China’s humanoid robots are entering their first major growth phase. Robot Era, a startup only two years old, has closed a Series A Plus round worth about 1 billion RMB (roughly 140 million USD).
The founders come from the ecosystem around Tsinghua University in Beijing.
⚙️ Money for movement: The new round is led by automaker Geely. Several state-backed funds are joining, as well as Haier, Lenovo and even Alibaba. It is essentially a who’s who of China’s VC industry.
📦 Full order book: Orders for 2025 exceed 70 million USD. The client list reads like an industrial catalog: Renault, Geely, SF Express and TCL. About half of the revenue comes from North America, Europe and Japan.
🤖 More than blinking and waving: In logistics the humanoid robots already sort packages and scan items. In factories they handle assembly and quality inspections. In shops they clean floors and deliver products.
🧠 Embodied AI at the core: The heart of the system is the Vision-Language-Action model ERA-42. The key idea: robots first practice tasks in a kind of digital sandbox before being deployed at customer sites. This increases their success rate in new environments by nearly 45 %.
🧱 Robots like Lego: Robot Era develops its hardware in a modular way. Hands, torso, sensors and the walking base can all be swapped. More than 95% of the components are manufactured in-house. The goal is a building-block system that can be adapted quickly to different industries.
Why we think this matters
Humanoid robots are the steam engine of the twenty-first century. They are reshaping entire industries and reorganizing the way we work. The major difference from the last revolution: this time, the driving force is not Europe, but Asia.
Sources: CMRA, 36Kr, Yicai Global
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