On the WRC main forum on 20 August, Unitree founder Wang Xingxing opened with an unsettling fact: his robots can already do simple assembly on a factory line, but slower than a person, and a new task still needs re-tuning. So there is no mass rollout yet. In a market high on ‘mass-production year’ slogans, … Read more
Oak Fruit Robotics, a Beijing embodied-AI startup, has closed an angel round led by China Merchants Venture and NIO Capital, with a Tsinghua alumni seed fund following. Four months after a nearly 100 million yuan seed round in March, the company has now raised two rounds totalling several hundred million yuan. It was founded in … Read more
BridgeDP Robotics, a Shenzhen developer of general-purpose robot operating systems, has closed a Pre-A+++ round of about 100 million yuan led by the China Mobile Chain-Leader Fund, with existing shareholders Fosun Capital and Shenzhen Capital adding capital. The company does not build robots. It builds the software that makes other people’s robots walk, run and … Read more
Critical Point, the dexterous-hand maker spun out of AgiBot, has closed a new round of nearly 1 billion yuan, pushing its post-money valuation above $1 billion. From founding to unicorn took just five months and four rounds. The company says OmniHand-series hands have shipped more than 8,000 units and grippers over 10,000, making it the … Read more
Guangdong Jiateng Robot Automation, a veteran mobile-robot maker, has closed a strategic round of tens of millions of yuan led by Hella-CTRL, with Dahe Fund and Jinmu Capital following. Orient Paper has held about 19.84 per cent since a 2014 strategic stake, remaining the second-largest shareholder. The new capital lines up tightly with the robotics … Read more
Beijing Zhongke Yuandongli Technology has closed a B2 round of several hundred million yuan led by Chery Intelligent Technology, under Chery Holdings. Tianyancha records eight rounds to date. Spun out of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Microelectronics, it is a national little giant specialised SME for agricultural robots, led by academician Li Deyi … Read more
Deep-sea Intelligence, a Harbin Engineering University spin-out, has announced a Series A of over 500 million yuan, unveiled on 13 August. The investor list spans top market funds and state capital: Guanghe Venture, Fortune Capital, GGV, a TotalEnergies-managed fund under Cathay Capital, CICC Investment and China Insurance Investment, with returning backers including Zhengxuan Investment, Yunze … Read more
DataSmart, a humanoid foundation-model company, has closed a nearly 500 million yuan Angel++ round from listed-industry players and top financial investors. It is the sixth round the company has raised since its founding just half a year ago. DataSmart trains whole-body humanoid models on real interaction data. (Source: LeiPhone) Prior backers include whole-machine makers AgiBot, … Read more
China’s surgical robotics funding fell from about 30 rounds in 2021 to just 9 in 2024, even as 2026 brings a wave of IPO filings. Zhenghang Medical listed in Hong Kong on 30 June as a puncture-surgery-robot maker, while Huake Precision’s STAR Market IPO was accepted. The contrast hides the real story: a survival race … Read more
At WRC 2026, Galaxea co-founder Gao Jiyang argued that the ultimate business model for embodied AI is selling “physical-world tokens”, the way OpenAI bills developers per text token today. In his telling, robot hardware eventually becomes a negative-margin vehicle whose only job is to put more endpoints into the real world to consume model tokens. … Read more