The Belt 
HyperVolve Intelligent has closed an angel round in the several hundreds of millions of yuan. BlueRun Ventures China led, with SenseTime Guoxiang Capital, Legend Star, Inno Angel and a Tsinghua alumni seed fund participating. Lansong Capital is long-term strategic financial adviser. The company began operating in late August. Two months and no product is, on … Read more
Juqiao Industrial has closed a RMB 100 million Series A led by Ant Group, with existing shareholders Zero-One Ventures, Weihai Gangrong and Qingdao Hexin increasing their positions. Multi-Dimension Capital acted as sole financial adviser. The money goes into production capacity for electronic skin, into tactile and multimodal research, and into applications in robotics, home products … Read more
On 27 October, Synrise closed a Pre-A round in the tens of millions of yuan, invested solely by Yunqi Partners. The angel round before it had brought in Vertex Ventures and K2VC. The company makes bionic prosthetic limbs, which is not where the capital in embodied AI has been going. That is the point. While … Read more
Schaeffler published its third-quarter numbers this week. Inside them was a sentence that deserves more attention than the headline figures: management said the hype has cooled somewhat, but that activity related to actual delivery remains quite brisk. The sentence was supported by data. Two new Chinese customers placed mass-production orders in the quarter. The humanoid … Read more
AgiBot used its innovation day on 29 October to disclose a number that few Chinese robot companies publish. First-half 2026 revenue came in at close to RMB 2 billion, a figure above what Unitree and UBTech reported for the same six months, and comparable to Unitree’s performance across a full nine months. The trajectory behind … Read more
China’s industrial control giants are having a better year. Inovance reported revenue of RMB 37.956 billion for the first nine months of 2026, up 19.88 per cent, with net profit attributable to shareholders of RMB 4.398 billion, up 3.38 per cent. The headline profit number is unremarkable. The line underneath it is not. General automation, … Read more
The investor is easy to identify by reputation rather than name. He appears on the early cap table of one listed robot company and sits behind another of the sector’s leaders. For years he kept his distance from publicity while operating in the primary market with a style that other investors describe as aggressive and … Read more
In October, Suzhou Limiaoda Intelligent closed two funding rounds, B1 and B2, for close to RMB 500 million in cumulative capital. A third, B3, is already oversubscribed by several institutions. The company was registered in Xiangcheng district in June 2025. What makes the round unusual is not the speed. It is that a company barely … Read more
On 28 October the Hong Kong Exchange was supposed to ring its bell for Changzhou Weiyi Zhizao. The price range was set. The maximum raise was about HKD 800 million. Three days before the listing, the company told the market it was postponing the global offering and returning every subscription payment in full, without interest. … Read more
Jaime Xiao follows his argument that China’s megacities behave like venture capitalists. New fDi Intelligence data puts Arizona’s $275bn in greenfield FDI pledges since the 2022 midterms top of the US table, with roughly nine-tenths of it tracing back to one company. Washington, he argues, has been learning the trade.