Ant Group leads strategic round in Daimon Robotics as tactile sensing becomes the new variable

On 11 August, Daimon Robotics announced a several-hundred-million-yuan strategic round led by Ant Group, with existing shareholders oversubscribing. The raise came only about two months after its previous financing: a 100-million-yuan A round in June led by Inovance Industrial Investment and China Telecom. The string of capital injections has built Daimon an investor roster spanning … Read more

Oaknut Robotics closes angel round led by China Merchants and NIO Capital, bets on instinct not data

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

Hikrobot ships its 200,000th mobile robot, two years after the 100,000th

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

Xiaomi open-sources Robotics-U0, a unified model for the embodied-data bottleneck

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

LimX Dynamics closes $200M Pre-IPO round, valuation reaches 15 billion yuan

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

Panic blockade: can America’s play really wall off China’s robotics expansion

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

Estun, from ‘number one in the East’ to a profit squeeze: an industrial-robot leader at its breaking point

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

Still losing money on e-drives, Schaeffler bets on robotics with a 350 million euro order book

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

Crossing the unmanned sea: Sinian Intelligent Driving steers out of ports toward the long haul

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

Why warehouses are becoming the first real battlefield for humanoid robots

The embodied intelligence sector has moved from demo videos to live work tests. The first real proving ground is not the home or the coffee shop. It is the warehouse. Figure’s 03 robot sorted nearly 250,000 packages over 200 hours of live streaming. (Source: Gasgoo Embodied Intelligence) In May 2026, Figure live-streamed its Figure 03 … Read more