Galbot raises RMB 2.5 billion as China's Big Fund makes its first embodied AI bet at a RMB 20 billion valuation

Galbot, the Beijing developer of wheeled humanoid robots founded in 2023, announced on 2 March 2026 that it had completed a new financing round of RMB 2.5 billion. The Haidian District Bureau of Commerce said in a release dated 16 March that the amount set a new record for a single round in China's embodied AI industry, and that it was the first time the national "Big Fund" had invested in an embodied AI company, doing so through the National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund.

The Zhongguancun Science City administration, in an account republished on 11 March by the Beijing International Science and Technology Innovation Center portal, said Galbot's valuation had risen to RMB 20 billion with the deal. The commerce bureau described Galbot as the highest valued unlisted company in China's humanoid robot sector and said its cumulative funding now ranked first among Chinese embodied AI companies. Neither government release disclosed a round letter, a share count, the split between primary and secondary capital or a dollar figure, and Galbot has not posted the terms on its corporate website.

The investor list reads like a cross section of the Chinese state economy. Zhongguancun Science City named the National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund, which it identified with the third phase of the Big Fund, together with China Petrochemical Corporation (Sinopec), CITIC Investment Holdings, SAIC Motor's financial holding arm, BOC Financial Asset Investment and Summitview Capital, the semiconductor investor known in Chinese as Zhongxin Juyuan. The administration noted that the group spans a national industrial fund, an energy major, a central automotive group and the chip supply chain.

The March round follows one of RMB 1.1 billion that Galbot announced in June 2025. According to the Zhongguancun release from that time, CATL and Puquan Capital led that deal, with CDB Science and Technology Innovation, the Beijing Robotics Industry Fund and GGV Capital among the other investors, bringing Galbot's two year total to more than RMB 2.4 billion. The March 2026 account said the new round also beat a record Galbot set at the end of 2025; the size of that late 2025 round is not stated in the official material MEKAWIRE reviewed.

On the commercial side, Zhongguancun Science City said Galbot had signed deep cooperation agreements with CATL, Bosch and Toyota and that its cumulative orders reached several thousand units. It said the Galbot G1 was already fastening screws in CATL battery plants, and that after the robot appeared on the CCTV Spring Festival Gala stage, nearly 300 G1 units were added to orders on Lunar New Year's Eve, prompting the company to reallocate production capacity. The same account said CCTV had named Galbot its designated embodied large model robot.

The G1 is not a walking humanoid. Galbot's product page lists a dual arm upper body on a four wheel omnidirectional base, a maximum height of 1,730 mm, a weight of 92.5 kg, seven degrees of freedom per arm, a payload of 5 kg per arm and 10 kg combined, a 710 mm arm length from shoulder to wrist, a top speed of 1.5 m/s, a 48 V 30 Ah battery rated for eight hours of work with a 3.5 hour charge, and an NVIDIA AGX Orin 64GB module rated at 275 TOPS. The company lists five deployment scenarios: its automated "space capsule" retail kiosks, supermarkets, homes, instant retail warehousing and industrial manufacturing.

The technical bet behind the valuation is data. Zhongguancun Science City said Galbot trains its models mainly on synthetic simulation data and uses real robot data as a supplement, and that the company has built what it called the world's largest embodied AI dataset, at the ten billion sample scale. In January 2025 Galbot released GraspVLA, which the June 2025 government release described as the first end to end embodied model pretrained on billion scale synthetic action data. The approach is meant to cut the cost of collecting teleoperated demonstrations, which rivals such as AgiBot have pursued at scale.

Galbot's raise landed in a crowded quarter for Chinese embodied AI. LimX Dynamics announced a USD 200 million Series B on 2 February, and three days after Galbot, Robot Era said it had closed a RMB 1 billion strategic round that the Haidian commerce bureau said lifted its valuation above RMB 10 billion. EngineAI followed with a USD 200 million Series B in April. Among listed peers, UBTech trades in Hong Kong and Unitree went on to list on Shanghai's STAR Market in August 2026 under code 688836. Outside China, Galbot's customer list puts it in direct competition for factory pilots with US and European humanoid developers courting the same carmakers and battery makers.

For the global industry, the significance lies less in the headline amount than in who wrote the cheques. A state fund created to back AI, an oil refiner, a financial conglomerate and a carmaker's finance arm have now tied their balance sheets to a single robot company. That gives Galbot potential anchor customers in energy retail, automotive and battery plants, and it signals that Beijing's industrial policy machinery now treats embodied AI as part of the same strategic stack as chips and compute.

There are clear limits to what is known. Galbot has not published revenue, delivery counts or the conversion rate of its "several thousand" cumulative orders into installed units, and the RMB 20 billion valuation comes from a district administration's account rather than from a filing. No listing timetable appears in the official material reviewed. Later in the year the company opened pre-orders on 3 September 2026 for a consumer agent robot it calls Galaxy Cub, and on 10 August said it was leading a newly approved national key laboratory for embodied AI large models, according to its news page.