Company business, funding and M&A, people, partnerships, lawsuits, regulation and policy, markets and infrastructure.
Sichuan Embodied Humanoid Robotics Technology Co. (EIR) has completed a Pre-A funding round of more than 100 million yuan. The company says it will use the funds to develop its “Ai Qiu” humanoid robot, build a production base planned for capacity of up to 10,000 units, and establish a sales system. Ai Qiu starts at 98,000 yuan, and EIR says its new funding round has also begun.
DamoDa is developing a second product line for autonomous drone swarms in enclosed, GPS-limited environments and plans to apply for an IPO in 2027, Leiphone reports. According to the company, equipment sales contribute about 70% of revenue, while overseas equipment sales have grown 45-fold over five years. The new system targets navigation, obstacle avoidance and coordinated operations using multisensor positioning, with a demo expected between year-end and early next year.
Ant Group’s embodied AI company Ant Lingbo has signed strategic cooperation agreements with Longsheng Weirui, Dema Technology and De’er Xiangwang to develop robotics solutions for industrial and logistics settings. The work includes industrial loading and unloading, automotive factory digitalization, and flexible parcel sorting. At the China International Industry Fair, robots from Tihoo and Stardust Intelligence equipped with LingBot-VLA 2.0 demonstrated industrial loading and unloading and flexible sorting.
The 2026 Global Developer Pioneer Summit and International Embodied AI Skills Competition will run October 23–25 in Shanghai’s Pudong district, featuring 10 highlights focused on real-world robot training and applications. The program includes 9 competition tracks with 23 events, more than 1,000 competing teams, and over 100 open source communities. Organizers say the event will showcase robot systems, components, industry models, and application scenarios.
Industrial Next presented AI-driven robotic stations at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 that it says let manufacturers retool production lines in minutes rather than weeks without traditional programming. Its proprietary foundation models connect vision, task context, and motion, with new tasks taught through simulation and demonstration. The startup announced a partnership with BMW Group Technology Office to evaluate dexterous manipulation for manufacturing, and co-founder Lukas Pankau said some stations already perform delicate assembly tasks for an undisclosed smartphone customer.
TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 opened its first day at Moscone West in San Francisco, bringing together more than 10,000 startup founders, investors, and tech leaders. The event features 250+ speakers, 300+ exhibiting startups, six industry stages, and Startup Battlefield pitches, including a $100,000 equity-free prize.
DeepSeek plans to lead a seed round worth tens of millions of dollars for robotics AI startup Winverse AI, according to Bloomberg, at a post-money valuation of about $400 million. Founded in 2026 by Swin Transformer coauthor and former Tencent scientist Han Hu, Winverse AI remains in early research and development without publicly disclosed products or a specific technical roadmap. The proposed deal follows DeepSeek’s approximately RMB 141 million investment in Unitree in August.
UBTECH ranked 11th globally with a score of 115 on the 2026 Fortune Future 120, making it the highest-ranked Chinese company on the list. Fortune and Boston Consulting Group selected 120 companies from more than 3,500 based on growth ambition, talent density, and growth culture. UBTECH reported first-half 2026 revenue of 1.27 billion yuan, up 104.2% year over year.
Shanghai’s International Embodied Intelligence Skills Competition will run October 23–25, with 23 events across nine tracks and plans to attract more than 1,000 teams. The competition will test robots on real workplace tasks using operational data, with awards in each event and investment-intent funding and financing guidance for teams that place. Registration is still open.
Robotics and physical AI companies raised nearly USD 48 billion through October 8, 2026, about 1.7 times the total for 2025, according to PitchBook data cited by the Financial Times. Funding increasingly concentrates in leading companies while supporting robot hardware, general-purpose models, training data, and deployment. The report examines paid video collection, robot training facilities, and commercial deployments as ways to gather data, while acknowledging that data quality, task coverage, and transfer across robots also affect learning.
The 2026 IEIC International Embodied Intelligence Skills Competition will test robots on real workplace tasks in Shanghai from October 23 to 25. It will feature nine tracks and 23 events, using a shared four-part, 100-point evaluation framework covering task execution, embodied data collection and feedback, autonomy, and innovation. Registration is ongoing, and winning teams may receive investment interest worth tens of millions of yuan and professional fundraising guidance.
Amazon operates more than 1 million warehouse robots and plans to expand its fleet, while employing more than 1.5 million full-time and part-time human workers according to its 2025 annual report. Executives say robots reduce physically demanding tasks and injury risks, but labor advocates and researchers raise concerns about AI-driven automation. George Mason University professor Brad Greenwood says collaborative robots change workplace dynamics by working near people and potentially dictating their pace.
Orbbec decided in mid-September to end its robotic lawn mower ODM business after cumulative shipments reached only a few thousand units, far below expectations. Its vision module business remains unaffected, and perception modules for outdoor robots are still in development. The report cites tighter FCC rules, a crowded market and customer shipments too small to sustain the ODM product line.
Siemens will showcase its industrial full-stack capabilities at the 26th China International Industry Fair, including a first full end-to-end humanoid robot solution spanning design, manufacturing, assembly and factory-floor use. It plans to release more than 20 new products and open 6 embodied intelligence "factory entry" scenarios, alongside an upgraded "钻耀之心3.0" and applications for data centers, electronics and semiconductors, and zero-carbon factories.
Standard Bots, which calls itself "America's largest AI-native industrial robot manufacturer," described its AI stack for industrial robot arms used in machine tending, welding, and assembly. Its largest model is in the low billions of parameters, trained on over a billion images for zero-shot perception, with training in the cloud and inference run on-premises via edge GPUs. The company recently raised $200 million at a $1 billion valuation in a Series C led by General Catalyst and RoboStrategy.
IM opened preorders for the new-generation LS6 on September 10 at a starting price of 209,900 yuan, with 8,000 small preorders in the first 45 minutes, and set the official launch for September 23. The fourth-generation LS6 is the first 200,000-yuan-class pure electric SUV under IM's "Next·2028" strategy, featuring a full steer-by-wire chassis, the NEO powertrain architecture, and IM Claw, an in-car AI agent.
Leiphone's New Smart Driving reports that Xie Baojun, vice president of Chery Automobile and head of its Intelligent Center, has apparently left the company, with his internal Feishu status showing as suspended. Chery had not responded to a request for comment at publication time. Xie joined Chery in October 2024 via its subsidiary Dazhuo Intelligent, and became the Intelligent Center's operational lead after Chery merged several units in May 2025.
Mifeng Technology launched Mifengpai, which it calls the world's first full-category high-quality physical AI data crowdsourcing platform, at a Shanghai event on September 23. The platform pairs MEgo capture devices and the MEgo Engine processing platform with a collector network, and covers 22 categories, over 5,000 task types and more than 50,000 real scenarios. The company also announced a robot trainer program and a 100 million yuan subsidy plan.
The 2026 China International Exhibition on Public Safety and Security and the Third Intelligent and Security Industry Development Conference will be held from November 3 to 6 at the China International Exhibition Center (Shunyi Hall) in Beijing, under the theme "Intelligent Engine Reshapes Security." This year's security expo will feature an embodied intelligence core exhibition area for the first time and will showcase innovations in AI large models and security intelligent agents, with companies such as Huawei, China Telecom, Tiandy, and Vimicro participating.
Edinburgh-based Danu Robotics is bringing its recycling sorting robot H.E.R.O. to market; the robot grasps items with grippers rather than a suction system, and uses AI to continuously improve its software. The company has raised $5 million in late-seed funding, holds $500,000 in signed contracts and letters of intent from two major customers, and has more than 200 customers in its sales pipeline.
The California State Athletic Commission issued a cease-and-desist order to startup Rek, which stages human-versus-machine fights. The commission said a September 18 bout between human Frankie LaPenna and a humanoid robot controlled remotely by a person using a VR system constituted an unapproved boxing or mixed martial arts event. Rek CEO Cix Liv posted the letter on X on September 30. Rek plans to hold a fight between two armed robots this Friday.
Nvidia is extending its Halos safety system from autonomous driving to robotics. Announced in June 2026, Halos for Robotics targets warehouse autonomous mobile robots, humanoid robots in factories, and surgical robots. It provides hardware and software tools to help developers build safety guardrails into physical AI devices. Amit Goel, who leads Nvidia's robotics ecosystem and edge computing, said safety is becoming the next bottleneck as AI models and robot hardware improve.
Li Jianxiong, the first PhD student at Tsinghua University's Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR), founded embodied AI company BASAL Intelligence. 5Y Capital led the round, with Ivy Capital, Linear Capital, and Huashan Capital participating. Tsinghua AIR associate professor Zhan Xianyuan is the chief scientist.
KargoBot announced on September 22 in Qipanjing Town, Ordos, the launch of a large-scale AI transport network, putting manned heavy trucks, driverless trucks with retained cabs, and cabless transport robots into the same transport system. Its driverless transport fleet has reached the scale of about one hundred vehicles, with operations covering 6 provinces including Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Gansu, Shaanxi, and Shanxi, and it cooperates with 30 customers, 8 automakers, and about 30 ecosystem partners.
Safeworld was founded by Zhao Ding, director of Carnegie Mellon University's Safe AI Lab, together with Kyle Wong and Simo Rachidi. It uses simulation environments such as Genesis and MuJoCo to evaluate the safety of robot-control systems driven by generative AI.
Paril Jain, co-founder and CTO of The Bot Company, and Quan Vuong, co-founder of Physical Intelligence met on the Runway AI Summit stage to talk real-world evals, deploying robots in the field and where robotics will be in three years.
Destro emerged from stealth with an $8 million seed round. Its AI intelligence layer lets robots work in logistics settings while directing human workers, instead of building its own robot hardware.
Visual tactile sensing is more than a simple 'camera plus silicone' setup: the density of tactile information depends on camera resolution. A 640×480 image represents 300,000 tactile information points; Yimu Technology can capture 240,000, compared with about 12,000 tactile points on a human fingertip.
QbitAI ROBO reviewed financial reports from at least 36 robotics-related companies listed in mainland China or Hong Kong: 18 deliver complete robots and application solutions, while 18 provide systems and components. Unitree generated about RMB 868 million from humanoid robots in 2025, about 51.1% of its revenue. UBTECH generated about RMB 821 million from full-size embodied-intelligence humanoid robots, about 41.0%. Unitree reported about RMB 278 million in net profit attributable to shareholders, while UBTECH reported a net loss of about RMB 703 million.
Guoxing Intelligence unveiled 11 specialized robots in Yantai, Shandong, for high-risk, complex settings including embodied AI, smart inspection, emergency rescue, and firefighting. It demonstrated the robots in real exercises. Its Smart Inspection line has been adapted for power operations, large warehouses, nuclear power, oil and gas, and chemical industries, and can carry out fully autonomous, all-weather inspections. Guoxing Intelligence also signed a cooperation agreement with the Shandong Computing Center (National Supercomputing Center Jinan) and Gao Longxiang's team to advance practical applications combining supercomputing, AI compute, vision, and specialized robots.
Ant Lingbo Technology, Ant Group's embodied-intelligence company, signed a framework MOU with the Arab Federation for Digital Economy (AFDE) to jointly deploy and localize full-stack embodied AI and robotics solutions in the UAE, GCC, and Middle East.
Shutu Technology raised nearly RMB 100 million in a Pre-A round co-led by CDH Baifu and Kunpeng Fund, with Guangzhou Industrial Investment and Yihe Capital participating. Existing investor Trend Investment also made an oversubscribed follow-on investment. This is the company's third funding round in one month. The money will support R&D and validation for tactile-data representation training, iterate the SynaTac product line, and accelerate applications in robot contact-policy training and on-device deployment.
Ant Lingbo Technology, Ant Group's embodied-intelligence company, signed a framework MOU with the Arab Federation for Digital Economy (AFDE) to jointly deploy and localize full-stack embodied AI and robotics solutions in the UAE, GCC, and Middle East.
JLC launched the Kaiwu Incubator at the 4th Spark Open Hardware Conference and Global AI Hardware Innovation Ecosystem Conference. It announced hardware-innovation support covering R&D facilities, industry scenarios and market channels, and capital. The open-source and closed-source tracks received more than 400 projects. The 2026 Spark Global Hardware Innovation Competition final produced nine winning projects. As of the end of June 2026, JLC EDA had 7.3688 million registered users worldwide.
AMD and World Labs announced that AMD will acquire the world-model company by year-end in a deal valued at $820 million, subject to regulatory approval. World Labs was founded in 2024 by computer vision scientist Fei-Fei Li and Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, and Ben Mildenhall. It initially raised $230 million, part of it from AMD.
Why it matters: AMD’s $820 million acquisition of Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs illustrates a chipmaker’s move into world models and synthetic data for robotics.
AMD announced an all-stock acquisition of spatial intelligence startup World Labs for about $8.2 billion. The deal is expected to close by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approval. World Labs founder Fei-Fei Li will join AMD's leadership team as executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting directly to CEO Lisa Su and leading frontier research.
Why it matters: Beyond the price and leadership changes, the source outlines the technical case for world models and compares the ecosystem with Nvidia's.
More than 600 YuanDian Xiaoqiao robots sold on the first day after launch on September 2; the initial run of 1,000 sold out in under a week, and it won Best in the Next Generation and Emerging Tech category at IFA 2026. The 88-cm-tall, roughly 13-kg humanoid has joint modules rated up to 50 N·m and an introductory price of RMB 8,888. YuanDian calls it the world's first AI-native embodied robot and has also launched the fully open-source OpenBridge ecosystem. The company previously released home-focused products including M1, W1, and Jupiter, with cumulative orders exceeding 30,000 in the first half of this year.
Yang Yuxin, co-founder of Striding AI, has made a formal public debut as company president, overseeing global market expansion, industry ecosystem development, and commercialization. Yang previously spent eight years as chief marketing officer at Black Sesame Technologies (02533.HK), from the launch of its first product through mass production and its Hong Kong listing. Founded in early 2026 by Yao Song, Charoen Pokphand Group, and Tsinghua scholar Yu Chao, Striding AI focuses on full-stack capabilities across embodied models, robot platforms, and software.
Consumer embodied-AI company Knowin Intelligence has raised hundreds of millions of yuan in an Angel+++ round led by a JD.com-affiliated fund, with follow-on investment from Zhengxingu Capital, Nanshan Strategic Emerging Industries Investment, and Walden International. Total funding since founding exceeds RMB 1 billion. Its GLOW generative embodied model achieved a 62.2% average success rate across 18 RoboDojo simulation tasks, 40 percentage points above the GPT-6 (Robocurve) baseline; it ranked first among the listed single-policy models on LIBERO-Pro with 86.7%.
AMD acquired World Labs for $8.2 billion. The official blog says that since its founding in 2024, World Labs has built a model-training team for image, video, and spatial reconstruction, and has advanced robotics simulation through its acquisition of SceniX.
Why it matters: AMD's $8.2 billion acquisition of World Labs and its disclosure of Atlas's sparse-reconstruction progress offer a view into the integration of spatial intelligence and robotics simulation.
