Today's Highlights
· 116,000 new companies registered in the humanoid robotics sector in H1, up 9.5% YoY
· Per China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT): humanoid shipments in China totaled roughly 23,000 units in H1, with over 70% still confined to showrooms and labs
· Unitree opens subscription on August 10, with nearly half of proceeds earmarked for embodied "brain" R&D
· Waymo adds four cities in one move, having previously operated in 10 cities
· Nvidia open-sources Cosmos 3 world model family, with the largest weights (64B) available for commercial use
· A humanoid robot designated "0755" starts work at a Shenzhen elder-care facility, whose welfare center has opened 21 application scenarios
· A US robotics startup hand-carries Chinese-made components in suitcases to sidestep customs declarations
I. Funding & Deals
Unitree Robotics | STAR Market IPO | Subscription opens August 10 | Issuance valuation nearly RMB 61 billion · humanoid
After setting its issue price at RMB 150.80/share, Unitree Robotics will open retail subscription on August 10, issuing 40.4464 million shares (10% of post-issuance total share capital), with expected total proceeds of RMB 6.099 billion — above the RMB 4.201 billion planned in the prospectus. The use-of-proceeds breakdown disclosed at the August 7 roadshow is notable: nearly half the raised funds will go toward smart robot model R&D, with the rest allocated to hardware R&D, new product development, and manufacturing base construction — this company, which built its reputation on hardware cost-performance, is putting its largest bet on closing the "brain" gap. Founder Wang Xingxing said the company is pursuing both the WMA and VLA technical routes. The financials reveal a gross margin trajectory for the first time: humanoid robot gross margin fell from 87.67% to 63.18% between 2023 and 2025, while quadruped margin rose from 43.71% to 56.72% — the company attributes this to deliberate price cuts to drive volume, offset by in-house core component development and scaled procurement (the base G1 starts at RMB 85,000, the R1 Air at RMB 29,900). Per the prospectus, humanoid shipments exceeded 5,500 units in 2025, ranking first globally, while cumulative quadruped sales from 2023-2025 topped 33,000 units. Source: China Securities Journal source
AgiBot (Chinese humanoid startup) | Hong Kong IPO | Cornerstone target valuation HKD 40-50 billion · humanoid ⚠️ single-source account
The earlier-reported disappearance of Chief Scientist Luo Jianlan from the partner list continues to draw attention during the IPO window; today's new information is a comparison of valuation and shipment figures. At an HKD 40-50 billion valuation, AgiBot's price-to-sales ratio comes to roughly 32-41x, notably above Unitree's approximate 24x and UBTech's approximate 22x — while AgiBot posted approximately RMB 1.05 billion in 2025 revenue and remains unprofitable, versus Unitree's RMB 1.699 billion revenue and RMB 278 million net profit attributable to parent over the same period. The "shipment leader" claim is also disputed: an Omdia report states AgiBot shipped 5,168 general-purpose humanoid units in 2025, or 39% of the global total, while Unitree states its actual pure-humanoid shipments exceeded 5,500 units and cautions against "combining different robot types for comparison." IDC's more granular data shows that in the core category of full-size bipedal units over 1.4 meters, AgiBot shipped only about 1,300 units in 2025. The backdrop is China's embodied intelligence sector raising a total of RMB 93.5 billion in H1, up 137% YoY — the fight over valuation anchors has now landed directly on statistical methodology. Source: Guancha source
Xizhi Technology | Series A | Over RMB 100 million · adjacent
Tongge Venture Capital and Xinhe Capital participated, with existing investor Hangzhou Capital adding to its stake; the company's cumulative 2026 funding has now exceeded RMB 300 million, and it is simultaneously launching a Series B. Proceeds go toward automotive power module production lines at its Hangzhou plant and compute power module production lines at its Suzhou plant, with a core business in high-frequency power electronics and wide-bandgap semiconductors — as robotics and autonomous driving compute demand scales up, Chinese domestic power-supply-side capacity is an easily overlooked but essential supporting line. Source: Gasgoo source
II. Commercialization & Deployment
Waymo adds four cities — San Diego, Las Vegas, Denver, and Tampa launch together · autonomy
Waymo announced service expansion into San Diego, Las Vegas, Denver, and Tampa, having previously operated in 10 cities. As is standard practice, new cities initially open only to Alphabet employees before gradually opening to the public, so this marks the start of a rollout schedule rather than four cities going live for public riders immediately. The notable timing: Zoox just announced it is converting Las Vegas to paid rides, and Waymo is following into the same city — the US robotaxi city race has shifted from single-city pilots to parallel multi-city buildout.Source: Investor's Business Daily source
Humanoid unit "0755" joins Shenzhen elder-care facility as welfare center opens 21 application scenarios at once · world-model
AgiBot (Chinese humanoid startup) partnered with the Shenzhen Municipal Social Welfare Service Guidance Center to deploy a humanoid robot designated Unit 0755 at a Shenzhen elder-care facility, where it handles daily patrols, item delivery, and voice companionship duties; the facility primarily serves Shenzhen household-registered elderly with severe or higher-level disability, under strict care standards. More notable is the supply side of scenarios: the center has now formally opened its first batch of 21 AI and embodied-intelligence application scenarios, spanning child welfare, social placement, elder care, and medical services. AgiBot previously partnered with home-services platform "58 Daojia" to launch in-home robotic housekeeping services in Shenzhen and Beijing, along with a one-month home-residency program. Caregiving is a low-fault-tolerance scenario, and current tasks remain limited to basic actions like patrolling and delivery — still a distance from fine-grained care work. Source: 21st Century Business Herald source
Xino Future dexterous hand lands 10,000-unit order; Flex 2 packs 23 degrees of freedom in one hand · hardware
Following a RMB 500 million Series A+ round in July that valued the company at over $1 billion post-money, this Hangzhou-based company — founded in December 2024 — has now disclosed cumulative orders of 10,000 units for its dexterous hand — a rare scale at a time when most dexterous hands remain stuck at prototype and small-batch delivery stages. Its Flex 2 uses a cable-driven plus direct-drive hybrid scheme: actuators are placed in the forearm with tendon cables pulling the finger joints to preserve grip strength, while micro-motors in the palm handle millimeter-level fingertip adjustments; the palm weighs under 400 grams yet delivers 23 degrees of freedom, with a peak single-hand grasp load of 12 kg, sustained load of 4 kg, repeat positioning accuracy of ±0.1mm, and force control precision of 0.05 N. The motors, motor control, reducers, ball screws, and algorithms are all developed in-house. Source: Hangzhou.com.cn source
Hertz's Oro Mobility surpasses 6 million cumulative miles, set to join Uber's robotaxi network this year · autonomy
Fleet management operations at Oro Mobility, a Hertz-affiliated operating company, have surpassed 6 million miles in cumulative mileage; it currently operates in four markets under a "human-driven managed fleet" model, maintaining and operating vehicles for rideshare drivers. Its first autonomous-driving partnership will be with the Uber robotaxi program in the San Francisco Bay Area, supporting Lucid vehicles equipped with Nuro self-driving technology, expected to launch sometime in 2026. What often limits robotaxi scaling isn't the algorithm but fleet operations — rental car companies are turning cleaning, charging, and dispatch into a new point of entry.Source: Pulse 2.0 source
Star Era robots deployed at over a dozen SF Express and China Post logistics centers · humanoid ⚠️ vendor-reported
On August 7, a "Robotics Development Watch Beijing" press tour visited Star Era (Xingdong Jiyuan) in Haidian District; the company's robots have been "put to work" at more than a dozen SF Express and China Post logistics centers, handling package sorting and packing. The company states that operational efficiency in some scenarios already exceeds that of humans — this claim comes from the company itself, with no third-party measurement cited, so it should be treated as vendor-reported for now. Source: Sina News, The Beijing News source source
III. Industry Developments
SAMR: 116,000 new companies registered in humanoid robotics in H1 · humanoid
China's State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) announced on August 8 that 116,000 new companies were registered in the humanoid robotics sector in H1 2026, up 9.5% YoY; over the same period, 55,000 new companies were registered in generative AI, up 28.0% YoY. Nationally, new company registrations across the "8 emerging industries + 9 future industries" totaled 561,000. By comparison, the humanoid sector's company growth rate now clearly trails generative AI's — while total registrations hold at the hundred-thousand level, the marginal trend is shifting from a registration boom toward consolidation of existing entrants. Source: Xinhua News Agency (via Jingbao) source
MIIT: China's humanoid production tops 30,000 units in H1, with over 70% still in showrooms and labs · humanoid
China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) reports that domestic humanoid robot production in China exceeded 30,000 units in H1 2026, with shipments of approximately 23,000 units — but among shipped units, over 70% are deployed in showrooms and labs, with only a small share actually deployed on production lines. This figure is worth reading alongside the day's funding and IPO numbers: shipment volume is increasingly used as valuation validation, but it currently measures purchase intent more than it does production-line replacement. Source: Guancha source
Nvidia open-sources Cosmos 3 world model family, largest weights (64B) available for commercial use · world-model
Nvidia released Cosmos 3, an open world model family for physical AI, comprising Super (64 billion parameters), Nano (16 billion), and Edge (4 billion) tiers, with the Edge version targeting on-device deployment and running on hardware such as RTX, DGX, and Jetson Thor. Weights are released under the Linux Foundation's OpenMDW 1.1 license, allowing developers to fine-tune with their own data and compute. Unlike previous task-specific model splits, Cosmos 3 folds scene understanding, synthetic data generation, and action prediction into a single family — usable as a vision-language model, as a world simulator predicting future states, or as a foundation for world action models; companion tools Omniverse and OpenUSD handle simulation environments and sensor asset management. Nvidia also claims top rankings on Artificial Analysis' open-weight image-to-video, PAI-Bench world generation, Physics-IQ image-to-video, and RoboLab robot policy leaderboards — these are vendor-self-reported leaderboard results, with no independent reproduction yet. Source: IT Brief Australia source
US robotics startups hand-carry Chinese-made components home in suitcases · hardware
Following last month's FCC restriction, citing national security, on imports of foreign-made humanoid and quadruped robots (previously reported), a supply-chain-side reality has surfaced: employees and investors at several US humanoid startups are directly packing motion control, power management, and signal transmission components into suitcases to carry back to the US, sidestepping the weeks-long formal customs process and tariff costs. Data from Germany's Mercator Institute for China Studies shows that 63% of core suppliers in the global humanoid robot component supply chain are based in China; the ban currently does not cover components, but startups will be directly hit once they move from prototype to mass production, unless final assembly happens in the US. K-Scale Labs, a now-defunct Palo Alto company, repeatedly traveled to China to hand-carry back dozens of actuators, and sourced sensors hard to find in the US via Taobao. Apptronik CEO Jeff Cardenas said the US-China difference comes down to supply chain geography, stating "we want to build America's own 'Shenzhen.'" The article also notes that some vendors print fake battery labels to evade air-cargo lithium battery regulations — itself illegal. Source: cnBeta source
Zhongke Huisi debuts with three dexterous hands at once, previews 37-DOF cable-driven biomimetic hand · hardware
Zhongke Huisi, a joint venture of Zhongke Huiling, Lens Technology (Chinese electronics component maker), and Hunan Huaxia Investment Group, launched three dexterous hands — L1, D1, and M1 — and previewed a cable-driven biomimetic hand from its F series. The L1 weighs about 610 grams with 11 degrees of freedom, opens and closes the full hand in just 0.2 seconds, and can lift a 25 kg load (roughly 40x its own weight); pricing will be kept in the low thousands of RMB range. The D1 weighs under 900 grams with 20 degrees of freedom and piezoresistive tactile sensors at the fingertips; the M1 uses a modular quick-swap approach with over a dozen functional fingertip options. The previewed F series reaches 37 degrees of freedom, with 7 in the thumb alone, and addresses cable-drive's biggest maintenance pain point with a single-tendon-cable design allowing cable replacement in as fast as 3 minutes. Lower price points and maintenance-focused design speak more to dexterous hands shifting from display pieces to consumables than the degree-of-freedom figures do. Source: Robot Outlook (via Ifeng Tech) source
D-Robotics wraps DGP DemoDay, over 40 institutions review 10 teams onsite · adjacent
On August 7, D-Robotics held its "Gravity DemoDay 2026" in Shanghai, drawing over 40 institutions including Hillhouse Ventures, Shunwei Capital, BAI Capital, and Jiuhe Venture Capital. 10 teams were selected from the DGP ecosystem's more than 200 member companies to present, with Aula Wanxiang, Xunling Technology, and Tiaoyue Technology taking the top three spots. Projects spanned personal mobility, exoskeleton hiking gear, home embodied intelligence, low-cost open-source humanoids, and jumping robots, with an average founder age under 30. DGP says it has enabled over 500 robotics startups cumulatively, and its platform now connects over 100,000 developers globally. Investors onsite focused on who would buy, why they'd buy, and whether the pricing holds up — AI capability alone doesn't constitute a reason to purchase. Source: Sohu, Ifeng Tech source
Hardware & Supply Chain
· Robot Battery Joint Lab: China Electronics Standardization Institute (under MIIT) signed an agreement with JD.com and Sunwoda on August 7 to jointly build a lab focused on standards development, product development, and testing/validation for robot batteries; the institute has led drafting China's only current robot battery standard, and two standards discussion meetings were held immediately after signing, with over 60 industry experts attending. JD.com's aim is to standardize battery dimensions, interfaces, and communication protocols to lower R&D and maintenance costs source
· Wanma Co. · robot cabling: In an investor briefing, the company said its specialty smart-equipment cabling is already mature in industrial robot applications and has entered the humanoid robot and robot-dog space, with robot-dog products already in mass production; however, it explicitly noted that robot cabling revenue currently makes up a small share of overall revenue source
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