2.5 billion. The largest embodied financing at the beginning of the year has arrived.
At the beginning of the Year of the Horse, the largest financing in the field of embodied intelligence was born.
According to investment industry sources, Galaxy Universal Robotics announced today that it has completed a new round of financing worth 2.5 billion yuan. The list of investors is impressive, including the National Artificial Intelligence Industry Fund (the third phase of the National Big Fund), Sinopec, CITIC Group Investment Holdings, Bank of China, SAIC Group Financial Holdings, SMIC Juyuan, Yizhuang State-owned Investment, Future Industry Investment, Kunpeng Fund, Wuxi Venture Capital, Fujian Industrial Investment, etc., as well as many existing shareholders who continued to increase their investments.
It's worth noting that only two months have passed since the previous round of financing. Such a rapid pace is truly astonishing. "They completed the financing in less than two months, which is an over - subscribed round," said a source close to Galaxy Universal. "The enthusiasm of the primary market for the company exceeded expectations, and after the Spring Festival Gala, there was a queue of investors."
So far, the cumulative financing of Galaxy Universal ranks first in the field of embodied intelligence in China, and its valuation continues to lead the humanoid robot industry. A battle among the giants has begun.
Just now, the largest embodied financing at the beginning of the year
The valuation has exceeded 20 billion yuan
In just three years, Galaxy Universal has become a phenomenon - level company in the venture capital circle. As we can see, almost all types of top - tier investment institutions in the market have invested in Galaxy Universal.
Going back to May 2023, when Galaxy Universal was founded, it quickly completed its seed - round financing. Since then, a series of top - tier institutions have joined in. At that time, according to insiders, Galaxy Universal had a high threshold for accepting investments and a rapid financing pace, so many investors who came with high hopes couldn't get in.
By June 2024, Galaxy Universal announced the completion of a total of 700 million yuan in angel - round financing, including strategic and industrial investors such as Meituan and BAIC, as well as top - tier investment institutions such as Qiming Venture Partners, Matrix Partners, and IDG Capital.
In November of the same year, Galaxy Universal completed a strategic - round financing of 500 million yuan. The investors included SAIC Group, the Hong Kong - based "Temasek" - like Hong Kong Investment Corporation (HKIC), Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Industry Fund, Beijing Robotics Industry Fund, Shenzhen Capital Group, CCB International, etc. Meanwhile, existing shareholders such as IDG, Matrix, BlueRun Ventures, and Beijing Artificial Intelligence Industry Fund continued to significantly increase their investments (in no particular order).
Then, CATL entered the picture. In June last year, Galaxy Universal completed a new round of financing of over 1.1 billion yuan, led by CATL. Other investors included the Science and Technology Innovation Investment of the China Development Bank, Beijing Robotics Industry Fund, and GGV Capital, and many existing shareholders also increased their investments.
CATL's investment is undoubtedly a significant indicator. As the global leader in power batteries, CATL has significantly increased its investment in the robotics field since the end of 2024. There is even a saying in the industry: "Almost every embodied intelligence company you've heard of has approached CATL."
Among them, Galaxy Universal is the only embodied intelligence enterprise that has won CATL's investment. It is reported that Galaxy Universal's Galbot S1 has achieved fully autonomous operation in the complex industrial scenarios of CATL's battery factory, passing the rigorous tests of real - world working conditions. It is the only humanoid robot that has achieved regular operation at CATL to date.
At the end of 2025, Galaxy Universal completed a new round of financing of over 300 million US dollars, breaking the single - round financing record in the field of embodied intelligence again. This round of financing was led by China Mobile, with heavyweight investment platforms and industrial giants such as CICC Capital, Suzhou Venture Capital, and CCTV Media Convergence Fund jointly injecting capital. It also received additional investments from international investment institutions from Singapore and the Middle East, as well as existing shareholders. According to insiders at the time, Galaxy Universal's post - investment valuation in this round reached 3 billion US dollars (over 20 billion yuan).
Opportunities are fleeting, and investors are scrambling for the last tickets. Now, the latest round of 2.5 - billion - yuan financing has emerged, attracting another group of top - tier industrial and strategic investors. This will undoubtedly open up new diversified application spaces for Galaxy Universal in the fields of energy, manufacturing, real estate, etc.
For example, Sinopec's gas - station network, high - risk scenarios in the petrochemical industry, and tens of thousands of Easy Joy convenience stores can provide broad application spaces for Galaxy Universal in the fields of smart energy and intelligent retail. CITIC Group, with its large - scale business forms including high - end manufacturing bases and commercial real estate, will provide rich implementation scenarios for Galaxy Universal in the fields of intelligent manufacturing and smart services. SAIC Group's automobile production lines will further open up in - depth application scenarios for Galaxy Universal in the field of industrial flexible production.
So far, Galaxy Universal has refreshed both the single - round financing and cumulative financing records in the domestic embodied intelligence field within just two months, and its valuation has also risen accordingly.
Led by a post - 90s professor
The first "self - working robot" on the Spring Festival Gala became an internet sensation
Why has Galaxy Universal become the Chinese humanoid robot enterprise with the highest publicly announced valuation?
As the saying goes, investing is about investing in people. As the leader of Galaxy Universal, Wang He has left a deep impression on the venture capital circle. He was born in 1992, graduated from the Department of Electronic Engineering at Tsinghua University, and then went to Stanford University to pursue a doctoral degree. He is one of the earliest scholars in the world to conduct research on end - to - end embodied large models.
After that, Wang He returned to China and joined Peking University as a professor. He founded and led the Embodied Perception and Interaction Laboratory (EPIC Lab) at Peking University. In 2022, he established the Embodied Intelligence Research Center at the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence and served as its director. In May 2023, Wang He founded Galaxy Universal. The team he leads can be regarded as the "golden team" in China's embodied intelligence field, bringing together AI and robotics experts from top - tier universities such as Peking University, Tsinghua University, Stanford University, and Beihang University.
In Wang He's vision, "Combining the physical interaction skills of an embodied robot's 'cerebellum,' such as body control and dexterous manipulation, with the cognitive, understanding, and planning abilities of its 'brain,' is the blueprint for future general - purpose robots."
Thus, Galaxy Universal's self - developed "AstraBrain" came into being. Currently, most in the industry develop the "brain" (task planning), "cerebellum" (motion control), and "hands" (dexterous manipulation) separately, lacking an end - to - end unified large model. There is information loss between the modules, resulting in slow response and weak generalization ability.
AstraBrain fundamentally reconstructs this paradigm. It is the world's first and currently the only end - to - end embodied large model that connects the "brain - cerebellum - neural control." It connects the entire link from high - level multi - modal perception to low - level real - time feedback control, achieving a deep integration of whole - body coordination and fine manipulation of the hands, making the robot's movements as smooth and precise as a human's.
As we all know, models rely on data, but collecting real data is not always feasible. Therefore, Galaxy Universal has built the world's largest embodied intelligence dataset with tens of billions of data points and created the data infrastructure "AstraSynth." It pioneered a virtual - real fusion training paradigm that combines synthetic simulation data as the main source with real - machine data as a supplement.
In a high - precision physical simulation environment, the system can generate a large number of diverse scenarios, allowing the robot to experience various extreme situations in the virtual world and then polish its skills with a very small amount of real - machine data. Data shows that this training efficiency is 1000 times higher than that of Tesla, and the success rate of the model trained based on this dataset reaches 99%.
This reminds us of the recent Spring Festival Gala of the Year of the Horse. Four embodied intelligence enterprises appeared on the stage, and Galaxy Universal stood out as the first "working robot" to appear on the Spring Festival Gala stage.
In the program, Galaxy Universal's robot completed tasks such as playing with walnuts, picking up glass fragments, accurately retrieving items from the shelves, folding clothes, and skewering grilled sausages beside Shen Teng and Ma Li. All operations were autonomously completed through real - time decision - making by "AstraBrain," rather than following pre - set programs. Facing randomly placed real objects, changing stage lights, and impromptu interactions with celebrities, the robot demonstrated stable generalization ability and millisecond - level response speed.
On the Spring Festival Gala stage, the capabilities of AstraBrain were directly verified. If traditional robots can only perform tasks they have seen before, AstraBrain enables the robot to acquire the general ability of "interacting with the physical world" through an intensive learning framework, allowing it to experience billions of "trial - and - error games" in the virtual world. Thus, the robot can "observe, think, and act" like a human, rather than following pre - set trajectories for specific actions.
Wang He previously said that from robots dancing on the Spring Festival Gala stage to hosting robot marathons, we are currently in the era of humanoid robot movement. However, he also believes that the industry is moving from the "movement era" to the "productivity era." The key to promoting the rapid application of humanoid robots in various industries is the coordination of hands, eyes, and brain.
From science fiction to reality
China is the first to enter the robot era
At the beginning of 2026, the battle in the field of embodied intelligence in China is heating up.
In the past two months, there have been several large - scale financings in the domestic embodied intelligence field. Behind this grand occasion, an elimination competition is taking place. Third - party statistics show that more than 20 robot enterprises around the world have been bankrupted, laid off employees, or divested their businesses in the past year.
The attitude of the venture capital circle has changed quietly. A VC partner even said bluntly, "In 2026, we will never consider embodied intelligence startups without mass production and revenue." Professor Wang Tianmiao from Beihang University also said before, "There are hidden concerns behind the prosperity of embodied intelligence. Capital is accelerating to concentrate on leading enterprises and upstream core components with high certainty." As an investor put it, "Only three to five out of more than 100 companies will survive in the end, and more than 90% of the money and resources will be wasted. There's nothing we can do about it."
All these indicate that the industry is showing an obvious "Matthew effect" - funds, resources, talents, etc. are all gathering towards leading enterprises. As a result, the prospect of a commercial closed - loop has become the dividing line in the industry. Relying solely on financing can no longer keep players in the game, and the ability of self - financing has become a life - or - death test.
As we generally feel, it's time for Chinese robots to shift from "running on the track" to "being used in families" and "working in factories." So far, Galaxy Universal has taken the lead in establishing an industrial closed - loop that combines "high - quality dataset + end - to - end large model + large - scale application," achieving in - depth implementation in real scenarios such as industry, retail, and healthcare, and transforming technological advantages into productivity advantages. "We don't aim for the robot to be able to do 100 things, but to do 10 things up to industrial - grade standards," Wang He once said.
Specifically, in the field of industrial manufacturing, Galaxy Universal has established in - depth cooperation with global leading customers such as CATL, Bosch Germany, Toyota, BAIC Group, and SAIC Group, with a cumulative order of thousands of units.
It's worth mentioning that its Galbot S1, the industry's first industrial heavy - load robot, addresses the load pain points in industrial manufacturing scenarios. The maximum load of its double arms reaches 50 kilograms, and the product meets industrial - grade standards, capable of continuous and stable operation under complex working conditions such as dust, vibration, and temperature differences. This product is equipped with an embodied handling model and can autonomously change batteries, filling the gap in the industrial - grade application of embodied intelligence.
In the field of new cultural and tourism consumption, within less than half a year of its launch, Galaxy Universal has achieved the world's first large - scale autonomous operation of hundreds of robots. The "Galaxy Space Capsule" convenience stores have spread to more than 100 locations in over 20 cities across China, becoming a popular check - in spot during the Spring Festival, which verifies the commercial sustainability of embodied intelligence in consumer scenarios. In comparison, the business model of the Galaxy Space Capsule is at least four months ahead of Tesla's.
In the fields of instant retail and smart pharmacies, Galaxy Universal has set a world record for the continuous operation of an instant retail warehouse for more than a year, 24/7. Currently, it has established smart retail pharmacies in 24 cities, managing more than 5,000 SKUs per store, turning the concept of "non - stop instant retail at night" into reality.
Galaxy Universal also has a presence in the field of medical and health care. Currently, it has established in - depth cooperation with top - tier tertiary hospitals such as Xuanwu Hospital and West China Hospital, promoting the implementation of robots in scenarios such as wards, pharmacies, and patient guidance, effectively improving the efficiency of the medical and nursing system.
Quietly, from the Spring Festival Gala stage to industrial production lines, from smart pharmacies to city landmarks, Galaxy Universal is transforming from a technological leader to a provider of general - purpose productivity. This has broken the outside world's prejudice against the practicality of Chinese embodied intelligence.
The wheels of the times are rolling forward. Most investors firmly believe that Chinese companies are winning this global race.