NEXFORM, a Zhejiang-based physical artificial general intelligence (AGI) company, said it has completed a seed round worth tens of millions of yuan. Investors included Gobi Partners, Zheda Youchuang and others. Founded in 2023, NEXFORM is led by an expert team from the Robotics Institute of Zhejiang University and was incubated by the Tianmu Laboratory at Zhejiang University’s Xinchang Joint Innovation Center. It focuses on general-purpose embodied robots, key components and embodied intelligence application solutions. Its products include the SE seven-axis robotic arm and W1 commercial-grade interactive embodied operation robot. NEXFORM has signed cooperation agreements with several hotel groups and property management companies, with cumulative contract value reaching several hundred million yuan and covering more than 100 million square meters of...
Factories worldwide installed 603,000 new industrial robots in 2025, up 11% from a year earlier, while the global operational stock surpassed 5 million units, the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) said. China is setting the pace. Chinese manufacturers installed 195,000 robots domestically, giving them a 55% share of installations in their home market. The global picture is becoming more uneven: China is driving a large share of new installations, the United States is expanding, and Europe is advancing at a slower clip. For robotics companies targeting Europe, the focus may increasingly shift to identifying the factories, industries and applications where automation can address measurable operational challenges. China remained the largest market by far, installing about 354,000 robots, a 20% year-on-year...
ACE Robotics and PetroChina Shanghai Sales Company have formed a strategic partnership to launch a pilot fully closed-loop embodied AI robot project in a gas station convenience store, the companies said. The partners will combine PetroChina Shanghai Sales’ digital platform, supply chain system and offline convenience store network with ACE Robotics’ capabilities in the Kaiwu world model, robot hardware and embodied intelligence technology. They aim to explore a four-in-one embodied retail co-creation model—”scenarios set the tasks, platforms coordinate, models drive, and robots execute”—and build a warehouse-store integrated smart retail paradigm for real business scenarios.
Jiangte Electric (002176.SZ) said it plans to invest 100 million yuan alongside affiliated investors in Vita Dynamics’ Pre-A+++ funding round, with a total capital increase of 300 million yuan. The affiliated investors will contribute 200 million yuan. The deal gives Vita Dynamics a pre-money valuation of 3 billion yuan. After the capital increase, Jiangte Electric and the affiliated investors are expected to hold 3.0303% and 6.0606%, respectively. Jiangte also said it has started joint development of dexterous hand motors and key components with Vita Dynamics, and the products are planned to be supplied to third-party robot OEMs.
DeepSeek plans to lead a funding round of tens of millions of dollars in robotics AI company Winverse AI, people familiar with the matter said. Meituan’s Longzhu Capital and others have also committed, valuing Winverse at about $400 million (2.7 billion yuan). The deal is not final and details could change. If completed, it would be one of DeepSeek’s largest startup investments since its 2023 founding. DeepSeek previously invested in Unitree Robotics, holding 0.2308%, or 933,399 shares, to co-develop embodied intelligence models. Founded in 2026, Winverse focuses on robot AI models. Founder Hu Han earned a bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua in 2008 and a PhD there in 2014. He was previously a Tencent Distinguished Scientist leading Hunyuan vision-language and embodied...
D-Robotics made its debut at the 26th China International Industry Fair (CIIF), which opened at the National Exhibition and Convention Center (Shanghai) on Oct. 12, showcasing full-stack AI capabilities for visual inspection, industrial data collection and industrial embodied intelligence. The company presented its Sunrise intelligent computing chips, RDK robot developer kits and RoboGo software platform. For industrial customers, D-Robotics combines edge computing, supporting algorithms and cloud-based development tools.
A team from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore won the IROS 2026 Legged Robot Challenge, using GENISOM AI’s quadruped robot Tongchui M1, the event concluded at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh. During the event, the M1 achieved fully autonomous operation throughout the entire course for the first time. It autonomously perceived the arena environment, dynamically planned its route to complete autonomous navigation, and after reaching the target position autonomously drove its robotic arm to carry out manipulation tasks. The whole process ran fully autonomously, without manual remote-control intervention.
Chinese embodied AI startup PHANES AI, in partnership with Tinno Mobile, launched SeePhys Hub, a wearable full-body multimodal data collection system for robot training. The system comprises a four-camera headband, two wrist bands, three waist-and-leg motion trackers and a tactile glove. PHANES said it can simultaneously collect first-person 360-degree visual data, full hand data including hand pose tracking and high-density touch, and full-body motion data including pose and force. The launch comes as robot data collection has moved from teleoperation to UMI and Ego, with devices becoming lighter and collection simpler. But PHANES said that simplification has come at a cost: Ego can record what the hands are doing, but it struggles to fully capture whole-body movement and cannot sense...
At the 2026 China International Industry Fair, Wang Xingxing, founder of Unitree Robotics, said that with breakthroughs in models such as GPT-6, the tipping point for embodied intelligence—its “ChatGPT moment”—could arrive “in as soon as one or two years.” He also predicted that next year’s GPT-7 may “directly crack the embodied intelligence problem.”
AGIBOT, a Chinese humanoid robotics company, said it has formed initial partnerships with more than 20 Chinese universities under its “Yuansheng Ecosystem Development Plan,” including Peking University, Tsinghua University, Zhejiang University, South China University of Technology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Southeast University and Sun Yat-sen University. The partners will jointly build a platform to integrate industry and education in embodied AI, combining curriculum development, joint research and practical training, to better align cutting-edge industrial technology with university talent development. AGIBOT will deploy more than 1,000 embodied AI devices across its full product lineup, including wheeled, half-size and full-size humanoid robots from its Jingling, Lingxi and Yuanzheng series, as well as Kutuo quadruped robots. It will also provide...
the 2026 Bund Summit