The domestic collaborative-robot track gained another IPO contender. FAO Robotics of Suzhou recently started A-share listing tutoring with Guotai Junan Haitong as its sponsor.
The IPO path has moved steadily this year: the company completed its joint-stock restructuring in March 2026, signed a tutoring agreement with Guotai Junan Haitong in August, and had its tutoring filing published by Jiangsu regulators in September, formally entering the tutoring stage.
Behind the brisk progress sits a roster of top-tier backers. FAO Robotics has raised more than 2.2 billion yuan in total, and its post-money valuation has passed 7 billion yuan. Investors include state-linked funds such as the China Life Dual-Carbon fund, Suzhou Industrial Investment and Suzhou Ventures, alongside marquee private names Meituan Longzhu, Alibaba, Hillhouse Ventures, Shunwei Capital, Source Code Capital and Zhongding Capital.
The company was founded in 2019 by two Harbin Institute of Technology alumni, Yao Ting and Gong Xiangfeng, who had known each other for over a decade. Yao, a machinery graduate with a Swiss Federal Institute of Technology master’s, previously worked at ABB, while Gong came from a communications-engineering background with serial-entrepreneur experience. The pair built FAO around the motto ‘make robots ubiquitous’ and won national recognition as a little-giant specialist.
Unlike most Chinese cobot makers that buy core parts and focus on integration, FAO developed and produces in house its controllers, encoders, servo drives, harmonic reducers, servo motors and brakes, delivering more than 250,000 joint modules and building capacity for 300,000 a year. Its line spans 3 to 30 kilogramme payloads across eleven models, with welding, commercial and bin-picking variants, plus an AIRLab embodied-intelligence platform for welding, picking, palletising and dual-arm tasks.
FAO positions itself as a Tier-1 supplier of full-stack humanoid hardware, covering joint modules, humanoid arms, upper bodies and whole units. Commercially it is scaling fast: 2025 signed orders passed 13,000 units, up 86 per cent, with shipments above 11,000 units, up 68 per cent. Overseas signed orders exceeded 4,200 units, up 251 per cent, and overseas shipments passed 3,100 units, up 176 per cent, reaching more than 100 countries and regions.
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/2026-09/ART-8321202-8120-30702035.html.
Translated and adapted from OFweek Robotics (https://robot.ofweek.com/2026-09/ART-8321202-8120-30702035.html).