A ping-pong robot pitches itself as an AI coach
AI sports hardware company Pangbot has closed a several-hundred-million-yuan Series B. The round was led by the Shanghai Guotou XianDao fund, with Yuanhe Puhua and Pudong Venture Capital joining and early backer BlueRun adding capital, while Gaohu Capital acted as sole adviser. The proceeds go into a sports foundation model, motion-vision and training-decision technology, and global market expansion.
Pangbot was founded in Shanghai in 2019. Founder Zhang Haibo brings more than ten years of sports-training robot experience and once led a national-team table-tennis sparring robot. The company started with a ball server and now spans professional and consumer tiers, with over 300,000 global users, more than one million user-generated training trajectories and over two billion cumulative ball serves.
Its architecture is described as three layers: hand, eye and brain. The hand is the serve and feed system that recreates speed, spin and landing point. The eye is motion-vision perception that tracks the user’s movement in real time. The brain is the large-model coach that turns natural-language interaction into a personalised training plan.
The Aura all-in-one coach robot, launched in May 2026, already runs this stack. It raised over one million US dollars on Kickstarter within five hours and more than four million dollars in total.
Reuse is the moat
Extending from table tennis to tennis, pickleball and padel relies on shared underlying technology. Pangbot says moving its ball-trajectory, path-generation and body-analysis engines from table tennis to tennis cost only about 10 per cent of the original development.
Overseas revenue passed domestic for the first time in 2025, and a single Black Friday month in 2024 cleared 20 million yuan in sales. The two-billion-serve and one-million-trajectory base is the data wall that makes the AI coach sharper the more devices sell.
The state-backed lead investors signal Shanghai’s intent to build a cluster at the crossing of AI hardware and sports technology. The next test is whether the hand, eye, brain stack keeps its data efficiency as Pangbot moves beyond ball sports.
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. The full original (in Chinese) is at https://robot.ofweek.com/2026-10/ART-8321203-12005-30706751.html.