million A round led by Lens Technology.
Why the money came back
Yonghua Investment’s managing director Tang Zheng described the logic as a shift from concept to industrial validation. The firm, he said, weights commercial deployment in real scenarios. In its reading, the directions CASBOT picked, smart mining and shoe and apparel manufacturing, have clear demand and measurable returns.
Body, brain and hand
Founded in 2023 as a key incubation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Automation, the company is chaired by Zhang Zhengtao, a researcher and doctoral supervisor at the institute and director of its industrial vision intelligent equipment laboratory. The core team has worked on micro-target precision assembly and on compliant assembly for the C919 airliner.
On the brain side the company built CAS-brain, an embodied model combining a vision-language foundation with embodied agents, world models and reinforcement learning. For industrial work it offers CASBOT PA, a lighter perception-to-action model that chains visual perception, action generation, kinematics and execution, trains on a single consumer-grade GPU, and can correct errors and retry in real time. CASBOT PA is scheduled to be open sourced in the second half of 2027.
On the body side the company designs from end effector to complete machine: the full-size CASBOT 01 and CASBOT 02, the wheel-arm industrial CASBOT W2, the half-size CASBOT Mini and the CASBOT BAND robot band. Dexterous hands sit in a joint venture, Zhongke Huisi, formed with Lens Technology and Hunan Huaxia Investment Group, which has shipped the L1, D1 and M1 covering tactile sensing, fine manipulation and compliant gripping.
The shoe order book
Shoe and apparel manufacturing is the first commercial proof. In 2025 the company took tens-of-millions-yuan orders from several leading shoe manufacturers. This year its order book for embodied shoe-making robots has passed RMB 400 million, with several thousand units scheduled for production.
Footwear is a difficult automation target. Uppers and fabric are flexible, and every arrival at a station differs in edge, wrinkle and position. Multiple styles and frequent changeovers defeat fixtures and pre-set trajectories. CASBOT attacks the gap with embodied manipulation.
In August 2025 its first shoe robot entered the factory of Fujian Xinbai Sports, a Putian footwear leader that supplies Puma and Skechers, for proof-of-concept work on insole stamping. This October the CASBOT PA model went into live validation at the same plant across tongue insertion, outsole stamping and sole pressing, while the W2 began testing sole loading.
The measured cycle times are 7 seconds per piece for outsole stamping and 18 seconds per pair for sole pressing. On current project economics the company estimates annual return on investment of 50 to 70 per cent and a payback period under two years. The plant also feeds the model: success and failure data for each material and style flows back, and the next model returns to the same station, closing a loop from task to data to training to on-machine validation.
Mining, entertainment and export
Mining is the second front. Underground conditions are dusty, wet, narrow and badly connected, which is a hard reliability test. In June 2025 the company formed a joint venture with Shandong Zhaojin Group and Shandong Zhongkuang Group, based in Yantai, focused on high-risk underground work and safety patrols. A mine charging robot is now in a live mine for on-site training and validation.
Entertainment is the third. CASBOT BAND, four full-size CASBOT 02 units, launched in February, appeared on the Beijing Spring Festival Gala and later at the Zhongguancun Forum, the World AI Conference and the World Robot Conference. Since August it has held a standing residency at a robot experience store in Qingdao, moving from event equipment to an operating service product. The company has framework and purchase agreements with operators of experience stores and commercial pods, and is testing sale, lease and service models.
After this round the company will keep building across industrial, commercial, special-purpose and foundation-model directions, and use education and entertainment as entry points to expand into the Middle East, Europe, Southeast Asia and North America.
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/70476142.