Companies / Galbot (银河通用)
Embodied AI company
Galbot (银河通用)
State of play as of
The Chinese humanoid company that answers the deployment question with a customer list rather than a demonstration reel.
Most Chinese humanoid companies are argued about on the strength of what their robots can be filmed doing. Galbot is argued about on the strength of who is paying it. Its S1 works CATL production lines under a global agreement with the largest battery maker in the world, which is also the only embodied-AI investment CATL has made; its retail units have been running unattended overnight shifts in a Beijing pharmacy for more than a year; and the trade press puts orders of several thousand units on its book from CATL, Bosch, Toyota, BAIC and SAIC. What is much harder to check is the money. Galbot has never filed accounts, no valuation has been disclosed since December 2025, and its most striking published numbers are its own. Read this page for the separation between the two: the deployments have named customers and dates, and the financial picture is reported rather than filed.
Fast facts
- What it is
- Galbot (银河通用机器人, Galaxy General Robotics), founded in 2023 and based in Beijing. It describes itself as a general-purpose robotics company built around an embodied foundation model rather than around a chassis. Its robot lines are the G1 and the S1, with a bipedal ET1 added in August 2026, and it also sells a self-contained autonomous retail unit it calls the 银河太空舱, or Galaxy Space Capsule.Company statements on galbot.com, read by CAD 25 Sep 2026
- Founder
- Wang He (王鹤), born 1992, founded the company in 2023 and is its chief technology officer. He took a PhD at Stanford in 2021 under Leonidas Guibas and a bachelor’s degree at Tsinghua in 2014, and he holds two posts outside the company: assistant professor at Peking University, which hosts a Galbot robotics lab, and director of the embodied-AI centre at the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence.The Wire China Who’s Who; company site for the founding year
- Latest round
- 2.5 billion yuan announced on 2 March 2026, put at 350 to 362 million dollars depending on the outlet. The two English reports do not publish the same investor list: between them they name the National AI Industry Investment Fund, the China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, Sinopec, CITIC entities, Bank of China, SAIC Motor’s finance arm and a China Mobile-backed vehicle, alongside existing shareholders. 36kr described it as the largest single embodied-AI financing of early 2026 and as the first time state large-scale funds had invested in an embodied-intelligence company.TechNode, 2 Mar 2026; Caixin Global, 3 Mar 2026; 36kr, 3 Mar 2026
- Valuation, and what is actually known about it
- No valuation was disclosed with the March 2026 round. The last one that was is the December 2025 round, which closed above 20 billion yuan, about 3 billion dollars post-money. Galbot says the March round makes it the highest-valued unlisted company in humanoid robotics, and that is the company’s own characterisation rather than an independent assessment. Nothing here is a filed figure: Galbot is private, publishes no accounts, and every number on this line is a reported one.TechNode, 2 Mar 2026; Caixin Global, 3 Mar 2026
- Customers and order book
- Orders totalling several thousand units as of March 2026, from a customer list that includes CATL, Bosch, Toyota, BAIC Group and SAIC Motor. Two of those five are not Chinese companies, which is unusual for a Chinese humanoid maker at this stage. The figure is a trade-press one and Galbot publishes no delivered-unit count against it, so treat it as an order book and not as shipments.TechNode, 2 Mar 2026
- Units actually shipped, as far as anyone outside can tell
- Galbot publishes no shipment count, so the only figure available is modelled. Smart Analytics Global put it near 900 units of the roughly 19,100 global humanoid shipments in the first half of 2026, behind AgiBot at about 8,400 and Unitree at about 5,900 and ahead of UBTech near 700. That is a private research firm’s estimate rather than an audited or filed number, and it sits against an order book the trade press put in the thousands, so the gap between ordered and delivered is real and nobody has quantified it.Smart Analytics Global, published 9 Aug 2026, via 南方都市报
- The CATL deployment
- CATL and Galbot signed a global strategic cooperation agreement announced on 24 June 2026, covering smart production-line upgrades and the scaled deployment of embodied robots, and saying the two will write the first aftermarket service standard for AI humanoid robots. The Galbot S1 runs on CATL’s lines in module and battery-pack manufacturing on material handling and picking work. CATL states the robot has a dual-arm 50-kilogram payload, vision-only centimetre-level positioning and 360-degree omnidirectional obstacle avoidance, and that its own batteries give it up to eight hours of continuous operation at a parts-per-billion cell failure rate. CATL calls it the world’s first AI humanoid robot in regular operation powered by CATL batteries, and separately Galbot is the only embodied-intelligence company CATL has invested in.CATL newsroom release, 24 Jun 2026; CnEVPost, 24 Jun 2026
- The retail deployment, and the one-year number
- Galbot’s robot has run a pharmacy overnight for more than twelve consecutive months, taking the night picking shift so the store trades unattended between closing and morning. The first store is in Beijing’s Haidian district. The company reports its Galaxy Space Capsule units in more than 100 stores across more than 20 cities, with a national target of 1,000. The framing of this as a world record for continuous autonomous humanoid operation is the company’s; the twelve months, the location and the store counts are what Beijing Daily reported.Beijing Daily via ithome, 11 Jun 2026
- Models
- The company’s house names are 银河星脑 (AstraBrain) for the embodied model and 银河星数 (AstraData) for the data platform underneath it, and it also publishes work under the names GraspVLA and WAM. Galbot describes AstraBrain as the world’s first end-to-end embodied model to integrate brain, cerebellum and neural control in one system. That description is the company’s own and CAD has not found an independent assessment of the claim. Note the English naming: AstraBrain is the name the company uses, not a translation of 星脑.Company statements on galbot.com, read by CAD 25 Sep 2026
The state of play
Galbot showed the ET1, its first bipedal robot, which Wang He described as the world’s first physical agent capable of autonomous learning. That description is the company’s and is not an independent finding. It arrived alongside an embodied model release from the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Centre, in a week where the cheap end of the hardware kept getting cheaper faster than the software got better.
Galbot researchers published WAM-TTT, a framework that lets a deployed robot keep adapting from ordinary unlabelled human video rather than from fresh robot demonstrations, with the base model frozen and a small memory module doing the learning. The paper reports WAM-TTT at a 61.1 percent progress score in its standardised cubicle setting and 46.2 percent in unseen households, against 29.8 and 25.3 percent for its WAM-Cotrain baseline. The interest is the input, not the score: robot teleoperation data is the expensive part of this field and phone video is not. These are benchmark results from the team that built the method, not deployment numbers.
At the World AI Conference in Shanghai, Galbot ran its robot through multi-step food-handling work across a full day rather than a timed demonstration slot, on a show floor carrying 242 embodied-AI exhibitors. The length of task the sector could hold together had gone from one arm and one cup a year earlier to sequences of three, five and thirty steps. What still failed on the floor was touch-dependent work.
CATL and Galbot announced a global strategic cooperation agreement and put the S1 into regular operation on CATL production lines, in module and battery-pack manufacturing. CATL states a dual-arm 50-kilogram payload, vision-only centimetre-level positioning, 360-degree obstacle avoidance and up to eight hours of continuous running on its own cells, and says the two will establish the first aftermarket service standard for AI humanoid robots. Passing the line-acceptance process of the largest battery maker in the world is a different order of proof from a demonstration, and CATL is the only robotics company of this kind it has put money into.
Beijing Daily reported that a Galbot robot had passed twelve consecutive months of autonomous operation at a smart pharmacy in Beijing’s Haidian district, handling overnight inventory picking so the store keeps trading with nobody in it. The company put its Galaxy Space Capsule retail units at more than 100 stores across more than 20 cities against a 1,000-unit national target. Twelve months of uninterrupted running is a reliability claim rather than a capability one, and reliability is the thing this sector has had least of.
Wang He gave the industry keynote at ICRA 2026 in Vienna, arguing that embodied AI had reached an "AlphaGo moment" and was approaching a "ChatGPT moment", and naming two benchmarks for the gap: fully autonomous humanoid tennis against a human with no teleoperation, and dexterous tool use with coordinated fingers rather than a rotating wrist. The date he keeps naming for the robotics equivalent of the ChatGPT moment is 2028. It is a forecast by an interested party and CAD carries it as one.
Galbot announced a 2.5 billion yuan round, reported at 350 to 362 million dollars, with state funds prominent among the investors and Hong Kong named as the listing it is working towards. 36kr called it the largest single embodied-AI financing of early 2026 and the first investment by state large-scale funds into an embodied-intelligence company. No valuation was disclosed with the round; the December 2025 round had closed above 20 billion yuan, about 3 billion dollars.
Our reporting on Galbot (银河通用)
- The Internship
Forty-eight central state-owned enterprises appeared together at the World Robot Conference in Beijing on 19 August, showing twelve application scenarios under a joint MIIT and SASAC notice that orders each central enterprise to open at least ten real work stations and each designated province at least twenty, targeting more than a hundred high-value scenarios by the end of 2026. The next morning on the same stage Unitree founder Wang Xingxing said robots are not yet efficient or general enough to be rolled out into factories at scale, and put embodied AI’s ChatGPT moment two to three years away at best. His stock fell 16.05 percent that day.
- The Last Centimeter
Chinese robots can see and reason; the sense they still lack is touch. At WAIC 2026, 242 embodied-AI firms exhibited, yet demos still failed an edge-of-bin pick after about ten tries, even as NeoteAI and Fudan released a 30,000-hour paired vision-touch dataset and the tactile-sensor maker Yimu Tech raised over 1 billion yuan to reach mass production.
These link to the full issues on the newsletter. New pieces go out in the daily first.
Common questions
What does Galbot actually have in production?
Two deployments with named customers behind them. The Galbot S1 works CATL production lines in module and battery-pack manufacturing on material handling and picking, under a global strategic cooperation agreement announced on 24 June 2026; CATL states a dual-arm 50-kilogram payload, vision-only centimetre-level positioning, 360-degree obstacle avoidance and up to eight hours of continuous operation on its own cells, and calls it the world’s first AI humanoid robot in regular operation powered by CATL batteries. Separately, a Galbot robot has run the overnight picking shift at a pharmacy in Beijing’s Haidian district for more than twelve consecutive months, and the company reports its Galaxy Space Capsule retail units in more than 100 stores across more than 20 cities with a national target of 1,000. The trade press put orders of several thousand units on the book as of March 2026 from CATL, Bosch, Toyota, BAIC Group and SAIC Motor, but Galbot publishes no delivered-unit count against that, so the order book and the shipments are not the same number. The nearest thing to a shipment figure is modelled rather than filed: Smart Analytics Global put Galbot near 900 units of roughly 19,100 global humanoid shipments in the first half of 2026, behind AgiBot near 8,400 and Unitree near 5,900.
How much has Galbot raised and what is it worth?
Its most recent round is 2.5 billion yuan announced on 2 March 2026, put at 350 to 362 million dollars depending on the outlet, with the National AI Industry Investment Fund, the China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, Sinopec, CITIC entities, Bank of China, SAIC Motor’s finance arm and a China Mobile-backed vehicle named across the two English reports, which do not publish identical lists. No valuation came with that round. The last disclosed one is the December 2025 round, above 20 billion yuan or about 3 billion dollars post-money. Galbot says the March round makes it the highest-valued unlisted humanoid-robotics company, which is its own characterisation. Cumulative-funding figures in circulation disagree and are differently dated, so CAD does not publish one: The Wire China’s profile says more than 335 million dollars in total, which is less than the single March round alone and therefore predates it. Galbot is private and files no accounts, so none of these are audited numbers.
Is CATL an investor or a customer?
Both, and that is the point of the relationship. CATL led a 1.1 billion yuan round in Galbot in 2025 and is, as of June 2026, the only embodied-intelligence company it has invested in. It is also the site of Galbot’s most checkable deployment, with the S1 in regular operation on its production lines. The two signed a global strategic cooperation agreement announced on 24 June 2026 covering production-line upgrades, scaled deployment and a joint aftermarket service standard for AI humanoid robots. An investor who is also the reference customer is a stronger signal than either role alone, and it is also a concentration: the deployment that most validates Galbot is at the company with the largest financial stake in it working.
What is AstraBrain?
It is Galbot’s embodied foundation model, house-named 银河星脑 in Chinese, with a data platform called 银河星数 (AstraData) underneath it. The company describes it as the world’s first end-to-end embodied model to integrate brain, cerebellum and neural control in a single system; that is Galbot’s own description and CAD has not found an independent assessment of it. The company also publishes research under the names GraspVLA and WAM, and the WAM-TTT paper of July 2026 is the public work closest to the model’s method. Note the English name: the company uses AstraBrain rather than a literal rendering of 星脑, and earlier English coverage that calls it "Star Brain" is translating rather than using the company’s own name.
Is Galbot the same company as AgiBot?
No, and the two are routinely confused in English coverage because both are 2023-founded Chinese embodied-AI companies that have raised at multi-billion-dollar valuations. Galbot is 银河通用机器人, founded by Wang He in Beijing. AgiBot is 智元机器人, a separate company. Any English article that pairs the name Galbot with the Chinese name 智元 has mixed the two up. Forbes reported in April 2026 that the pair had raised nearly 2 billion dollars between them, which is the kind of sentence that starts the confusion.
What is the strongest argument against Galbot?
That almost everything impressive about it is either self-reported or concentrated in one customer. The world-record framing on the pharmacy, the "world’s first" claim on AstraBrain, the description of the ET1 as the first physical agent capable of autonomous learning, and the 2028 date for a robotics ChatGPT moment are all the company’s own words. The deployment that is independently documented is at CATL, which is also its investor. The order book is a trade-press number with no delivered-unit count published against it. None of that makes the deployments unreal, and Galbot is further into paying industrial work than most of its peers. It does mean the checkable part of the record is narrower than the published part, and that a company with no filed accounts should be read on its customers rather than on its adjectives.
Every dated fact above traces to a named source, and where it comes from our reporting, to the dated issue that carried it. Where a claim is self-reported or disputed, we say so.