China

Chinese robotics firms LEJU Robot and Heyman have jointly launched a scene-oriented solution centred on a general-purpose humanoid robot body and a multi-fingered dexterous hand, aiming to eliminate the need for custom end-effector swaps across diverse industrial tasks. The system addresses common pain points such as trade-offs between payload and precision, low gesture-development efficiency, and difficult redeployment, the companies said. The integrated dexterous hand features a variable-configuration design that supports seven plus grip modes – including two-finger pinch, internal expansion, enveloping grasp, and two-handed hold – on the same hardware. It delivers a payload of at least 24 kg and a repeated positioning accuracy of ≤0.03 mm, outperforming the industry norm of 0.2 mm. This allows a single manipulator to...

Astribot, a Chinese robotics startup, has unveiled SmoothRL, an online reinforcement learning framework designed to train policies during asynchronous execution – a growing reality for embodied AI deployments where inference and action run at different frequencies. The work, led by the company’s foundation model team, addresses a fundamental mismatch: when a robot receives new action chunks before previous ones finish, conventional RL that updates on entire chunks ends up crediting or blaming actions that were never actually executed. The framework partitions each action chunk into three regions – committed (already fixed), execution (actually performed), and discarded (overwritten by later inference) – and backpropagates gradients only through the execution region. This ensures that optimisation mirrors the robot’s real experience. SmoothRL also...

A mysterious Chinese artificial intelligence team has released a series of uncut, one-take videos showing humanoid robots performing household tasks with fluid, human-like coordination, reigniting online speculation that embodied intelligence might be nearing a “ChatGPT moment.” The clips, which went viral last week, depict robots adapting to external physical disturbances while carrying a water glass, tidying a living room in a single long-horizon sequence, collaborating to smooth a bedsheet, and carrying multiple items at once – all without visible teleoperation, according to the developers. The underlying model, internally codenamed MVP – short for “Make Veritable People” – is designed to endow machines with physical reasoning and autonomous decision-making rather than probabilistic imitation, the team said in response to inquiries. In...

PsiBot has officially closed a new round of financing worth more than $100 million, according to an August 27 update. The round brings together industrial leaders and institutional investors including Tuopu Group, Ruicheng Fund under Chery Holdings, Lens Technology, Sanqi Interactive Entertainment, Wuhu Investment Holding Group and Fosun Chuangfu. Existing shareholder Zhuhai Science and Technology Industry Group made a further over‑subscribed follow‑on investment. Following previous backing from state‑affiliated investors, this financing round draws capital from multiple leading real‑economy enterprises. It marks dual authoritative recognition of PsiBot’s technical roadmap and commercial value from both state‑owned capital and industrial players. The firm has built a multi‑dimensional development framework featuring national policy guidance, real‑world industrial deployment and long‑term capital support. As China’s first...

AI robotics firm Sharpa has completed financing totaling over 4.5 billion RMB, backed by a lineup of top industrial and financial investors. The investor consortium includes industrial giants Alibaba, Meituan, Tencent, JD.com and Transsion Holdings, as well as leading investment institutions such as Sequoia China, Qiming Venture Partners, Meituan Longzhu Capital and Photosynthesis Venture Capital. The raised funds will be dedicated to core technology R&D, global talent recruitment and cultivation, and advancing the real-world deployment of general-purpose robots from technical verification to large-scale commercial application. Marking a key milestone for real-scene robotic implementation, the world’s first fully autonomous, renovation-free, year-round robotic restaurant — jointly built by Sharpa and DQ — officially launched on August 29 at DQ’s Wujiang Road store...

DexTeleop, an embodied-AI infrastructure provider, has closed a nine-figure RMB (tens of millions USD) Pre-A round led by Zhuzhou Industrial Investment, Feitu Capital, Future Margin Ventures, and Xineng Ventures. Proceeds will scale production of its robot hardware, upgrade real-world data collection pipelines, and advance its cloud operation platform. Maple Pledge continues as exclusive PE advisor. This marks DexTeleop’s third funding round this year, following prior backers including InnoFund, CMC Capital, Galaxy Innovation, Futian Capital, Leaguer, and Tianying Capital—total financing now exceeds nine figures RMB. As embodied AI moves from demos to commercial deep water in 2026, investor focus shifts from pure growth to the viability of “real-scenario data driving model evolution.” Founded in early 2025, DexTeleop builds full-stack infrastructure—robot bodies, data acquisition,...

The hype surrounding humanoid robots is hardly new, fueled largely by Tesla’s Optimus and viral demo clips from Boston Dynamics’s Atlas. Beneath the buzz lies tangible technical progress: robot physical performance keeps improving, and LLM‑derived AI enables complex robots to learn diverse real‑world tasks. Driven by these advances, a wave of new entrants — notably Chinese automakers — are betting big on commercial profits from humanoid robots. Xpeng’s robotics division secured over $900 million in fresh funding, hitting a $6.3‑billion post‑money valuation. Backed by IDG Capital, Gaorong Ventures, Tencent and Alibaba, it marks China’s largest‑ever single financing round for embodied AI. Xpeng’s founders He Xiaopeng and Brian Gu also personally invested roughly $100 million in this round to back Iron,...