Guo Renjie was born in 1997, entered Xi’an Jiaotong University’s gifted programme at 15, and within four years at Dreame rose to China president, running a team of over 1,500. In late 2024 he founded LeXiang Tech and its YuanDian robot brand. In July the company closed a RMB 500 million Pre-A round led by Ant Group.
A calibrated confidence
Guo says his early mistake was importing lessons from robot vacuums, where 90 per cent of the tech was mature, into embodied AI, where 90 per cent had no precedent. The gap between imagining a capability and building it, then between building it and making it useful, proved far wider than he expected. Through the first half of 2026 he went quiet, hiring scientists and building out six technical tracks: body structure, joint modules, light arms, VLA, embodied general models and bionic-awareness models.
Small first, into the home
The new Bridge robot stands 88 cm, weighs under 13 kg and pre-sells at RMB 8,888, with backflip, teleoperation and object-manipulation skills. LeXiang’s self-developed joint module is about 40 mm in diameter, roughly 210 g, and delivers 12 N·m peak torque, which the company claims is the world’s lightest and smallest high-torque joint. The smaller M1, about 50 cm tall, is already in delivery for elder care, pet companionship and child education. Guo sets the product-market-fit bar at 10,000 to 20,000 units shipped.
LeXiang is also opening OpenBridge, a developer ecosystem where users install robot skills like phone apps. Guo’s thesis is that the home robot must be small and safe enough to be tolerated before it can be smart enough to be trusted, and that a long hardware cycle rewards the consumer-grade player who reaches millions of users.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original Zhidx report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience. The full original (in Chinese) is at https://www.zhidx.com/p/589669.html.