Three Chinese carmakers just cracked the global top ten

According to figures from the China Passenger Car Association based on OICA data, China’s vehicle exports reached 5.31m units in the first half of 2026, up 53 per cent year on year, with June alone at 1.07m units, up 73 per cent and 8 per cent month on month. The export momentum is broadening, not … Read more

Shenzhen and Los Angeles are quietly running the same Robotaxi race

From technology to the city In 2026, Waymo’s order volume in San Francisco at one point surpassed Lyft’s, while Apollo Go’s first-quarter rides crossed 3.2m. Capital followed the proven demand: global private autonomous-driving deals reached 23.3bn dollars in the first four months of 2026, more than double the full-year 2025 total, headlined by Waymo’s 16bn … Read more

A 5 billion yuan bet on China’s humanoid ‘brain’ race

A price-to-sales multiple near 200 times The other side of the headline matters. Public figures put Qianxun’s 2026 revenue target at about 100m yuan on roughly 200 units. A 20bn yuan valuation against 100m yuan of sales is a price-to-sales ratio close to 200 times. A company just starting to earn revenue is being priced … Read more

Another Baidu veteran bolts for physical AI

From platform to physical world Yu joined Zhongguancun Kejin as president in September 2024 and is credited with productising its large-model platform and capturing the enterprise opportunity of ‘platform plus application plus service’, improving the company’s product capability, business scale and visibility. His departure marks another senior operator stepping from internet platforms and scaled AI … Read more

Shenzhen’s Jiuyou database clears a national-level evaluation with Peking University

What the evaluation found The panel concluded the project fills a core gap in China’s domestic multi-modal AI databases and offers a new paradigm for modernising basic-software architecture and fusing AI with the data layer. Targeting the strategic need for local substitution in critical fields, it tackles entrenched industry problems: rigid sharding in distributed databases, … Read more

A Huawei veteran is betting China’s inference chips on the Agent era

A Huawei lifer’s bet Founder and CEO Yang Bin spent more than two decades at Huawei, building the company’s processor team from scratch in the US and later leading wireless baseband algorithms and chip work, with long experience in large-scale hardware scheduling and data architecture. He sums up entrepreneurship as ‘the realisation of everything you … Read more

PaXini crosses 3.5 billion yuan as tactile sensing becomes Physical AI’s data layer

PaXini says cumulative funding has crossed 3.5 billion yuan, refreshing the global ceiling for tactile-sensing financing, as the company repositions itself from sensor maker to the data infrastructure of the Physical AI era. The round assembles a ‘four-in-one’ capital matrix spanning national financial capital, three regional AI-industry funds, leading market institutions and global industry giants. … Read more

The StarWeave scientist who walked away to build a home robot

From a 20 billion yuan unicorn to a fresh start The founder is Xu Huazhe, formerly co-founder and chief scientist of StarWeave, the embodied-AI company whose valuation blew past 20 billion yuan with close to 3 billion yuan raised. Xu left at the peak to build something new. His record is rare even in this … Read more

A 1.2 billion yuan bet on trackless robots for China’s chip fabs

Jieluo Intelligent Equipment (Suzhou) has broken ground on a headquarters project in Suzhou’s Wuzhong district, a 1.2 billion yuan bet on the robots that move wafers around the world’s cleanest factories. The site covers 42.5 mu and about 70,000 square metres, and is designed to build 2,000 trackless-navigation robots (AMRs) and 500 wafer-intelligent-storage systems a … Read more

Shenzhen’s Dobot unveils Lumeng, its ’embodied omni’ home humanoid

Four kinds of freedom Dobot says ’embodied omni’ rests on four dimensions. Spatial: the robot adapts freely to homes, shopping malls and campuses. Role: it switches identity with the person it meets, becoming a life companion, a sports playmate or a science tutor. Capability: it fuses vision, voice and movement so it moves from passive … Read more