In less than three years, with a valuation exceeding 15 billion yuan, the embodied ambition of a Huawei genius youth.

In 16 trading days, with 11 consecutive daily limit-up boards of 20%, the stock price soared 10.83 times, and the market value skyrocketed by over 34 billion yuan. This is the record set by Shangwei New Materials (688585.SH), a listed company on the Science and Technology Innovation Board, in July. As a result, Shangwei New Materials became the first and, as of now, the only "tenbagger" this year.

Behind this capital frenzy is a less-than-three-year-old embodied intelligence company - Zhipu Robotics.

On July 8th earlier, Shangwei New Materials announced that Shanghai Zhipu New Creation Technology Co., Ltd. [the operating entity of Zhipu Robotics, now renamed Zhipu Innovation (Shanghai) Technology Co., Ltd.] plans to acquire no more than 63.62% of Shangwei New Materials' shares for 2.1 billion yuan through a shareholding platform jointly funded by the company and its core team.

After the acquisition is completed, the controlling shareholder of Shangwei New Materials will change to an entity jointly held by Zhipu Robotics and its management team, and the actual controller will change to Deng Taihua. The core team includes Peng Zhihui and others.

Zhipu Robotics first caught the attention of the capital market and the industry because of Peng Zhihui, a former "Genius Youth" at Huawei. Born in 1993, Peng Zhihui, with the online name "Zhi Huijun", is one of the top 100 UP owners on Bilibili, with 2.82 million followers. He used to work on Ascend AI chips and AI algorithms at Huawei.

During his time at Huawei, Peng Zhihui was praised by Ren Zhengfei in a speech as "the driving force behind Huawei's innovation." However, at the end of 2022, Peng Zhihui announced his departure from Huawei and his participation in the establishment of Zhipu Robotics, where he serves as the CTO.

Subsequently, the founding team of Zhipu Robotics continued to expand. In March 2025, the legal representative of Zhipu Innovation changed to Deng Taihua, who was a former vice president of Huawei, leading Huawei's 5G campaign and building the Ascend AI ecosystem. Deng is not only Peng Zhihui's former supervisor at Huawei but also his alumnus from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. In April 2025, Luo Jianlan was appointed as the chief scientist. Luo was a research scientist at Google DeepMind and a core member of the robotics team led by Sergey Levine at the University of California, Berkeley. He led the development of the world's first superhuman robotic reinforcement learning system. In 2024, Yao Maoqing joined as a partner and the president of the embodied business department. Yao used to be responsible for autonomous driving algorithms at Waymo and NIO.

Photography: Zhao Dongshan

Zhipu Robotics has set a record in the industry in terms of the speed and amount of financing. In less than a year since its establishment, its valuation quickly reached 1 billion US dollars, making it the world's fastest embodied intelligence company to become a unicorn. Its investors include well-known institutions such as Hillhouse Capital, Matrix Partners, CDH Investments, and BYD.

As of now, Zhipu Robotics has completed 11 rounds of financing. In March 2025, Zhipu Robotics received a new round of financing led by Tencent. In May 2025, JD.com and the Shanghai Embodied Intelligence Fund participated in its new round of financing, and many existing shareholders such as SAIC Motor increased their investments. After this round of financing, the valuation of Zhipu by a third-party research institution reached as high as 15 billion yuan. On August 1, 2025, Zhipu Robotics announced another strategic investment from an international group, led jointly by LG Electronics and Mirae Asset Group.

Recently, Zhipu Robotics was once again pushed into the spotlight after winning the first 124 million yuan order in the humanoid robot field together with Unitree.

According to the procurement and tendering website of China Mobile, Zhipu Robotics won a 78 million yuan bid for a humanoid robot procurement project of a wholly-owned subsidiary of China Mobile. For Zhipu Robotics, this large order of 78 million yuan is not only a breakthrough in short-term revenue but also a key catalyst for the comprehensive upgrade of its technology, supply chain, and market strategy.

"Specifically, it is a bipedal humanoid robot customized for China Mobile, which will mainly be used in the stores and business halls of China Mobile operators to perform some interactive tasks such as reception and explanation. In the future, similar service reception scenarios in operators, hotels, banks, etc. actually have a huge demand." Regarding the details of the order, Yao Maoqing told "China Entrepreneur".

Currently, Zhipu Robotics has entered the "intensive commercial delivery stage." "The number of robots mass-produced offline by Zhipu has exceeded 2,000, and it is expected that the annual shipment volume will reach several thousand this year. It has achieved breakthrough implementation in four major scenarios: industrial manufacturing, warehousing and logistics, power inspection, and interactive guidance." Yao Maoqing said. In addition, he revealed that Zhipu has launched an overseas expansion plan and has achieved market layout in North America, Europe, the Middle East, Japan and South Korea, Southeast Asia, etc.

Full-stack Layout

While some entrepreneurs in the robotics field are seeking breakthroughs in single points, Zhipu has chosen a different path. Like Apple and Tesla, it conducts thorough full-stack optimization and closed-loop layout of software and hardware.

In terms of product layout, Zhipu Robotics has three major robot families: Expedition, Elf, and Lingxi, with products covering a variety of commercial scenarios. Among them, the Expedition series is positioned for industrial-grade applications; the Elf series is targeted at commercial and light industrial scenarios; and the Lingxi series focuses on scientific research and frontier exploration.

In terms of technology layout, Zhipu Robotics chooses to conduct full-stack self-research on the robot body, cerebellum, and brain to build the core capabilities of the robot in three aspects: interaction, operation, and motion intelligence. This is not an easy path. On the one hand, the capital investment is huge; on the other hand, bottlenecks in any link may become a constraint for the whole company.

Photography: Zhao Dongshan

Regarding why Zhipu chose a full-stack layout, Yao Maoqing told "China Entrepreneur": "The implementation of intelligent robots is a tightly closed-loop flywheel, and it is difficult to outsource one part completely. In the process of practice, it is a cyclical process, from body design, to data collection, and then to model iteration. After the deployment is completed, you will find that there are many new areas that need improvement. Therefore, the current team is making saturated investments in all directions."

In terms of capital operation, Zhipu Robotics has also taken a completely different path. On the one hand, Zhipu Robotics has received 11 rounds of external investment in two years; on the other hand, Zhipu Robotics is also actively deploying the upstream supply chain through investment.

According to the statistics of "China Entrepreneur", Zhipu Robotics has currently invested in more than 10 embodied intelligent robot-related enterprises, such as Digital Huaxia, Lingchu Intelligence, Qianjue Robotics, and Fuxing Electromechanical. Among them, there are upstream companies such as robot components, embodied intelligent systems, and bionic robots, as well as joint ventures jointly established by Zhipu and listed companies such as Bozhong Precision, Dafeng Industry, Wolong Electric Drive, iSoftStone, and Fuling Precision.

"We often invest more in the upstream supply chain, such as sensors, joint modules, etc. And some of the investors and shareholders we have introduced are actually scenario providers, including industries such as automobiles and 3C electronics." Yao Maoqing told "China Entrepreneur".

Regarding the progress of cooperation with upstream and downstream partners, Yao Maoqing said: "We have introduced the components of some upstream supply chain enterprises into our whole machines, and the downstream scenarios have also been opened up for us. The two sides are jointly building some POC (Proof of Concept) projects, and there is a chance for delivery in the second half of the year."

Build Its Own Data Warehouse

Currently, the bottleneck in the development of embodied intelligent robot technology lies in the extreme shortage of high-quality scenario data, which is also the key reason why the performance of humanoid robots varies greatly in different scenarios.

To address this, Zhipu Robotics has chosen to "build its own data warehouse."

In September 2024, Zhipu Robotics built a data collection factory covering an area of more than 3,000 square meters, containing more than 3,000 real objects. Currently, through this factory, Zhipu has formed the world's largest dataset, AgiBot World, and made it open source, covering hundreds of scenarios such as households, laboratories, and retail stores.

 "Facing the desert of embodied intelligent data, we chose to plant the first tree, hoping it will grow into a forest." When talking about the original intention of creating the dataset and making it open source, Yao Maoqing said.

In March 2025, Zhipu Robotics released its first general embodied base model - "Zhipu Qiyuan Large Model GO1". This model can learn from Internet videos and real human demonstrations to enhance its understanding of human behavior. In Zhipu's design concept, this model is a general robot strategy model that can be migrated between different robot forms and can seamlessly adapt to heterogeneous robot bodies such as bipedal, wheeled, and robotic arms, significantly reducing the cost of intelligent migration.

Embodied intelligence means enabling AI models to have a "body" to perceive, make decisions, and take actions in the real physical world. Therefore, while humanoid robots are showing off their skills, many people are also concerned about when the "ChatGPT moment" for the embodied intelligence industry will arrive.

In Luo Jianlan's view, "Reaching the 'ChatGPT moment' doesn't make much sense. The goal is to reach the 'DeepSeek - R1 moment' after training and optimization. Enabling robots to have both generalization ability without sacrificing performance and reducing the hallucination rate so that the success rate of each task is close to 100% is what can truly make robots useful in the real physical world."

"If you only know the principle of tying shoelaces but the actual success rate is only 10%, you won't be able to leave home in three hours." Luo Jianlan explained to "China Entrepreneur".

At the 2025 World Artificial Intelligence Conference, Zhipu Robotics released the world's first open - source platform for the world model of a real - world dual - arm robot. Based on the collected AgiBot - World dataset, this platform uses more than 1 million and nearly 3,000 hours of synchronized video streams of the head and dual - arm wrists to capture the spatial layout, action evolution, and semantic intentions in robot operation tasks, which can help robots complete cross - modal migration from visual perception to robot action execution.

"If the GO1 model solves the problems of 'what to do' and 'how to do it', the world model solves the problems of 'how the environment changes' and 'what the consequences of actions are'. The former helps robots make multi - task decisions and execute actions, while the latter helps robots build the ability to dynamically deduce the physical environment." An industry insider in embodied intelligence told "China Entrepreneur".

Put into Practical Use

In the embodied intelligent robot industry, the quality of a robot is mainly evaluated by two indicators: generalization ability and performance. Generalization ability refers to the ability of an individual to apply skills in different situations, while performance refers to the success rate and speed of a robot in completing tasks.

"Different from large models, robots have very high requirements for performance. If the success rate of task execution is only 50% or 60%, such robots cannot be applied in the real world. For example, if a robot spills water every other time when pouring water for you, surely no one will accept it." Luo Jianlan told "China Entrepreneur".

In 2025, many practitioners in the embodied intelligence field call it the "year of mass production" and the "year of commercial implementation" for humanoid robots. Luo Jianlan also believes that "the robotics industry has passed the stage of showing demos and is evolving from a technology - show - off mode to an industrial closed - loop mode."

Currently, the entire application scenario and market direction of Zhipu Robotics are mainly focused on the B - side. It has achieved breakthrough implementation in four major scenarios: industrial manufacturing, warehousing and logistics, power inspection, and interactive guidance.

Photography: Zhao Dongshan

During the 2025 World Artificial Intelligence Conference, Zhipu Robotics also conducted a global live - broadcast in cooperation with Dematic Technology. Zhipu's robots acted as couriers to sort express parcels on - site. According to Yao Maoqing, in less than a month of cooperation between Zhipu Robotics and Dematic Technology, the sorting speed of the Elf G1 has been increased to one parcel every six seconds, which can already meet the needs of some clothing e - commerce enterprises.

However, although humanoid robots have had some practical applications in real - world work, there are still certain limitations in scenarios.

In the past year, Yao Maoqing has clearly felt the change in customers' attitudes. "Previously, they thought they could plug in the robot and use it directly. Now they realize that it requires a two - way effort. This is a data - driven process. Robots need to be trained in real scenarios and continuously iterated. Secondly, some production line transformations are also needed to better integrate the robots. From the perspective of customers' funds, they are also willing to invest a lot of money in scenario verification with us."

Wang Chuang, the president of the general business department of Zhipu Robotics, is responsible for the commercial implementation of Zhipu's robots. He said, "In terms of scenario implementation, Zhipu Robotics follows the principle of 'from easy to difficult'. First, solve the scenarios that traditional intelligent methods cannot handle but can be easily achieved by embodied intelligence, such as material box transfer. Then, tackle more complex scenarios such as material sorting that require generalization ability."

Yao Maoqing is optimistic about the real - world application of robots. "In the first half of this year, Zhipu has signed some contracts for flexible scenario implementation. In about a year, many such cases will emerge. Factories are just the first step. The next step is the retail service industry, and ultimately, in a few years, robots will enter households."

However, Yao Maoqing also admitted that "the current supply chain, especially the upstream joints, motors, reducers, etc., still needs to be improved in order to achieve large - scale production while ensuring product consistency. The suppliers we are currently in contact with are mostly small and medium - sized enterprises, and we are still accompanying them in their growth. The real big players in the electromechanical field are still eager to enter the market."

This article is from the WeChat public account "China Entrepreneur Magazine" (ID: