Chery buys in, not just funds
Beijing Zhongke Yuandongli Technology (Original Power) recently closed a B2 round of several hundred million renminbi led by Chery Holdings’ Chery Smart Technology. The funds go mainly to new-energy smart-agriculture machinery and embodied-intelligence farm-robot R&D, scaled delivery and faster overseas expansion. Per Tianyancha, Zhongke Yuandongli has completed eight rounds, backed by a mix of state forces (CAS-held Guoke, Zhongguancun, Beijing Kewei, Jilin Zhongke, Hubei Hi-Tech) and top institutions (Haiyi, CICC, CCV, InnoAngel, Vertex China).
Chery’s entry is not just money. As a leading carmaker it brings deep automotive know-how, and the two will collaborate on R&D, engineering validation, supply chain, production quality and global channels to speed productisation, scale and internationalisation of new-energy smart ag-machinery and embodied farm robots.
An academician’s farm team
Zhongke Yuandongli was incubated by the CAS Institute of Microelectronics and is a national agriculture-robot “little giant”. Beyond the research pedigree, it carries a mentor-disciple founding tag. Chief scientist Li Deyi, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, long studied uncertainty AI, cloud computing and autonomous driving and coined the “driving brain” concept. Founder, chairman and CEO Han Wei, a Li student, graduated from Tsinghua’s computer department and is a CAS senior engineer with years in farm-robot R&D.
Li’s vision for future farm machines is a learning agricultural robot: “the ox retires, the iron ox ploughs, the farmer moves to the city, the expert farms”. Replacing heavy fieldwork with machines, plus standardised intelligent farming, upends the old labour- and experience-based model.
New energy plus autonomy
Zhongke Yuandongli built a “new energy plus intelligence” route with pure-electric and alcohol-hybrid smart machinery, the world’s first 25 to 340 horsepower full-coverage new-energy smart-agriculture product system, breaking industry bottlenecks. It covers tillage, management, harvest and transport with an unmanned operation system, whole machines and embodied farm robots including the Wantu pure-electric tractor, Zhiniu unmanned smart machinery, and Zhinong tomato-picking, transport and spray robots.
While most unmanned tractors sit at Level 1 navigation, Zhongke Yuandongli reaches Level 4 with commercial scale. In April in Changji, Xinjiang, its unmanned smart machinery with a “wide-early-premium” seeder worked without manual control at centimetre-level straight-line error. Overseas, in May its “Zhiyun” system adapted to Minsk Tractor Works’ local models in Belarus for spring combined tillage.
It has commercial use in fields, ranches and orchards, over 1 million mu of standardised operations, across more than 20 provinces, with overseas validation underway, pushing farm machines from single tools toward perceptive, decisive, executable, self-learning embodied farm robots.
A market at speed
MarketsandMarkets puts the global agriculture-robot market at USD 17.73 billion in 2025, rising to USD 56.26 billion by 2030, a 26.0 per cent compound rate. Abroad, the US commercialised laser weeding via Carbon Robotics. Ageing Japan pushes unmanned machinery through Kubota, Yanmar and Iseki. Germany’s BoniRob serves field detection. Britain leads fruit and mushroom sorting with vision and arms. In China, the largest agriculture-drone nation with over 300,000 drones and 460 million mu of annual coverage, 2026 saw drones enter the national strategy, and the two ministries solicited robot scenarios in planting, breeding and processing. Zhongshang predicts China’s agriculture-robot market will pass RMB 16 billion in 2026.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original OFweek Robotics report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience. The full original (in Chinese) is at https://robot.ofweek.com/2026-08/ART-8321204-8120-30696736.html.