The person in charge of the humanoid robot business at Dreame Technology has left to start his own business and has received angel round financing. | Exclusive from 36Kr.

Written by | Wang Fangyu

Edited by | Su Jianxun

36Kr exclusively learned that Luming Robot Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Luming Robot"), founded by Yu Chao, the former head of the humanoid robot business of Dreame Technology, has recently received angel round financing. The investors are InnoAngel Fund and SenseTime Guoxiang Capital.

Luming Robot was established in September 2024, with the business direction of embodied robot, and it is long-term targeted at the home scene. 36Kr learned that its first humanoid product is already under development. For potential investment institutions, the characteristics of Luming Robot are its product definition ability and the comprehensive iterative ability of hardware and software, so as to create robot products with extreme performance and high cost performance.

Early venture capital investment is to invest in people. Luming Robot has received financing just a few months after its establishment, which is inseparable from the founder Yu Chao's working experience at Dreame Technology from 2020 to 2024.

Yu Chao used to be the head of the humanoid robot business and the head of the Innovative Robot Research Institute of Dreame Technology. He led the team to complete the R & D and mass production of Dreame's quadruped robot and the development of the humanoid robot. Earlier, Yu Chao worked at Shanghai Lingxian Robot, one of the first batch of domestic humanoid robot companies, responsible for software and algorithm-related work, and was one of the earliest practitioners of learning based control in China.

In the first half of this year, Yu Chao left his job to start his own business and laid out embodied intelligence. Some other members of Dreame's humanoid robot team also followed him to start a business together.

According to public information, Dreame Technology began to lay out robots in 2021, and has successively launched bionic quadruped robot dogs, general-purpose humanoid robots and other products, all of which were completed by the team led by Yu Chao.

In March 2023, Dreame Technology released a general-purpose humanoid robot. This product achieves a high degree of bionics, with a total of 44 degrees of freedom in the whole body, and each leg has a complete 6 degrees of freedom, which can complete standing on one leg. In terms of interaction, it is equipped with a depth camera, which can complete the modeling of the indoor three-dimensional environment. In the reports of many media, Dreame Technology's humanoid robot (MagicLab) has also achieved the world's first backflip electrically driven humanoid robot.

Affected by the wave of artificial intelligence, the embodied intelligence track is attracting more and more attention and investment. At present, when venture capital is cold, humanoid robots are also one of the few fields that can obtain large amounts of financing.

However, the humanoid robot is also a crowded track, filled with giants. Domestic players include not only established enterprises such as UBTECH and Unitree, but also upstarts such as Yinhe General and Zhiyuan Robot, as well as leading enterprises from multiple industries such as Huawei, CATL, XPeng, Xiaomi, Changan Automobile, Chery, and Seres.

At present, the resources, thresholds and barriers of the leading enterprises in the industry have been greatly improved. For the newly established start-up companies represented by Luming Robot, the entrepreneurial opportunity window has become smaller. How to stand out from the fierce competition is the key challenge it faces.