China’s humanoid output could top 100,000 units in 2026, five times 2025, but most machines still land in labs and classrooms, not factories, as capital pivots from bodies to brains.
UBTECH has taken a 10 per cent stake in a new Maoming joint venture with a state-owned partner, extending its humanoids from auto and 3C factories into traditional industries and building a replicable
Japanese engineers have taken apart a Unitree G1 to study China’s humanoid advances, but Japan lacks the commercial scenes, from entertainment to data centres, that turned Chinese robots into a real i
At WAIC 2026 the embodied-intelligence zone was again the busiest. Sudu’s booth drew a different crowd: robots stood quietly at a workbench doing plain things, grabbing items, wrapping an object with a cloth using both arms, inserting a part into its hole. No showmanship, but the stability, success rate and generalisation stood out. This is … Read more
As multimodal and VLA models mature, embodied intelligence is racing toward industry. Robots reason better, but in real homes, factories and shops, what decides capability is not only how smart the brain is, but how accurately they perceive the physical world. Navigation, fine grasping and human interaction all rest on reliable three-dimensional vision. Guangxin Technology … Read more
As robots flood factories, homes and public spaces, what decides whether they can actually work is shifting from movement to manipulation. Carrying, inspection and simple pick-and-place are maturing, but on finer dexterous tasks, grasping parts, turning tools, inserting components, robots still struggle. The industry used to rank a hand by parameters, degrees of freedom, load, … Read more
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
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
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