The round drew top-tier global capital from China, Europe, the Middle East, North America and Southeast Asia. New investors include IDG Capital, Lens Technology, G.G.G. Group, Redstone VC, Huashan Capital and Hefei Binhu Industrial Development Group. Returning backers such as Nio Capital and Oasis Capital increased their stakes, with UAE’s Stone Venture following on across … Read more
Xiaomi has released and open-sourced Xiaomi-Robotics-U0, which it calls the first unified generative model for embodied AI, and the bottleneck it targets is the one everyone agrees on but few have solved: robot training data. Language models drank from the internet; robots have no equivalent “physical-world internet.” Useful data, vision, action and state together, mostly … Read more
The shift at WAIC 2026 was not in any single product but in the script. Past editions debated what humanoid robots were even for. This year the answer was stacked on the booths: humanoids moving totes in warehouses around the clock, picking among 3,000 pharmacy SKUs, putting a Coke in the fridge and a dirty … Read more
Sudo, a robotics startup barely a year old and already carrying a valuation around 20 billion yuan, used its WAIC debut to argue that the path to general-purpose physical intelligence is not more isolated demos but accumulating atomic skills. On the booth, more than ten capabilities ran at once, grasping unseen objects, two-hand cloth wrapping, … Read more
At WAIC 2026, a booth drawing some of the biggest crowds belonged to Force Machine, a startup that assembled a 3.5-metre-long model of the Great Wall from nearly 82,000 tiny Lego bricks, using four desktop arms and two wheeled Apex robots working for 15 hours straight. The smallest components were under a centimetre wide; the … Read more
Shenzhen-based Opticalix has launched a vision-perception suite built specifically for embodied AI, betting that the bottleneck for robots leaving the lab is no longer brains but eyes. The package centres on AI-driven binocular stereo vision and two modules, Libra 1000 and Libra 3000, that the company says stabilise depth recovery in exactly the scenes where … Read more
A robot’s understanding of the world usually begins with vision. But whether a grasp is stable, a plug is seated, or a p
At WAIC 2026 in Shanghai, Qiling did something many robot demos avoid: it let the machines run the shop by themselves.
At WAIC on 17 July, Weiyi showed up with a range of industrial embodied-AI robots, and the pitch was that these machines are already in volume production, running in top-tier factories for over a year. No lab demos. The financials make the case. Per the prospectus, revenue rose from 221 million yuan in 2022 to … Read more
The humanoid-robot sector has entered its capital-realisation phase. AgiBot has confirmed it has launched the process for a Hong Kong listing, and it timed the announcement to land on the very day the exchange’s new listing rules took effect. The message was not a surprise. Rumours of an IPO have circulated for half a year. … Read more