Chery Holding Group has led a B2 round worth hundreds of millions of yuan into Zhongke Yuandongli, a national specialist agricultural robot company, through its Chery Intelligent Technology arm.
The funds will support R&D in new-energy smart agricultural machinery and embodied AI farming robots, scaled delivery, and overseas market expansion.
Academic pedigree and a serial entrepreneur team
Zhongke Yuandongli was incubated by the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Microelectronics. Its chief scientist is Li Deyi, a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and honorary president of the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence, who coined the concept of a driving brain for autonomous vehicles.
Founder and CEO Han Wei, Li’s student, holds a PhD from Tsinghua’s Computer Science department and is a senior engineer at CAS. The team draws from Tsinghua and UC Berkeley.
From L1 to L4, and into commercial deployment
While most unmanned agricultural machines on the market operate at L1 navigation, Zhongke Yuandongli’s products have reached L4 and entered commercial use. Its product line covers the full farming cycle: ploughing, management, harvest and transport.
In April, its autonomous machinery planted cotton in Changji, Xinjiang, with centimetre-precise straight-line tracking. In May, its system was adapted to Belarusian tractors at the Minsk Tractor Works for spring ploughing.
The company has completed unmanned farming operations across more than 1 million mu (about 67,000 hectares), covering 20-plus provinces, and is running product validation overseas.
A market scaling fast
According to MarketsandMarkets, the global agricultural robot market is projected to grow from $17.73 billion in 2025 to $56.26 billion by 2030, a 26 per cent compound annual growth rate. China’s domestic agricultural robot market is expected to exceed 16 billion yuan in 2026.
China is already the world’s largest operator of agricultural drones, with over 300,000 units and annual coverage exceeding 460 million mu. The inclusion of drones in the national agricultural strategy for 2026 has opened a fresh policy window.
Why Chery
Chery’s investment is not passive capital. The carmaker brings automotive engineering, supply chain rigour, and global distribution channels. The two companies plan joint R&D, production quality control, and international market development for new-energy smart farm equipment.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original OFweek report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience.