China’s embodied-intelligence funding cooled at the top in September, but the money did not leave. It changed where it lands.
The big tickets hit the brakes
Gasgoo counted 51 disclosed funding rounds above 1 billion yuan in the first nine months across embodied robots and core parts, with peaks of ten each in April and June. September saw only two such deals: a 400 million US dollar Series C for D-Robotics, spun out of Horizon’s AIoT team, and a fresh round above 1 billion yuan for Sudu Technology. Notably, neither flowed to a general-purpose humanoid whole machine. D-Robotics builds robot compute chips and a development platform, while Sudu positions a reusable embodied platform.
Yet total deal count stayed high at 49 in September, above most months of the year. The signal is a shift from valuation-driven races to a more selective, upstream-focused market.
Why the top cooled
On the company side, leaders are pivoting to initial public offerings. Unitree listed on the STAR Market on 19 August as the first humanoid-robot stock on the A-share market, and Zhiyuan, Leju, Jixian Vision and AIZ Square have all signalled IPO plans. Once in an IPO window, firms pause large equity rounds to avoid unsettling valuation anchors. On the capital side, more than ten unlisted or pre-IPO firms now carry reported valuations of 20 billion yuan or more, while regulators are tightening scrutiny of hard-tech and robotics listings on revenue authenticity and valuation reasonableness, narrowing exit paths.
Money moves to the shovel sellers
Capital is not leaving. It is moving early and upstream. Shutu raised three rounds in a single month, and Sainade and Xihu each closed four rounds in half a year. Seed and angel rounds were about 37 per cent of September deals. The flow is concentrating on force-and-tactile sensing and other component layers, with Paxini, Xinjingcheng, Tujian, Qianjue, Juqiao and Bairui all recently funded. Across the 49 funded firms in September, at least seven had clear automotive or autonomous-driving backgrounds.
Why car people keep getting funded
Since 2023, roughly 40 autonomous-driving executives have crossed into embodied intelligence across more than 20 startups, most founded in the last two years, drawing from Horizon, Li Auto, Huawei’s car unit, Baidu, Momenta, Waymo, Xpeng and RoboSense. Investors cite three reasons: car-team track records are verifiable through mass production, the pool of people with end-to-end, large-data and cluster-scale experience is tiny, and autonomous driving is the closest complete industrial capability to robotics, with a ready-made perception, planning and data-flywheel stack.
A structural bubble, not a global one
IDC puts first-half global humanoid shipments near 25,000 units, up 432.1 per cent, with China at over 19,000, about 78 per cent of the world, yet entertainment, data collection and research still make up 65 per cent of demand. Venture investors from Lenovo and GSR have warned of a bubble and predicted most of China’s 200-plus robot firms will not survive a decade. The smarter read is a structural bubble concentrated in whole machines and brains, while components and real-scene firms stay early. New Ding Capital expects only 10 to 20 of more than 100 humanoid companies to survive the coming shake-out.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original Gasgoo report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience. The full original (in Chinese) is at Gasgoo.