Chinese embodied AI startup Astribot has raised 1 billion yuan in a new funding round, valuing the rope-driven robot maker at 15 billion yuan.
Toposcend Capital, a unit of Shenzhen Investment Holdings, led the round. Hongtai Fund, Ninghai Xingtaihe Fund managed by Guanghua Sunshine, Soliton Capital and existing shareholder Xianmu followed on.
It was Astribot’s fourth round in six months. Its valuation rose from 10 billion yuan to 15 billion yuan in three months, a rare pace even in China’s hot humanoid robot sector.
Astribot said proceeds will fund model upgrades, hiring, commercial deployment, capacity and its three-in-one full-stack architecture spanning an AI model, embodied operating system and rope-driven body. Founder and CEO Lai Jie said investors were important “fellow travellers” and the round showed recognition of that strategy.
The company says it is the world’s first to mass-produce rope-driven AI robots. Its stack includes the Lumo foundation model, Astribot OS and rope-driven body. In July, it released Lumo-2, described as the industry’s first implicit world-action model for home scenarios, and said it ranked first in more than 22 real-machine tests covering temporal reasoning, physical understanding and manipulation complexity. Astribot also says it is at least one generation ahead of OpenAI-backed 1X.
Commercially, Astribot’s S flagship series began taking thousand-unit orders in September 2025, and its T1 robot started shipping in June 2026 at a price starting around 90,000 yuan. The company said combined S and T capacity has reached the 10,000-unit level. Customers and partners include JD.com, CCTV, ThunderSoft, Seer and Jinma Amusement, it said. It plans thousand-unit deployments with partners including ThunderSoft to expand overseas.
Its Robot MART retail stores have been deployed in six Chinese cities since November 2025. AI developers including Ant Lingbo and Shengshu Technology are using its platform, Astribot said.
Astribot said it will keep investing in talent, technology, model iteration, capacity and commercialization. It is pursuing commercial services and a developer ecosystem, while developing products for homes and individuals. Prominent AI researcher Sun Peng joined in September to lead reinforcement learning, and the company released the SmoothRL online reinforcement learning framework.
“We hope that through robots plus AI, we can unleash human creativity,” Lai said.
the 2026 Bund Summit