While humanoids packed the WRC floor, a quieter fight played out one level down. Unitree still leads the quadruped market, but its grip is loosening, and a young firm called Vbot (Weita Power) found the gap: the consumer. SAG estimates global quadruped shipments of about 26,000 units in the first half of 2026, with Unitree … Read more
StarBot (Star Agent) came to WRC 2026 with a full family and a claim it has already passed the hardest test in robotics: product-market fit. The headline exhibit was an end-to-end embodied logistics plan, the first in the field to clear PMF, running with SF Express and China Post across more than ten logistics centres … Read more
At WRC 2026, Zhejiang Humanoid Innovation Centre brought its NAVIAI range to booth C-105 and argued for one idea: a single technology base should run every scene, not a different robot per job. The base is SPIRE, a fusion of a world model that reads the environment and predicts change with an embodied model that … Read more
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
When typhoon White Dolphin landed in early August, cities from Shanghai to Beijing flooded and thousands of cars sat submerged. The annual question returned: can a car actually ford standing water? For petrol cars the answer is fixed by the air-intake height. For electric cars, the answer has quietly moved. Lei Jun posted that drivers … Read more
On 18 August, Xiaomi president Lu Weibing and chief financial officer Lin Shiwei took an earnings call to answer questions on the group’s second-quarter results and, above all, its car business. The headline number was a deepening loss in the unit that holds Xiaomi’s smart electric vehicles and artificial-intelligence work, even as volume kept climbing. … Read more
Alibaba has set a five-year goal for AI and cloud revenue to break $100 billion, about 690 billion yuan, a target that would require roughly sevenfold growth from a base of about 100 billion yuan, some 14.5 billion dollars, in external commercial revenue, implying a compound annual rate near 47 per cent. Alibaba Cloud is … 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