Grishin Robotics

AgiBot D1 Pro can navigate all types of terrain; it's water-resistant. Perfect for outdoor operation. Check out this short demo.

Unbelievable, but it's true – this SpaceX Falcon 9 booster has been used 30 times!

China's humanoid robotics boom is starting to look like a stress test for investor discipline. This year we've seen robotics stocks in China soar on hype, policy support and viral robot demos - yet many players remain deeply unprofitable and trade at valuations that assume flawless execution. Regulators are now warning about overcrowding and copycat projects, echoing broader concerns that the sector is running ahead of fundamentals. Long term, China's strengths in supply chain, costs and engineering talent are real - but we believe only a handful of companies will emerge as winners. In our view, this is no longer a "buy the theme" story; it's a time for careful, bottom-up selection and a clear view on where real industrial use cases will appear.

Changan is no longer just an automaker. Its board has approved a 225m RMB investment on 28 Nov 2025 to launch "Changan Robot Company", built on 450m RMB registered capital. Set up as Changan's embodied-intelligence platform and incorporated as Changan Tiankshu Intelligent Robotics Technology Co., Ltd., the company will deploy humanoid robots into its NEV plants (one Chongqing line already turns out an EV every 60 seconds) and later into sales and service roles. Ownership stays in-house: @Changan Auto (50%) leads, Changan Technology adds 10%, while China Changan Auto Group and Chenzhi Auto Tech hold the rest. Alongside XPENG's Iron, GAC's GoMate and Chery's Mornine, this move leans on Changan's Tianshu Intelligent stack plus Huawei, Tencent and Haier ties into a humanoid-robot market forecast above 12bn RMB by 2030. 👇 Quick facts ● total capital raised: 450m RMB registered capital at launch ● HQ: China, within the Chongqing-based Changan group ● investors: Changan Auto (lead); Changan Technology; China Changan Auto Group; Chenzhi Auto Tech ● partners: Huawei (smart-car JV, 2023); Tencent (intelligent-vehicle data, 2017); Haier Group (vehicle-home ecosystem, 2025)

China just signed a $37 million contract to put humanoid robots on its border with Vietnam. UBTECH Robotics's Walker units won the deal and will be trialled for guiding travellers, managing queues and handling basic logistics at a busy crossing. This is less about sci-fi "robot guards" and more about treating humanoids as front-line public service workers: giving directions, answering simple questions, doing repetitive checks while human officers focus on judgement calls. What makes this interesting is the timing. China's humanoid robot market is forecast to reach about 8.2 billion yuan in 2025, nearly half of global revenue, and UBTech has already started mass production of Walker S2 with a first batch of several hundred units and a target of 500 shipped this year. At the same time, BMW's Spartanburg plant just wrapped an 11-month pilot with two humanoids on the line. Border control is becoming another real, paid use case.

ETH spin-out Gravis Robotics just closed a $23M round led by IQ Capital and Zacua Ventures.   Signed 28 November 2025, the raise targets the skilled-operator crunch in earthmoving. Their bet: retrofit autonomy kits onto the excavators and loaders already building our roads, wind farms and AI data centres - boosting output by ~30% while shrinking near-misses on site. Instead of forcing contractors to buy new OEM robots, Gravis' Rack + Slate combo snaps onto mixed fleets from HD Hyundai Develon to CNH and Menzi Muck, letting operators tap a tablet to switch between manual, co-pilot and fully autonomous modes. The system has already run on live jobs in seven countries, from Manchester Airport trials to Holcim quarries. This lands as construction productivity has barely budged for decades and skilled operators age out faster than they're replaced, just as earthmoving demand surges for infrastructure and AI data centres. Autonomous earthmoving equipment is already an ~$8–9B market and compounding, yet much of it is still tied to single-brand or greenfield deployments. Gravis is going after the brownfield: dealer installs, rental fleets like Flannery, and OEM partnerships that make "any excavator" autonomy the default, not the exception. 👇 Quick facts ● founders: Ryan Luke Johns; Dominic Jud; BURAK Çizmeci; Marco Tranzatto; Pascal Egli; Simon Kerscher; Marco Hutter; Edo Jelavić, Hanspeter Fässler ● total capital raised: $27M+ (publicly reported) ● HQ: Zurich, Switzerland ● Investors - IQ Capital; Zacua Ventures; ARMADA Investment AG; ESA BIC Switzerland; ETH Zürich; Holcim; Imad Ventures (Nesma & Partners CVC; as reported by Fortune, Nov 2025); noa; Pear VC; Sunna Ventures ● Partners - Holcim (2025); HD Hyundai Xitesolution / DEVELON Europe (2025); Taylor Woodrow (2025); Manchester Airport / AMRC (2025); KTEG GmbH / Hitachi (2025)

China's state planner just told its 150-plus humanoid robot companies to slow down - or risk inflating a bubble. At today's NDRC briefing, Li Chao warned that "speed and bubbles" now define the sector and called out repetitive products that squeeze out real R&D. At the same time, Morgan Stanley still models a $5 trillion humanoid market and nearly 1 billion units by 2050, with China in the lead, and McKinsey counts about 50 humanoid OEMs globally but fewer than 10 with scaled pilots. In China, investment has outrun adoption. A 2024 US–China Economic and Security Review Commission report estimates local humanoid firms raised roughly $1.8 billion from 2023 through mid-2024, yet industry representatives say deployments remain limited and most companies report no commercial sales. GSR Ventures partner Zhu Xiaohu is already exiting embodied-AI bets, describing the sector as overheated and asking who will pay tens of thousands of yuan for the current use cases.

Pontaq Ventures just committed ₹5.5 Cr to Dweepi Innovations Pvt. Ltd. and Edgehax. Second cheque into both from its UK–India fund (24 Nov 2025). Dweepi builds robotic trolleys that scan rail tracks with sensors and AI, helping operators move from periodic patrols to predictive maintenance. Edgehax ships modular edge-compute boards - a rival to Raspberry Pi/Jetson/Coral - in use with 150+ startups. Layer this on Edgehax's ₹1.39 Cr seed led by Inflection Point Ventures and Nexus-backed equity at Dweepi and you get ₹6.9 Cr+ disclosed into the pair, right where rail automation, edge workloads and hardware sovereignty intersect. Congrats to Dweepi Innovations, Edgehax and Pontaq Ventures. 👇 Quick facts ● founders: Dweepi: Jyosthna Goli, Saraswathi Panithapu; Edgehax: Prabhu Stavarmath, Savitri Patil ● total capital raised: ₹6.9 Cr+ disclosed across IPV-led seed (Edgehax) and Pontaq's ₹5.5 Cr round; earlier Nexus funding for Dweepi not public ● HQ: Dweepi - Visakhapatnam; Edgehax - Bengaluru; Pontaq - Chennai & London ● Investors: Pontaq Ventures (latest lead), Inflection Point Ventures (prior seed lead), Nexus (American Center incubator), Raman Sobti (angel) ● Partners: Dweepi - Nexus at the American Center ('19), DCIS/DoT ('22); Edgehax - STPI NGIS, NXP Silicon Seeds, MeitY Bhashini Velocity 1.0 (all '25); Pontaq - T-Hub partnership ('22)

London just added a serious bet on robot learning infra: Neuracore has raised €2.5M pre-seed led by Earlybird, announced today (27 Nov 2025). The team is going after the "Frankenstein" robotics stack: ad-hoc ROS nodes, custom data stores, and one-off training rigs that every lab rebuilds from scratch. Neuracore offers a unified robot-learning infrastructure – from async data capture through training to fleet deployment – and is already in use at 50+ commercial and academic robotics teams worldwide. On the cap table, you've got Earlybird Venture Capital as lead plus operator capital from Clem Delangue 🤗 (co-founder & CEO of Hugging Face) – a strong signal for anyone building at the intersection of cloud, AI and hardware. They're stepping into a market where AI robots are forecast to 5x+ by 2030 and where peers like Foxglove and Model-Prime are racing to own the data layer. Neuracore's angle: ship the full learning pipeline and give universities the same infra as industry via a free academic programme. Details 👇 ● Founders: Stephen James ● Total capital raised: €2.5M (pre-seed)   ● HQ: London, UK   ● Investors: Earlybird Venture Capital (lead), Clem Delangue 🤗   ● Partners: Not publicly disclosed; platform reportedly used by 50+ commercial and academic robotics teams

Hmmm, is it scratch-resistant? 😀