Just now, Wuxi has welcomed a star IPO.

A star IPO has just been born in Wuxi.

On September 9, UD Robotics was listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Right after the opening, the share price of this Wuxi-based robotics company surged by over 160% compared to its issue price of HK$14.45, with a market capitalization exceeding HK$15.5 billion.

Led by Lu Ying, a veteran from the "Little Smart" era, UD Robotics, which originated from UT Starcom, has completed 13 rounds of financing and finally knocked on the door of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

Along with the ringing of the IPO gong, investors including Legend Capital, Alibaba, Yunfeng Capital, SenseTime Guoxiang Capital, Shenqi Capital, Snowball Capital, Shaanxi Hongchuang, GreenTree Hospitality, BTG Homeinns, Huazhu Group, iFlytek, New Hengji Investment, Guian Kunpeng Fund, Deyang Kaizhou and Xinfang Capital have also ushered in their harvest moment.

Veteran from UT Starcom Leads the Team, Wuxi Gains a Star IPO

The birth of UD Robotics stems from the strategic adjustment of UT Starcom.

After UT Starcom, which launched products such as Little Smart and IPTV, was spun off, Lu Ying, who once led the company to briefly turn losses into profits, eventually obtained control of UT Starcom China. In 2013, under the leadership of Lu Ying and others, UD Technology under UT Starcom China began to focus on robotics, which became the predecessor of UD Robotics.

At that time, Lu Ying might not have imagined that this special experience at UT Starcom would allow him to own a listed company in the future. However, the intersection between the two dates back even earlier. After graduating from Huazhong University of Science and Technology and working for a period of time, Lu Ying obtained a Master of Business Administration degree from the University of Southern California, and founded a company in 2001 that later received investment from UT Starcom.

It was the investment from UT Starcom that allowed Lu Ying to get through the difficulties in the early stage of his entrepreneurship. "UT Starcom gave me very important help when I encountered difficulties." This gratitude also made him join UT Starcom without hesitation when the latter encountered difficulties, and finally gave birth to the story of UD Robotics.

After its establishment, UD Robotics soon began to develop robots. From providing R&D services for the robot central control unit CCU to further entering the R&D of robot products and solutions, in addition to cooperating with NVIDIA in the early stage of development, they also focused on exploring outdoor unmanned driving.

As the project progressed, the team gradually found that the price of hardware such as LiDAR was high at that time, the cost of the entire industrial chain was also high, and the environment faced by open roads was more complex. The technology could continue to be improved, but high costs and complex environments raised higher thresholds for large-scale commercial implementation.

Therefore, in order to achieve commercial implementation at an early date, this company chose to shift from open roads to low-speed, relatively closed environments, shifting its focus from manned self-driving taxis to indoor delivery robots. In 2016, UD Robotics launched its first-generation indoor intelligent delivery robot "UD Xiao Mei".

After the products entered the indoor scene, technical problems shifted from open roads to specific business processes. For a delivery robot to complete an order, it needs to continuously handle links such as positioning, navigation, obstacle avoidance, elevators, access control, notification, multi-machine scheduling and equipment operation and maintenance. Indoor delivery in hotels, KTVs and other places became their early verified commercial scenarios.

In 2019, the shipment volume of UD Robotics had exceeded 2,500 units, and exceeded 10,000 units two years later. After the number of products expanded, the company replicated its formed capabilities to more businesses. In addition to launching the cleaning robot UD Xiao Gu, it also commercialized the UD Xiao Yun AI visual model platform in 2023.

After more than ten years of development, UD Robotics, whose registered address has been moved from Shenzhen to Wuxi, has not only grown into a star robotics company, but also successfully knocked on the door of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

Sold Over 110,000 Robots, Generated Over RMB 300 Million in Annual Revenue

With products such as commercial service robots and AI visual model solutions, UD Robotics has supported its successful IPO.

At present, the company has formed five categories of commercial service robot products: the UD Xiao Mei series for indoor delivery and guest guidance, the UD Xiao Di series for high-load indoor delivery, the UD Xiao Ge series for on-demand delivery in closed environments, the UD Xiao Gu series for indoor and outdoor cleaning, and the UD Xiao Feng series for unmanned retail.

The changes in products also outline their past business expansion paths. Starting from indoor delivery, then entering high-load delivery, closed-environment delivery, indoor and outdoor cleaning and unmanned retail, UD Robotics has applied the same set of robot capabilities to different operating environments.

As the earliest delivery robot launched by the company, UD Xiao Mei is mainly deployed in hotels, leisure and entertainment venues, undertaking tasks such as item delivery, guest guidance and cross-floor delivery. After receiving the task, the robot moves relying on perception, positioning and navigation, avoids obstacles during operation, and cooperates with elevators, access control, notification and scheduling systems.

In addition to delivery, UD Robotics entered the cleaning robot market by launching UD Xiao Gu, covering indoor and outdoor cleaning. Its UD Xiao Feng is used for unmanned retail, which can independently complete self-service retail, or cooperate with UD Xiao Mei to transfer goods from the vending robot to the delivery robot, which then continues to complete the delivery.

Behind different products, a shared set of basic robot capabilities is adopted. At present, the company adopts a cloud-edge collaborative architecture: the robot end undertakes tasks with high real-time requirements such as visual perception, positioning, navigation, obstacle avoidance and motion control; the cloud end is responsible for data management, model training and optimization, task coordination and remote operation and maintenance.

As robots extend from indoor delivery to outdoor scenarios, cleaning and retail, the set of technical systems needs to adapt to more operating environments.

To date, the cloud infrastructure of UD Robotics can support more than 15,000 robots at the same time, executing more than 360,000 instructions every day. The ultimate problem these capabilities aim to solve is that even after the deployment scale expands, the company can still manage a large number of devices remotely at the same time.

In addition to robots, the company also provides AI visual model solutions in the form of projects through the UD Xiao Yun platform. Simply put, this business develops, trains and deploys visual models according to the needs of industry customers, which can be used for tasks such as object detection, scene recognition, and abnormal behavior detection.

Selling robots on the one hand and providing visual analysis services on the other hand, the scale of UD Robotics continues to expand. According to the prospectus, as of March 2026, the company has cumulatively sold more than 114,600 robots to over 5,100 customers worldwide. In this process, its revenue also increased from RMB 244 million in 2023 to RMB 318 million in 2025.

However, affected by factors such as R&D, it is still in a loss state at present. From 2023 to 2025, the net losses of UD Robotics were RMB 251 million, RMB 151 million and RMB 111 million respectively. In the first quarter of 2026, the company's revenue was RMB 77 million, and its net loss reached RMB 31 million.

The good news is that China's commercial service robot market is still growing rapidly. According to the forecast of Frost & Sullivan, the market size of China's commercial service robot products and solutions is expected to increase from RMB 2.2 billion in 2025 to RMB 7.1 billion in 2030, with a compound annual growth rate of about 25.9% from 2025 to 2030.

Calculated by revenue, UD Robotics ranks third in this market in 2025, with a market share of 8.9%. Although it has entered the top camp, whether in delivery or cleaning, the pattern of China's commercial service robot market is far from the end of competition.

Backed by Legend Capital and Alibaba, Completed 13 Rounds of Financing Along the Way

Along the journey, UD Robotics has gathered numerous investors behind it.

Back in 2016, the company's first-generation UD Xiao Mei had just been launched. Under the leadership of Lu Ying, who has rich entrepreneurial and management experience, they completed Series A financing in September of that year, with investors including New Hengji Investment.

Optimistic about the commercial robot market, and recognizing the founding team's industry experience and productization capabilities, Legend Capital chose to invest in UD Robotics in 2018 together with Jiangsu Lianfeng and other investors.

After that, more capital began to enter the company. In Series B2, Suodao Investment and Yunjin Capital invested RMB 26 million; Series B3 raised RMB 46.8 million, with investors including Legend Capital, Snowball Capital, Shaanxi Hongchuang, etc.; Series B3+ financing was invested RMB 5 million by Pernod Ricard.

In Series B4 in July 2020, industrial capital made investments in batches. At that time, GreenTree Hospitality, BTG Homeinns, Huazhu Group and others all became shareholders of UD Robotics.

For these investors, if robots can reduce repetitive labor, lower the labor intensity of employees, improve service efficiency and bring contactless experience, they are no longer just display devices, but may be integrated into the daily operation system of hotels.

With the rapid increase in robot sales, UD Robotics also received investments from Yinfeng Rongjin, Alibaba, Yunfeng Capital, Guanda Holdings, Jianling Capital, Shenqi Capital, Wotu Investment and other institutions.

At that time, Yunfeng Capital believed that this company had excellent low-speed autonomous driving delivery capabilities, and had landed scenarios in leisure and entertainment, hotels, campuses and other places. As for Shenqi Capital, it paid more attention to UD Robotics' indoor and outdoor delivery scenario capabilities, and believed that the two sides could form strategic synergy.

Starting from June 2022, local state-owned assets also accelerated their entry. In about three years, they completed several more rounds of financing, with investors including Xinshang Capital, Chaohu High-Quality Development Fund, SenseTime Guoxiang Capital, Guian Kunpeng Fund, Wutong Investment, Deyang Kaizhou, Zhongjiang High-Tech, Zhongtian Ronghui, Xinfang Capital, etc.

After nearly ten years, the valuation of UD Robotics has risen from RMB 80 million to RMB 3.84 billion. At the same time, the company's shareholder types include financial investors, internet and industrial capital, hotel groups and local state-owned assets.

Before listing, Legend Capital holds 8.02% of the shares, making it the largest external shareholder; Alibaba holds 7.9%, Yunfeng Capital holds 6.4%, and SenseTime Guoxiang Capital holds 5.89%. Roughly calculated based on a market capitalization of HK$15.5 billion, the shareholding value of these investors is about HK$1.2 billion, HK$1.2 billion, HK$1 billion and HK$900 million respectively.

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Dongsisitiao Capital" (ID: DsstCapital), written by Lu Zhigao, authorized by 36Kr for release.