A humanoid took a kick to the head in a cage in Shenzhen this month. The head came loose, you could see the cables, and the machine still won on points.
EngineAI opened URKL this month, the first commercial fighting league for full-size humanoids. Every fighter runs the same robot, a T800 at 1.73 metres and 75 kilos with 29 joints, and a single hit lands with up to 450 newton metres of torque.
When you get kicked by the robot, it feels like you get hit by a small car.
That is the company's own description, and it is not a joke. More than 200 teams signed up from China, the US, Singapore and beyond, 32 made the first event at the Nanshan Culture and Sports Center, and the champion takes home a belt made of ten kilos of pure gold worth around 1.5 million dollars. The founder says he wants the league to become the Formula 1 of robot sports.
The question the organisers could not answer
I spent the evening asking one thing. How much of that fighting did the robots decide themselves, and how much came from a person with a controller?
Nobody gave me a straight answer, the organisers included. They admitted they still have to define where remote control ends and where autonomy begins. Every fighter also runs the same software, so what gets compared in that cage is the operator and the code above the machine.
This goes well past a sports format. The same question decides whether one of these ends up in your hotel, your warehouse or your plant. A humanoid that needs a person in the loop is an expensive puppet, and I keep asking because the honest answer changes the whole investment case.
It is easy right now to write off humanoids on a stage. I would still take them seriously. The difference between what stood on the Spring Festival Gala stage last year and this year was large enough that I expect these fights to look unrecognisable in two seasons.
Four rivals put 1.5 billion RMB into one hand maker
Xynova sits in Hangzhou, 40 minutes from Shanghai by train, and it builds hands for other people's humanoids.
In four months the company closed three rounds worth about 1.5 billion RMB and became a unicorn. JD backed the first, Li Auto the second, Meituan led the third at 500 million RMB, and Xiaomi went into all of them. A food delivery platform, an e-commerce group, a car maker and a phone maker who also builds cars, four companies that compete with each other almost everywhere else.
The reason sits in the part of the robot that breaks. Building a humanoid up to the shoulders is the easy bit. The hand is what has to hold the screwdriver or the scalpel once these machines get a real job, and most dexterous hands on the market survive one to three months of use, some of them a couple of weeks.
Xynova claims its Flex 2 has 23 degrees of freedom, weighs under 400 grams, and runs tendons past 1.5 million cycles. That is the company talking and nobody outside has tested it. They are building their own factory in Hangzhou for 10,000 units by the end of this year regardless.
In Korea the strike came before the robots
Hyundai workers walked out over machines that have not started working yet. The plan is more than 25,000 Atlas robots built with Boston Dynamics across the plants, Georgia first and Korea after that around 2028.
On 13 July a shift ended two hours early. After 15 rounds of wage talks the union moved to four hour stoppages every week. One estimate puts the loss at 18.7 billion won an hour, roughly 12.5 million dollars, with the damage so far above 200 billion won and about 5,000 cars not built.
Look at what the union is asking for. Guaranteed hours for people paid by the hour, retirement at 65 instead of 60, and a formal agreement that gives workers a say before any robot enters the workplace. That last demand is the one I would watch. I expect a version of it on European tables inside two years.
I was on tour here with a German automotive supplier working the same subject from the other side, looking for what opens up rather than what closes. The overlap between an automotive supply chain and a humanoid supply chain is large, and the parts they already make have somewhere new to go.
What JD gets out of Lumos
Lumos Robotics in Shenzhen took a large round from JD with a target of more than a billion RMB in sales through jd.com. The money is the smaller half of that deal. JD brings the supply chain, the retail channel and access to enterprise and government buyers, and Lumos brings the machines: a full-size biped, a mini biped, a heavy load wheeled arm and a wheeled foot model. Mitsubishi Electric and a large shipping group are already using them.
The joint work is aimed at factory solutions, data collection and inspection. Inspection is the one I would look at first if I were buying this year. It comes up in most customer conversations I have, the robot dogs already do it, and it needs nothing with two legs.
What a cage fight does not tell you
None of the companies in this issue existed five years ago. EngineAI, Xynova, Lumos, all of them grew up inside the same three years, which is why the demos still run so far ahead of the deployments.
So read the money rather than the stage. Four rivals funding one hand supplier says more about where this industry stands than a gold belt does. If you want to be early, spend this year getting to know the component makers behind the humanoids, because that is where your own supply chain touches this first.
[00:00] This week in Shenzhen, two humanoid robots stepped into a cage, fought against each other, and one of them got carried out without [music] its head. This was organized by a Chinese robotics company called Engine AI, and they started something called URKL. It's like a freestyle fighting league, but it's not made out of human. The fighters are all humanoid robots. I found some numbers. One kick carries about 450 Newton-meters of torque. The company itself says, "When you get kicked by the robot, it feels like you get hit by a small car." So, this is no joke. In the opening match, one robot got a kick in his head, and you could see the cables, but the robot still won by points. There's one question I'm really interested in. Like, how
[00:48] autonomous are these robots, or is it all remote controlled? All the people, even the organizers I talked to, they couldn't answer this question [music] really straight. We will talk about the details later. And this actually really matters because it decides on whether these robots will be on your factory floor, or in your hotel, or in your home soon. And also this week, a company you probably have never heard of became a unicorn in under 2 years. It is called XY Nova, and it makes robot hands. It doesn't make the humanoid, it just makes the hand. In just 4 months, it pulled in about 1.5 >> [music] >> billion RMB by four unrelated giants. It's Meituan, it's JD, it's Li Auto, and it's Xiaomi. And we see when [music]
[01:38] food delivery, e-commerce, a car maker, and a phone maker, there is substantial stuff behind all the marketing. Then I want to tell you a little bit about WAIC, where I just went yesterday. It's the World AI Conference here in Shanghai. We have interesting robots, we have scary robots, and we have a lot of entertainment for every one of us. And then we will go to South Korea because in South Korea something happened that has never happened before. Workers from Hyundai went on strike because they are [music] afraid of the future because Hyundai said they will deploy a lot of robots in their factories in the future, and people are [music] actually scared of them, afraid that they will lose their jobs. Another robotics bet.
[02:26] jd.com, one of the biggest retailers here in China, they have a billion RMB sales targets over 3 years. And in the end I will have a little bonus video for you, which blew my mind. So, stick around till the end. Once again, Asia is not slowing down. Every week we have new funding rounds. We have new mind-blowing videos. We have new robots that work on factory lines, and we have robots that fight in cages. That is why I bring you these news every week so you can spot the trends, you can spot the possibilities before your competitors do, and maybe make some good money on it. And why me? I've been living in Shanghai for 10 years already, and I speak Chinese. I have a huge network here, and in the past [music] years I
[03:15] brought hundreds of VCs, of founders, of board members to robotics companies and technology companies all over China and all over Asia. Most people never get to see this stuff up close, but I do, and I want to share my view with you. If you ever want to see this by yourself, just write me. The link is down below in the description. >> Asia base. >> Let's start with a company I even have never ever heard of, and I bet you also have never. It's called XY Nova, and it is out of Hangzhou, which is very close to Shanghai, just 40 minutes by train. They do the robotics hands. We all know that building a humanoid till here is actually quite easy. It's not a hard
[04:04] part, but building the brain and building the hand is a big challenge. So, in this week, they just raised 500 million RMB, backed by Meituan, and [music] this is just the newest one. In the last 4 months, they closed three funding rounds. So, the first one was backed by JD. The second one was by Li Auto, and then Meituan led the third round. And Xiaomi, we know Xiaomi from the phones, but it's also a car maker right now. They backed every single one. So, totally raised in 4 months about 1.5 billion RMB, which makes them a unicorn officially. As I said, they built the hand, and this matters more than it sounds like, because the hands are very, very fragile. When we want to put these humanoids into our daily lives, into our
[04:54] factories, in our hotels, in our homes, the hands will be the ones holding the scalpel, holding the screwdriver. In this industry, it's called the centimeter problem. The hand is the part that breaks the first. It's very fragile. Most of these dexterous hands on the market right now, they last 1 to 3 months in real use, just 1 to 3 months, which is really short. And some of them even fail in a couple of weeks. XY Nova says they are different. So, their latest hand, called Flex 2, has 23 degrees of freedom. It weighs under 400 g, and they claim the tendons survive over 1.5 million cycles before they break. I have to say, this is all their marketing speech. Nobody outside of the
[05:41] company has tested it yet, but we will see. They also built their own factory back in Hangzhou right now. They want to produce 10,000 units by the end of this year. So, this is China speed. So, what I find really interesting is the investors. If we look at these investors, we know them. All big names, right? So, we have food delivery Meituan. They started as a food delivery. They have different business units right now, but food delivery is their main business. Then we have e-commerce. Then we have a car maker. And we have a phone maker Xiaomi who also became a car maker. So, they are rivals in a lot of businesses and in a lot of fields, but they all decided to fund this one company, a very very young [music] startup. So, this is a signal.
[06:30] So, they all bet on this one company doing the robot hands. So, that shows me how important these hands are right now and will be in the future. So, if you want to know these stories and these trends before it hits the headline, just click on the subscribe button. Give me a like. It is for free, but it helps me a lot and it helps to spread the word. Now, let's talk about the top five from the WAIC in Shanghai. I went there on Saturday and it is crazy what you see there. All the Chinese robotics companies, they will promote their newest products like there. And I saw one thing that really astonished me. This is number one. These are horses or centaur, how you call it in English,
[07:16] like called Renma in Chinese. Half human body, half horse from LimX. LimX, a company I went a couple of times in Shenzhen. So, what do you think of this one? The only use case I can think of is marketing, right? Do I have to ask my friends at LimX over there what is their use case for this Renma. And then we saw another one. It's looks like a car, but with legs. It's also a horse, and I'm also not very sure about the use case. If you have any idea, let me know in the comments. Then we we all know the Robo dogs from Unitree. Unitree started as a Robo dog company, but here you see a Robo dog doing a 720° flip in the air. They say their
[08:03] marketing speech is we don't do this to be cool. We just want to show how flexible our dog is. And this company is called Unitree UB AI. And then we have a very very cute robot. It looks like a crab, and it can dance, and I thought it's just cute. And then we actually saw something from Roboterra. They are doing Finzi and how you call it in Chinese. It's like the the parcels will be flipped, and then the barcode will be on the top. And I saw a lot of these videos, but no none of them were as good as this one. So, I think we see already a big improvement of there. Last but not least, I want to show you another hand from BrainCo. And this hand is actually
[08:51] crazy. It looks really good. And this guy here has he lost his hand in an accident, and he can use it like a real hand. I really love the hands, and I love the dogs much more than the the humanoids. So, and then one thing I want to share with you also is like the we saw the Unitree this big monster. It looks really really cool, and the video from the boss riding it also went viral. So, all of these clips you can [music] tell me what are the use cases of this. And then in the end I show you a video which is from Tobao. The only use case of this video is [music] it is cute, and it makes you laugh. So, now let's go to our neighbors to South Korea. Something happened that never happened before. Workers went on to strike because of
[09:40] robots. Hyundai, we know the big automaker, and the funny thing is that no robot actually has started [music] working right now. This was a preemptive strike over a plan of deploying robots. So, what is the plan? Hyundai plans [music] to deploy more than 25,000 Atlas robots built with Boston [music] Dynamics across the factories. And Korea comes after the US. So, in Georgia, they want to start to deploy these robots around 2028. [music] And on July 13th, the shift at Hyundai ended 2 hours earlier, and [music] then they had 15 rounds of talks about the wages. And the union escalated this week to 4-hour stoppages [music] every week. So, I don't know if this is actually
[10:28] helpful. Maybe this even will escalate [music] the speed, and Hyundai will say, "Yeah, now you prove yourself why we [music] need robots as fast as possible, because robots, hopefully, [music] will not go on strike." The humans here, they have quite some interesting requirements. Their demands are They go beyond the usual pay talk. They want hourly workers who get paid by hour to get a fixed so a company cannot [music] say, "We shrink your paid hours so we can reduce some cost." And they want to the retirement [music] age raised from 60 to 65. So, they even want to work [music] longer, not shorter. And the headline demand is a formal agreement that gives workers a say before any
[11:16] robots enter >> [music] >> the workplace. I am not sure how this will work out. So, this is already very expensive for Hyundai because one estimates put the lost production at around 18.7 billion won an hour, roughly 12.5 million dollars. A separate estimate puts the total damage so far [music] that over 200 billion won are destroyed, which is around 135 million [music] US dollars, and about 5,000 vehicles not built. Actual real loss for Hyundai, and it's a big conflict in this company and in this whole [music] country. If you work in the car industry or in the automotive supplier industry, this is a topic that you have to think about, that
[12:04] you have to talk about, and [music] this you have to learn about. I was on a robotics tour here in China with a German automotive supplier, and we started [music] to find the chances, because there are a lot. We have a big overlap between the supply chains of automotive and humanoid robotics. So, they are right now here and checking what they can do, how they can do it, and this is my advice for you, you also should do it, because your competitors are doing it right now. Now to the title story of today's video, the robot fight. So, I told you this is called URAL, and it was opened this month by Engine AI, one of the most famous Chinese
[12:52] [music] humanoid robot companies, and it is in Shenzhen. So, the founder says he wants this league to become the Formula 1 of robot sports eventually. For now, it's worldwide the first commercial fighting league league for humanoid robots, [music] and every fighter uses exactly the same robot, which is called T-800. It's 1.73 m tall, about 75 kg, has 29 joints, and as I said, each hit [music] lands with up to 450 Newton meters of torque. The opening night was in the Nanshan Culture and Sports Center and more than 200 teams signed up. They came from China, from the US, from Singapore and beyond. So,
[13:41] 32 of them made it to this first event and we see this fight right here. So, the headline fight was White Eagle against a robot called Matador and Matador took a kick to the head and I we saw that the head came loose and you could see the cables and the strings coming out. [music] So, they carried it off on a stretcher, but he still won by points 2 to 3. And this is a serious fight and it is serious league. So, the prize is a championship belt made of [music] 10 kg of pure gold and it is worth around 10 million yuan, which is 1.5 million US dollar. So, let me be honest with you. I was doing some research. I
[14:30] was very curious how many of the decisions were made by the robots themselves and how many were made made by humans with a controller and nobody could really answer this question. Even like the organizers, they admitted that they still have to define where remote controlling ends and where real autonomy begins. [music] And uh every fighter uses the same software. So, in the end it's not necessarily a fight between hardware, but it's more a fight between software. So, right now we see humanoids on a stage that make them very suitable for the stage, right? You can put them in the cage, you can put them on America's Got Talent [music] and you
[15:19] can put them on the stage of the Chunwan, the Spring Festival Gala here in China, and everyone loves them. So, the big question is like, [music] will you be part of it? So, you have to take it serious right now. It's very easy right now to hate on humanoids on the stage to say it's all show, it's just on stage, but let me tell you, I am quite sure that in a couple of years these humanoids will be in your hotel, will be in your home, or will be in your factory floor. We saw it in the Spring Festival Gala. There was a big difference between last year and this year, [music] and I'm quite sure the fights we will see in the stage in the next years will be also totally different. So, the last story is about a startup you probably also heard about, but you should have on your
[16:08] radar. It's called Lumos, and it [music] was got a big funding from jd.com. And the target they set is more than 1 billion RMB in sales of Lumos robots on jd.com. It's not about money, it's about the ecosystem. So, JD has a huge ecosystem. They can provide them the supply chain, they can supply the retail channel, they can supply the access to big enterprise and government buyers. And Lumos brings the robots and the software behind it. So, they have different products. They have a full-size bipedal robot, a heavy load wheeled arm, a mini bipedal robot, and a wheeled foot model. And they already
[16:56] have customers, so they're already making business. Mitsubishi Electric and Costco Shipping, uh they are already using their robots, but JD is by far the biggest name they have landed yet. What they want to build together is joint solutions for factories, for data collection, >> [music] >> and for smart inspection. Inspection is actually also a topic I talked with a lot of [music] my customers. Robodock and inspection is something that you should be aware of. JD loves to invest in robotics company. We talked about LimX before, the one with the Reema. All the big giants in China are building their robotics portfolio. So, if you look at all the companies in this issue of Asia Bits
[17:44] Robotics news, it's very interesting to see that especially the robotics companies 5 years ago nobody of these companies were in the market. They were non-existent. So, this is a totally new industry and we all know that robotics came to stay. It will maybe the hype will slow down, but in 10 years, in 15 years, in 100 years, robots will still be here and that's why you have to pay attention to it. And for me as a European, as a German, even after 10 years of living here in China, this speed still amazes me and the iteration speed, it's so hard to describe. I can [music] tell it to you in this video, I can show it to you, but you have to come here to experience [music] it yourself,
[18:33] to see it yourself. So, this is why I take European companies or companies from all over the world to all the players here in China because you have to see it by yourself. So, if you want to go and visit these places, the link is down below and I would be very happy to show you around here in person. So, last but not least, I promised you the bonus video. A robot flying on a hoverboard is a promotional video. We know it. I don't know if there is any use case for this, but I think [music] it's super cool. So, if you like this video and you want to support me, be sure to give me a like, send it to your friends, leave a comment below. What do you think? How far are we away from having humanoids in our factories or in our homes? I am very looking forward to see you in the
[19:21] comment section and be sure to subscribe. See you next week.
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