Embodied AI

On 10 September the Beijing humanoid maker Galbot won a procurement tender worth 236 million yuan, about 35 million dollars at the offshore rate of 6.7006, and the buyer was CATL. Huxiu reports the tender, Galbot's roughly 7 billion yuan raised over three years, about 1.04 billion dollars, a valuation above 20 billion yuan, and close to a hundred machines deployed across CATL plants. Caixin reported in June 2025 that CATL co-led Galbot's 1.1 billion yuan round alongside Puquan Capital, with China Development Bank's venture arm, the Beijing Robotics Industry Fund and GGV in the same round. CATL also supplies the battery inside the robot it bought: on its own newsroom in June 2026 it called the Galbot S1 the first heavy-load embodied robot in continuous commercial operation running a CATL battery, and listed a dual-arm payload in the 50-kilogram class, centimetre-level positioning from vision alone, 360-degree obstacle avoidance and eight hours of endurance, working the module and battery-pack stages of its own line on material handling and picking. The phrase CATL uses for the effect is 直接替代人工, directly replace manual labour. Three relationships run to one counterparty, which is a revenue line an outside investor cannot easily price, and Mech-Mind's founder has said publicly that he doubts its quality. Huxiu also names Meituan, BAIC and SAIC as shareholders who are customers too. Outside the factory the economics invert. Galbot's wheeled G1 lists at 699,000 yuan for the base configuration, about 104,000 dollars per tmtpost, and one has worked the FamilyMart in the Dinghao building in Zhongguancun since April, greeting shoppers and handing over hot food and coffee. Haidian district's market supervision bureau issued that store a food business licence written to cover a humanoid handling prepackaged food, hot prepared food and made-to-order drinks, and required periodic disinfection of the actuator, a regulatory step Beijing Daily carried in April and no English outlet did. Against a FamilyMart clerk's starting wage of 4,500 yuan a month, 699,000 yuan buys 155 months of one person, or three shifts for 51 months. IDC counted close to 25,000 humanoids shipped worldwide in the first half of 2026, up 432.1 percent, on revenue above 740 million dollars, with more than 19,000 units into China at 77.9 percent of the world and Chinese vendors building over 95 percent of global supply, and raised its 2030 forecast to more than 750,000 units. The best-documented case of one of these machines taking work off a person is about a hundred units on the floor of the company that co-led the round.

Orbbec Technology Group, the Shenzhen maker of the 3D vision sensors a great many Chinese robots see through, filed a Hong Kong listing application on 24 September with Goldman Sachs (Asia) and Haitong International Capital as joint sponsors. Its half-year accounts, published on 22 August, show revenue of 437.6 million yuan against 435.5 million a year earlier, growth of 0.49 percent, with net profit attributable to shareholders down 30.8 percent to 41.6 million. The flat top line is two businesses cancelling out. Sensors grew about 52 percent to 206.9 million yuan at a 57.6 percent gross margin while the finished-device side fell roughly a quarter, and overseas revenue nearly doubled to 67.3 million as domestic fell 7.9 percent. Blended gross margin rose from 41.3 to 48.6 percent and gross profit rose 18.2 percent on revenue that did not move, but research spending went from 91.2 to 111.4 million yuan and the three operating cost lines together rose 32.3 million against a 32.7 million gain in gross profit, so the entire margin improvement was spent in the six months it was earned. The device comparison is a reconstruction, flagged as one, because Orbbec recut its segment labels between the two reports. At 89.51 yuan the company is worth 36.95 billion yuan, 39 times last year’s sales and 289 times last year’s earnings.

UBTech founder Zhou Jian said on 30 June that all-channel orders for the new U1 consumer humanoid had passed 11,000 units and that the company would work to deliver all of them inside the year; by the first shipments on 16 September the Chinese trade press was reporting 13,361. On the 28 August results call chief financial officer Zhang Ju gave the number the company is actually working to, and it is 1,500 to 2,000 U1 deliveries this year, which leaves 85 to 88.8 percent of the order book unfilled. The rest of the business is doing well. Interim results filed to the Hong Kong exchange on 28 August show revenue of 1,269.1 million yuan for the six months to June, up 104.2 percent, with full-size embodied humanoids at 590.3 million of that against 38.2 million a year earlier, gross margin up from 35.0 to 44.7 percent, and the period loss narrowed 23 percent to 338.8 million yuan. The same filing books 921 full-size humanoid units sold, up from 45, an average selling price of 640,933 yuan. The constraint on U1 is manufacturing rather than demand: nineteen degrees of freedom in the head to drive thirty-odd micro-expressions, on a silicone skin with no mature production process anywhere, and parts of the build still done by hand. One number does not reconcile and is published unreconciled. The Humanoid Robot Scenario Application Alliance credits UBTech with 16,123 units for the first half against the filing’s 921 full-size units, and the alliance publishes no unit definition that holds across the ten companies it ranks.

Swancor Advanced Materials (上纬新材料, SSE STAR 688585), founded in 2000 to make epoxy vinyl ester resin and still described in its listed profile as a maker of wind turbine blade materials, put two humanoid robots on sale in Shanghai on 20 September at 19,999 yuan, about 2,990 dollars, and shipped them the same day. The Qiyuan Q1 is 88 centimetres tall, folds into a backpack and carries 22 compliant force-controlled degrees of freedom; the Qiyuan T1 is about a metre tall and 16 kilograms, switches between a wheeled humanoid stance and a quadruped one, runs two to three hours and carries three kilograms. An exploration edition of the Q1 costs 26,999 yuan and a T1 Pro 29,999. Pre-orders opened on 23 August. Swancor’s chairman is Peng Zhihui, known in China as Zhihui Jun, who is also co-founder and chief technology officer of AgiBot; the partnership vehicle Shanghai Zhiyuan Hengyue held 236,463,352 shares, or 58.62 percent, as of 30 June, read off the eastmoney share register. The shares closed at 7.78 yuan on 30 June 2025 and at 154.20 yuan on 18 September 2026, 19.8 times in under fifteen months and 61.9 times the 2.49 yuan 2020 IPO price, for a market value of 62.2 billion yuan, about 9.29 billion dollars and 34.6 times last year’s revenue. The figure absent from the day’s coverage is in the filings: first-half 2026 revenue of 802.73 million yuan, up 2.42 percent, against a net loss attributable to the parent of 166.54 million yuan, where the same half of 2025 earned 29.90 million, a swing of 656.97 percent, with the second quarter alone losing 125.47 million on less revenue than the first quarter earned. Chief executive Tian Hua said the line takes one robot off it every two and a half minutes to automotive standards, which is 192 units a shift, so covering the half-year loss at 19,999 yuan a unit needs 8,327 robots of gross revenue and about 43 shifts of production. Nobody has sold eight thousand consumer humanoids anywhere. The route to market is the story: investment bankers told Yicai on 14 September that humanoid robot IPO filings are getting harder, with the exchange asking whether a filer has entered a reasonable commercial cycle and what its path to profit is, and buying 58.62 percent of an already-listed resin maker bought the listing outright without answering either question.

Renting out a humanoid robot in China was a 3.3-day payback trade a year ago and is now a way to lose money, and the register has not noticed. tmtpost published a piece by 硅基降临 on 16 September reporting that a 100,000 yuan Unitree G1 could command up to 30,000 yuan a day at the peak, while JD’s own self-operated listing now rents a Unitree U1 for 1,571 yuan a day, about 234 dollars. Most machines have fallen from 10,000 or 20,000 yuan a day into the hundreds, and the rental platform Qingtianzu ran a ten-city promotion offering two hours for one yuan that drew over 500,000 visits with the fastest slots gone in seven seconds. Qichacha data cited in the piece puts 153,000 robot-rental companies on the Chinese register, 38,200 of them added during 2025 and another 9,114 in a bit over three months of 2026, close to a hundred new firms a day, against a sector worth about 1 billion yuan in 2025 and forecast at 10 billion for 2026. What the collapse exposes is what the orders were for: Qingtianzu’s own figures put 65 percent of them at entertainment performance and commercial marketing, where the novelty was the product and there is no second order, while light industrial work that renews year after year is about 10 percent of platform orders. The asset then depreciates at 20 to 30 percent a year, an engineering prototype bought in 2024 for 300,000 to 800,000 yuan now carries a second-hand residual of 30,000 to 60,000, and no machine works unattended, so a 2,500 yuan bare-machine day becomes 5,000 once the operator’s time and travel are added. The three businesses surviving are not renting robots: Hangzhou’s Xingshu Intelligence rents hardware near cost and sells choreography at 500 to 2,000 yuan per custom routine, Qingtianzu owns no machines and brokers idle inventory, and light industrial patrol and material handling renews. This matters beyond the rental trade because rental companies were named, by a founder who had just taken his own robotics company public in Hong Kong, as one of two vehicles the sector uses to manufacture revenue, the other being the data-collection centres covered on 11 September. The Information reported on 9 September that regulators had given banks informal window guidance raising the bar for humanoid-robot listings to recurring revenue, narrowing losses or real technical innovation, and bankers confirmed the tightening to Yicai on 14 September, against a queue of about 45 robot companies at some stage of capitalisation. Unitree, the one with the revenue, closed on 16 September at 474.28 yuan for a market capitalisation of 191.83 billion yuan, about 28.6 billion dollars, 3.1 times its 150.80 yuan issue price and 56.9 percent below the 1,100 yuan it opened at on 19 August.

硬氪, the hardware desk at 36Kr, walked through Beijing’s first humanoid-robot data training centre in Shijingshan and found a 3,000 square metre hall with the zone signs still hanging, the display stands still holding their plants, and the robots gone. It stopped seventeen months after it opened, and the third phase that was to run 108 robots across a thousand real tasks in 10,000 square metres was never built. The structure behind it is the story. A robot maker and a local government co-found a data-collection company, usually at a 1:9 or 2:8 split with the maker putting in the small share; the joint venture buys robot bodies, arms and supporting hardware from the maker; a third-party operator sells the data on to companies training models. So the manufacturer contributes one or two yuan in ten, books an order for all ten paid mostly with public money, and the buyer is a company it partly owns. 硬氪 reports more than a hundred such centres went up across 23 provinces in a year, that one robot company heading for a ChiNext listing had as much as 80 percent of its orders from the model, and that another valued above 20 billion yuan shipped 500 robots this year into data factories it had co-funded, against total expected shipments of 1,000 to 2,000. Figures from Interact Analysis cited in the piece put state-capital participation in these centres at 53.8 percent against 88.4 percent a year earlier, and an official at a provincial capital investment-promotion office told 硬氪 they had just turned down two data-collection proposals and that internally some of these projects look like a new kind of Ponzi scheme. The economics were thin even while the money flowed: an operator told 硬氪 that a collector wearing a rig for a full eight-hour shift yields roughly one hour of usable data once idling, out-of-spec motions and broken arms are subtracted, and collection has since gone bodiless to head-mounted egocentric video and UMI-style hand-worn grippers that need no robot present, yielding five to six usable hours out of eight at a crowdsourced rate that has fallen from 45 yuan an hour to 35. Real-robot data still matters, and a recent Tsinghua experiment found that stripping it out drops task success from 81 percent to 40 percent, but it is the seasoning now rather than the main ingredient. The listed-market version surfaced the same day: ASD, a Zhejiang cookware and small-appliance maker, filed an abnormal-fluctuation notice disclosing that its embodied-intelligence robot business has booked 137,200 yuan of sales to date, about 20,500 dollars, against 1.351 billion yuan of first-half revenue and a 93.4 million yuan net loss, and Sinovatio, filing after two straight limit-ups on AI-security enthusiasm, said its AI application products come to under 2 percent of first-half revenue.

Spain’s Dirección General de Tráfico issued the country’s first operating licence for a Level 4 autonomous passenger vehicle on 10 September, and it went jointly to three companies: WeRide, Uber, and AVOMO, the self-driving unit of the Spanish rental group Moove Cars, with the Madrid city government supporting the application. The permit was granted under Spain’s ES-AV framework and clears the three of them to put vehicles on public roads, with commercial service to the public expected before the end of 2026 once the operating and regulatory conditions are met. Madrid is the fourth city in a WeRide and Uber plan the two say will reach 15 cities and tens of thousands of vehicles before 2030, and WeRide says it is now the only company whose products hold autonomous-driving permits in nine countries, naming China, Spain, Switzerland, Belgium, France, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and the United States. The same morning Pony.ai and the mobility operator Verne said they had begun fully driverless robotaxi passenger testing on public roads in Zagreb, which they call the first anywhere in Europe. Set against both, Anfia chairman Roberto Vavassori asked the EU for an 80 percent tariff on Chinese vehicles and parts above a quota of 8 percent of annual new-car registrations, per Reuters, on top of the combined 18 to 45 percent the 2024 measure already charges Chinese electric vehicles. The proposal covers vehicles and parts and says nothing about software, fleet operations or a permit: a tariff is charged on an object crossing a border, and an operating licence is granted for a service performed inside one. In both deals that day the Chinese company supplied the driving stack while a European operator supplied the cars, the depot, the insurance and the relationship with the regulator, which is a template that travels without a vehicle being imported. Nine permits is nine permissions and no commercial service, Madrid is an expectation for later this year, and Zagreb is a test with passengers in it.

Unitree booked 50,013,826.62 yuan of net profit attributable to shareholders in the first quarter of 2026, against 95,602,511.45 yuan a year earlier, on 68.49 percent more revenue. The half-year headline runs the other way, a 274 million yuan profit against a 32 million yuan loss, but Chinese listing rules make a company print earnings both with and without non-recurring items, and the 0.67 against 0.75 yuan ratio puts underlying first-half profit down 19.34 percent while revenue grew 48.54 percent. The gap is a 349 million yuan share-based payment charge that hit the first half of 2025 and did not recur. Research spending went from 6.9 to 11.8 percent of revenue and selling expense from 6.0 to 14.2 percent.

Unitree listed on Shanghai’s STAR Market on 19 August at 150.80 yuan a share and opened at 1,100. Four sessions later it closed at 602.80, taking about 200 billion yuan off the peak valuation. Only 7.44 percent of its shares were free to trade on listing day, and roughly 85 percent of that float changed hands in a single session. The mark matters most to companies with no ticker: eight domestic embodied-AI firms were valued at 20 billion yuan or more as of June, and those private marks were set against Unitree’s screen price. Its own filed half-year numbers are good, with revenue up 48.5 percent and a 274.0 million yuan profit against a loss.

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.

Chinese investors put about 93.5 billion yuan (roughly 13 billion dollars) into embodied AI in the first half of 2026, a figure Chinese coverage reports as five times the year earlier, across 322 deals with more than 800 institutions taking part; the twenty largest raises took close to 60 percent of it and fifteen startups crossed a 1.4-billion-dollar valuation in the half. The asterisk is the demand: the buyers are overwhelmingly the state gathering robot-interaction data, and on the RoboDojo generalization benchmark the best humanoid still scored under 14 percent.

Unitree priced the year’s most anticipated hardware IPO at 150.80 yuan a share, a listing value near 61 billion yuan (about 8.5 billion dollars) and well above the 40 billion the market expected, with DeepSeek taking a strategic stake. That is about 103 times trailing profit for a company that shipped roughly 28,000 robots in 2025, most to research and education, so the price assumes it grows into 100,000 or more a year of paying industrial work.

A four-month-old robot startup, PokeBot, raised close to 100 million dollars, but the more telling money went a layer up the supply chain to the data sellers. Training a general-purpose robot brain needs an estimated 10 million hours of interaction data against a supply near 500,000, and LightWheel became what Chinese coverage calls the world’s first embodied-data unicorn.

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.

A product-less humanoid startup hit a billion-dollar valuation, built by Huawei’s former self-driving lead. China’s autonomous-driving talent is transplanting into robots.