Two Unicorns, 28,000 Robots
Two days, two $1.4 billion valuations, and a sector projected to ship just 28,000 units this year.
Editor’s Note: This is FlashPoint, Hello China Tech’s premium quick-strike column on one market-moving China tech event and why it matters.
Today’s column examines two humanoid robot startups that reached $1.4 billion valuations within 48 hours. The industrial capital behind them is real. The harder question is what $5.5 billion in annual sector funding buys when industry-wide unit sales remain in the low tens of thousands.
Two Chinese humanoid robot startups reached $1.4 billion valuations within 48 hours. On February 23, AI² Robotics (智平方, a robot maker whose backers compare it to Tesla’s robotics unit) announced a Series B exceeding $140 million, its twelfth funding round in twelve months. A day later, Spirit AI (千寻智能, a developer of general-purpose robot intelligence founded two years ago) closed roughly $280 million across two rounds. Both now sit among the half-dozen Chinese robotics firms at the billion-dollar tier, a threshold that in this nascent sector marks the fundraising elite. Spirit AI’s CEO Han Fengtao offered a blunt forecast: 2026 for embodied AI will resemble 2023 for large language models. He is likely more right than he intended.
The parallel holds. In 2023, dozens of Chinese LLM startups raised billions before revenue arrived. Capital bet that scale would sort survivors from casualties. Embodied intelligence follows the same script. In 2025, the sector attracted $5.5 billion across 325 deals, with year-over-year growth exceeding 300% in both funding and deal count. That capital chases a market Morgan Stanley projects at 28,000 humanoid units sold in China this year, up 133% yet small enough to fit one large factory’s annual output.
AI² treats monthly shipments in the “hundreds” as a milestone. Its three-year, 1,000-unit contract with HKC (惠科, a major display panel manufacturer and AI² shareholder) was cited by Morgan Stanley as the sector’s largest order globally. One thousand robots over three years is what passes for a blockbuster deal. That the buyer doubles as an equity investor illustrates how tightly fundraising and order books intertwine.
