Robot Era raises CNY1 billion from Samsung, Singtel and others, pushing its valuation past CNY10 billion

Robot Era, the Beijing humanoid developer spun out of Tsinghua University, said on March 5 that it has closed a CNY1 billion strategic financing round that values the company at more than CNY10 billion, according to an account published by the Zhongguancun Science City authority in Beijing's Haidian district. The round brings in Samsung, Singapore telecoms group Singtel and an investment arm of South Korea's Woori Financial Group, making it one of the few Chinese embodied-AI financings with sizeable participation from Asian strategic investors outside China.

The Haidian authority said the round closed only two months after the company's previous financing. Besides the three foreign names, new investors include CICC Porsche, SMIC-affiliated Juyuan Capital, Fenghe Capital, Wuxi Venture Capital, GF Qianhe and Hongrui Group, while existing shareholders CDH VGC and Tsinghua Holdings' Tiancheng put in more money. Robot Era now counts 16 industrial investors, the authority said, among them Geely Capital, Alibaba, Lenovo, Haier, BAIC and Shijijinyuan.

The company said the money will go mainly into faster technology iteration and scaling up products, with e-commerce, industrial manufacturing and pharmaceutical distribution named as the target industries. It disclosed cumulative orders of more than CNY500 million, with overseas business making up half of the total, and said nine of the world's ten most valuable technology companies are customers. Its dexterous hand, which it sells as a standalone product, shipped close to 1,000 units in 2025. A single order from the logistics sector exceeded CNY50 million, and Robot Era said operating efficiency in some logistics scenarios has reached 70%. A cross-border inspection system developed with SF Express is already in use by customs for checking cross-border goods.

The company and its hardware

Robot Era was founded in August 2023 and incubated at Tsinghua's Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences. According to the Haidian authority it is the only humanoid robot maker in which Tsinghua University holds equity. At CES in Las Vegas in January the company showed what it calls a six-product lineup. The L7 full-size biped stands 171 cm tall, weighs 70 kg, has 55 degrees of freedom and carries 20 kg with both arms. The Q5 is a wheeled humanoid with 44 degrees of freedom aimed at service work. The XHAND1 is a five-fingered, fully direct-drive hand with 12 active degrees of freedom, 80 N of grip force per hand and a stated lifting capacity of up to 25 kg. Robot Era said at the time it had delivered more than 600 units in total and named Skild AI, Humanoid, Extend Robotics, UC Berkeley, MIT and ByteDance Seed as XHAND1 users.

The direct-drive design matters for the economics. Most dexterous hands route motion through tendons or small gearboxes, which add backlash and wear; a direct-drive finger puts the motor at the joint, trading some torque density for precise, back-drivable force control that learning-based grasping policies can exploit. Selling the hand to other robot developers, including a US foundation-model company such as Skild AI, gives Robot Era revenue from rivals' research budgets while its own humanoids are still in early deployment.

Where it sits among Chinese peers

The financing lands in a week of large Chinese embodied-AI rounds. Galbot, another Haidian company, announced a CNY2.5 billion round at a CNY20 billion valuation earlier the same week, with the state's national AI industry fund among the backers. In Shenzhen, X Square Robot said on January 12 it had raised CNY1 billion in a Series A++ round from ByteDance, HongShan and Shenzhen Capital Group, and LimX Dynamics disclosed a USD200 million Series B on February 2. In the United States, Skild AI raised USD1.4 billion at a USD14 billion valuation in January.

For Korea, Japan and Southeast Asia the more telling detail is the investor list. Samsung, a Woori Financial Group vehicle and Singtel add capital from outside the domestic state funds, carmakers and internet groups that led most Chinese rounds this quarter. With overseas customers already accounting for half of orders, Robot Era is positioning itself as an exporter rather than a supplier to the domestic market alone.

The disclosures leave gaps. The company did not break out how much of the CNY500 million in orders has been delivered or recognised as revenue, did not name the nine technology customers and did not say whether the new money values it at a premium to the earlier round beyond the CNY10 billion threshold. Order books in Chinese humanoids often include framework agreements that convert slowly, and the 70% efficiency figure was given for some scenarios only, without a stated baseline.