Company
Shanghai-based maker of humanoid robots, also known as Zhiyuan Robotics, competing with Unitree in China's humanoid robotics market.
BYD's published humanoid patent resembles its Xiao Di concept, reported at 31 degrees of freedom, but BYD has not confirmed it is the production model. It has yet to announce a production timeline, Interesting Engineering reports.
Reality
AGILINK's OmniHand 3 Ultra split a silk thread into 16 strands, threaded a needle and made its first stitches in a company video of Suzhou embroidery. Silk slips under small changes in force, so it is a hard test of touch-guided control, and so far the only evidence comes from AGILINK's own video.
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Dozens of US venture investors have toured China's robot industry in recent months, where two firms shipped 71% of last year's humanoid robots. Their US startups are now measured against Chinese makers that many of them already depend on for parts or assembly.
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Shanghai has valued a small but profitable robot maker above Figure AI, Baidu and JD.com. The multiple, not the machines, is the number to check.
Perspective Coverage
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Figure's software finished 56% of chores in 30 unfamiliar homes, Boston Dynamics began training Atlas inside a Hyundai plant, and Unitree priced a 22-joint hand at $6,500.
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The International Federation of Robotics counted humanoids as their own category for the first time and found about 7,000 sold worldwide last year, most of them to research institutions and AI developers buying machines to generate training data.
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The scrutiny centres on revenue booked through data collection centres and joint ventures that local governments capitalised. One person familiar with the review put the valuation impact at 60 to 70 percent if that revenue is stripped out.
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The one humanoid deployment with published duty numbers did a single station's worth of work, while Chinese makers supplied more than four in five installations worldwide in 2025. Both facts shape a pilot decision.
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JoyIn, a 20-person robotics team in Suzhou with Ant Group backing, says OpenAI distilled its research framing and copied its launch page. The startup is going to court over the two assets any rival could rebuild.
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The robotics office Samsung created in July has a single executive running both the drivetrain team and the perception team, which is a cheap piece of optionality against Chinese rivals who took more than 97 percent of first-half humanoid shipments.
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Retail-driven Shanghai is now where domestic memory and humanoid programmes raise equity. The first-day pops describe the allocation, not the fab. CXMT's revenue line is the number worth reading.
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Chinese issuers are raising money into a domestic bid that then multiplies it by five, which says more about rationed supply than about durable AI earnings. Shein, the non-AI name in the queue, got the residual.
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Counterpoint puts five Chinese makers at 86% of the 22,000 humanoids shipped in the first half of 2026. That is the cost curve the Covered List and the new tariffs do not touch while they reprice US bills of materials.
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The Verge's tally from five days in the National Speed Skating Oval is worth more to anyone buying a humanoid than an edited demo reel, because it shows the spread of outcomes instead of the best take.
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The buyers are ministries and a state-owned utility rather than factory managers, and the arithmetic of the training-data deficit suggests what Beijing is actually purchasing is operating hours.
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The Information puts SoftBank in talks for a majority stake in 1X. The shipment boom cited as context belongs mostly to two Chinese firms, and 1X is not one of them.
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Shanghai priced the first mainland humanoid listing at more than seven times its offer. The benchmark it sets was built on robot dogs sold to universities.
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Smart Analytics Global puts AgiBot and Unitree at about 75% of global humanoid shipments. That leaves roughly 600 units for everyone else, and Western buyers a sourcing decision before a capability one.
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Peggy Johnson says the SPAC still closes this fall. The order book is $300M of potential contract value, not revenue, and the trust money depends on redemptions.
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China's World Humanoid Robot Games scored household and hotel runs out of 300 points, docking collisions and drops and halving credit when a person stepped in. The penalties are the interesting part.
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Leadership · August 19, 2026 · Confirmed2 publishers