Zero Zero Robotics, the company that put a folding camera drone in a jacket pocket, has closed a round at a USD 1 billion valuation and joined the unicorn list.
People close to the company estimate fourth-quarter revenue this year at RMB 600 million to RMB 700 million. Disclosed figures show revenue already passed RMB 1 billion in 2025.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original Leiphone report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience. The full original (in Chinese) is at https://www.leiphone.com/category/weiwu/qIl3bfS2v2a8zI7D.html.
Two rounds in one year, and Ant on the second
The company disclosed two rounds in 2026. The D round brought in Boyu Capital, Xianghe Capital and DeLian Capital. The D+ round brought in a company under Ant Group.
That is a reversal from eighteen months ago. In mid-2025, while talking to investors, Zero Zero was short of cash and still being valued at the number it carried around 2022, which means two to three years without a mark-up. Then the HoverAir brand broke out, Ant’s strategic investment arm wrote a USD 50 million cheque, and the valuation climbed past RMB 2 billion. Investors now say the entry ticket to a conversation is a partner-level title at the fund.
Founder Wang Mengqiu has a reputation among backers for generating ideas constantly and for not folding. Several investors told Leiphone they liked him early and stayed out because the consumer drone category was too brutal. The ones who stayed out are now watching from the outside.
What the product did
In August 2026 the company launched VERSA, a modular pocket gimbal camera built on a folding architecture. It reads as a new front in the same fight rather than a side project, and it is the kind of product that carries a hardware company from a single hero SKU into a line.
The revenue trajectory matters more than the round. A consumer hardware company that goes from tight cash to a USD 1 billion mark in a year is not being rewarded for a pitch. It is being rewarded for sell-through, and for a category it created a decade ago and then had to defend.
Consumer drones are a market where the second-place economics are famously bad. Zero Zero survived by going smaller than everyone else, into a form factor that folds into a pocket and a use case that is not aerial photography but personal capture. The valuation is what the market pays for having picked a lane narrow enough to own.