On 10 August, Oaknut Robotics announced an angel round co-led by China Merchants Venture and NIO Capital, with the Tsinghua alumni seed fund following on. Four months after a near-100-million-yuan seed round in March, the company has now closed two rounds for a combined several-hundred-million-yuan raise. Oaknut was founded in late 2024 and calls itself … Read more
On 6 July 2026, as a fork-lift robot rolled off the line, Hikrobot formally announced that cumulative output across all its mobile-robot categories had passed 200,000 units. It took the company only two years to go from its 100,000th unit in May 2024 to the second hundred thousand. By the latest count from the Mobile … Read more
All over the world, people are acting as preschool teachers for robots. In Indian factories, workers wear cameras while assembling, sorting and moving goods, recording first-person footage of complete operations. Inside Tesla’s Optimus training arena, staff wear helmet- and backpack-mounted camera rigs, repeatedly picking up cups, wiping tables and drawing curtains. Data firms pay ordinary … Read more
General-purpose humanoid robot maker LimX Dynamics has closed a Pre-IPO financing round of nearly 200 million US dollars, lifting its post-money valuation to 15 billion yuan and putting it among China’s super unicorns. The company has raised 400 million US dollars across the past six months, building a war chest for its next capital-market move. … Read more
On 28 July, the Trump administration’s FCC updated its controlled list, adding two categories of foreign-made equipment: advanced robots and networked power inverters. The FCC argues such products pose an unacceptable risk to US national security or public safety. An exemption path exists: the Defence Department, and for inverters the Homeland Security Department, can grant … Read more
A good name can hide a company’s ambition. Estun spells out its own: ‘Est’ from the Spanish for east, ‘un’ for one. The ‘number one in the East’ vision looked bold in the 1990s, when overseas giants monopolised China’s industrial-robot market. Estun made it real. Its 2025 report shows eight consecutive years as the top … Read more
Among foreign component suppliers, Schaeffler has been unusually forward-leaning on robotics. Its latest quarterly results put the humanoid-robot order backlog at 350 million euros, a figure it discounts heavily, applying at least a 50 per cent haircut to customer forecasts borrowed from automotive life-cycle maths. That 350 million covers only three OEMs. One is named: … Read more
For years, Sinian Intelligent Driving was known almost entirely for port autonomy. Compared with robotaxi and city navigation, port driving is the silent corner of the autonomous sector, a closed scenario with a limited market and long, fussy delivery cycles. That changed when Sinian closed a 300 million yuan Series C from Xingzheng Capital and … Read more
Cui Dixiao joined autonomous-truck startup PlusAI in 2017, straight from a lectureship at Xi’an Jiaotong University, where he earned a doctorate under autonomous-driving pioneer Zheng Nanning. Seven years later, in 2025, he left as chief scientist. What he learned reshaped how he sees the industry. ‘I underestimated the complexity of autonomous driving,’ he says now. … Read more
On 1 August, fourteen carmakers published July sales. The picture splits cleanly between camps. Among new-energy startups, three more than doubled year on year: Leapmotor at 101,300 (up 102 per cent), Zeekr at 35,800 (up 111 per cent) and Arcfox at 23,500 (up 150 per cent). Leapmotor, the sales leader among startups, set a record … Read more