The US just regulated Unitree’s new robots. The real test is elsewhere

Not a border ban Unitree secured CSRC approval for its listing on 2 July, but under the FCC rule its new US-bound products face fresh access questions. It flagged the US market risk in its updated prospectus on 31 July. The US was 18.39, 19.54 and 13.30 per cent of revenue in 2023, 2024 and … Read more

The dexterous-hand ‘shovel seller’: how Lingxin bets on everyone else’s robot gold rush

The bottleneck everyone argues about The hand is the most visible choke point of embodied intelligence. As early as 2018 OpenAI admitted that contact, friction and damping are hard to simulate accurately, and Musk has said the forearm and hand are harder to build than the rest of the robot combined. Every gain in degrees … Read more

Daxiao Robotics open-sources a world model built for Chinese homes

Why Chinese homes needed their own dataset Embodied intelligence ultimately has to enter homes, but home environments are complex and personal, demanding training across hugely varied real scenarios. The new dataset holds 300,000 structured real floor plans, 5,000 complete home simulation scenes and 50,000 physically simulated interactive object assets, filling a gap in large-scale, high-fidelity, … Read more

Hikrobot ships its 200,000th mobile robot, a milestone for China’s AMR scale-up

From ‘can move’ to ‘can be scheduled’ Scale is the result of long accumulation in technology, product, scenario and standards, not just capacity. Hikrobot’s path runs from early latent, forklift and omnidirectional models to a safety controller with the world’s first SIL3 certificate, China’s first full-directive CE for omnidirectional forklifts, and a fourth-generation ‘smart base’ … Read more

China’s ‘industrial robot champion’ ESTUN tops shipments again and clears 10,000 in a single quarter

Eight years at the top In 2025 ESTUN first reached number one in China across all brands, local and foreign, with a 10.6 per cent share and 25 per cent annual shipment growth, lifting domestic penetration of the industrial-robot market above 56 per cent. It has now led domestic-brand shipments for eight consecutive years and … Read more

Surgery-robot maker Surgerii, backed by Lei Jun’s Shunwei, gets STAR Market IPO accepted

Surgerii, one of China’s surgical-robot ‘four little dragons’, has had its STAR Market IPO accepted, its second run at the capital market after an aborted 2023 attempt. The company is targeting a 700 million yuan raise and intends to list under the exchange’s fifth standard, which requires a market cap above 4 billion yuan but … Read more

Tencent-backed agri-robot maker FJDynamics refiles for Hong Kong IPO after 1bn yuan of accumulated losses

After its September 2025 filing lapsed, FJDynamics has refiled for a Hong Kong IPO, joining a queue of nearly 50 robot companies now lined up for the exchange. Where most cluster into industrial and humanoid forms, FJDynamics stands apart by targeting agriculture, animal husbandry, construction and property management. Founded in 2017 by Wu Di, a … Read more

Where did H1 2026’s 93.5bn yuan in embodied-AI capital go? Heads took 70%, Beijing and Shenzhen lead

The first-half 2026 funding numbers for embodied AI are genuinely startling. IT Juzi counts 93.47 billion yuan deployed, up fivefold year on year, across 322 rounds, a 137% increase. Include overseas via GG Robot and the figure is 132.5 billion, up 428%. Same trend: a tide of capital rushing in. Where the money went The … Read more

Behind embodied AI’s ranking frenzy: how ‘world number one’ became a manufactured commodity

The speed of ‘first’ now outruns the speed of robot iteration. A model can go from launch to chart-topper in a week, and the charts refresh faster than products ship. When ‘first’ multiplies, the industry slides into a collective confusion about ranking inflation, and a fair question: who is actually manufacturing these titles? A manufactured … Read more