Standard Robots has submitted its prospectus to the Hong Kong exchange for the third time. On the industrial autonomous mobile robot, or AMR, track, the Shenzhen company is a genuine dark horse: its client list spans 3C electronics and automotive manufacturing and includes Huawei, Xiaomi, Toyota and NIO.
From a 12-square-metre room
Founder Wang Yongkun, now 35, turned down offers from Intel and DJI after finishing his master’s in 2015 and headed south to Shenzhen to start the company in 2016. The early setup was bare: a 12-square-metre office and a five-person team funded by a startup loan. He bet early on laser-SLAM autonomous robots, convinced that flexible, self-avoiding intralogistics was the real future of smart manufacturing.
The vision did not make the road smooth. In 2018, with the team grown to nearly 100, cash ran out and the original CEO stepped down, leaving three months of payroll in the bank. The 26-year-old Wang took over, met more than 140 institutions in three months, and secured funding just before the money ran out. Huawei became a seed customer, drawn by the technology. Wang then pushed industrial-grade SLAM to millimetre-level accuracy even in dynamic, occluded factories, the key that opened the high-bar 3C, auto and semiconductor sectors.
Reading the shift to EVs, he steered the team into NEV manufacturing, putting handling robots into Toyota, NIO and CALB workshops, and in 2023 rode the Xiaomi SU7 wave after a Xiaomi-led 150 million yuan Series C. In 2025 the company caught the embodied-AI wave with DARWIN, its first wheeled embodied robot, packing 23 degrees of freedom and a vision-language-action model.
Orders without profit
Big-name demand drove revenue from 162 million yuan in 2023 to 301 million in 2025, a compound growth rate of 36.2%, with another 107 million in the first four months of 2026. By 2025 shipment volume, Standard Robots was China’s fourth-largest industrial intelligent mobile-robot provider at a 4.0% share, and number two in both 3C and auto, serving more than 400 top-tier customers.
Yet it has never turned a profit. Net losses were 100 million, 45 million and 202 million yuan from 2023 to 2025, the last up 347.5% year on year, with cumulative losses past 350 million. Heavy R&D and even heavier sales costs ate the margin: industrial robots are not consumer goods, and winning each large account means lengthy on-site scoping, customisation and commission. A price war has also cut standard products from hundreds of thousands of yuan to the tens of thousands.
Cash is the real bottleneck
Overseas is now the escape valve. Ex-China sales rose from 9.8 million to 60.4 million yuan, lifting their share of revenue from 10.2% to 24.1%, because foreign customers pay more for the technical value. But building overseas delivery, compliance and service is itself costly.
The deeper problem is collection. Trade receivables climbed from 51.8 million yuan in 2023 to 93.4 million in 2025, and the collection period stretched from 144 to 163 days. Cash and equivalents had fallen to 77.8 million yuan by late 2025, and the first four months of 2026 alone posted a net loss above 61.8 million. With its top five customers supplying nearly 70% of revenue, the IPO has become urgent.
Read the original report (OFweek Robotics)
Translated and adapted from OFweek Robotics (robot.ofweek.com).