The robot company that raised the most funding sold 150 units in a year
After three years of establishment, it has refreshed the industry's financing records multiple times, and its cumulative financing amount is the highest in the industry. This includes attracting 5 billion yuan in just three months, and its current valuation has exceeded 20 billion yuan.
Galactic Universal, a new player in the industry, has become one of the most frequently mentioned companies in the embodied intelligence track after Unitree Technology and Zhipu Robotics.
In early March, Galactic Universal announced the completion of a new round of financing worth 2.5 billion yuan, further raising the single - largest financing scale it had previously set in the robotics industry.
Its growth curve is steeper than that of Unitree. Compared with Zhipu Robotics, it outperforms in terms of both financing scale and valuation.
This emerging enterprise, founded by Wang He, a 90 - postgraduate with a background from Tsinghua University, Stanford University, and Peking University, has won the strong support of "national - team funds, industrial capital, and international institutions". It has also become the first company in the embodied intelligence track to receive investment from the National Major Industry Investment Fund, which clearly indicates its position in the industry.
As the world's first embodied intelligence enterprise to achieve full - stack self - research from "hundred - billion datasets" to "embodied large models" and then to "robot bodies", Galactic Universal's development logic is quite different from other players in the industry. This is perhaps one of its most important labels and the key reason why it has gained great recognition without significant product sales.
This super unicorn is being closely watched by the market. The reasons behind it are also worth a more careful examination by the public and capital.
01
Phenomenal
Together with large models and AI chips, embodied intelligence is also triggering a huge capital frenzy.
Since the beginning of 2026, the financing wave in the embodied intelligence track has been surging. In just the first quarter, more than 50 financing events have been disclosed, with a cumulative amount of nearly 20 billion yuan, a year - on - year increase of 60%.
Among them, there have been 14 financing events with a single - deal value of over 1 billion yuan. Qianxun Intelligence attracted nearly 5 billion yuan in four rounds of financing within three months, and Xingyuan Intelligence accumulated 1 billion yuan in revenue within 10 months of its establishment. In terms of scale, Galactic Universal is the largest among them.
In early March, the company announced that it had secured 2.5 billion yuan in a B++ round of financing. The investors include the third phase of the National Major Industry Investment Fund, Sinopec, CITIC Group, SAIC, BOC Asset Management, Yizhuang State - owned Investment, etc. This scale also set a new record for single - round financing in the embodied intelligence track. After this round of financing, its valuation successfully exceeded 3 billion US dollars (over 20 billion yuan).
Just at the end of last year, Galactic Universal received over 300 million US dollars (about 2.1 billion yuan) in a B+ round of financing, which at that time refreshed the single - round financing record in the track. This means that within just three months, it has accumulated over 5 billion yuan in capital.
Looking back at its financing history, Galactic Universal is a soaring dark horse in the technology industry:
After its establishment in May 2023, it completed a seed - round financing in a very short time, with the support of Morningside Venture Capital and BlueRun Ventures;
In June and November of the following year, it successively completed an angel - round financing of over 700 million yuan and a strategic - round financing of 500 million yuan. Shenzhen Capital Group, IDG Capital, Meituan, and Qiming Venture Partners entered the game one after another;
In June 2025, it secured another 1.1 billion yuan in a B - round financing, which was the largest single - deal financing amount in the domestic embodied intelligence field at that time. CATL, GGV Capital, and China Merchants Bank International Capital all invested real money.
Galactic Universal, which has just turned three years old, has refreshed the industry's financing records three times and amazed the industry with a total financing scale of 7 billion yuan.
More rarely, its new - round financing has won the favor of the third phase of the National Major Industry Investment Fund, which is also the first time for the latter to intervene in the embodied intelligence track.
The National Major Industry Investment Fund is an out - and - out "national team" in the chip investment field, backed by the Ministry of Finance, the China Development Bank, and central enterprises such as China National Tobacco, China Electronics, and China Electronics Technology Group. As a national - level investment institution, its investment direction also represents the guidance of national strategies.
The first landmark investment project of the first phase of the National Major Industry Investment Fund was SMIC, whose importance in China's wafer manufacturing field is self - evident. This time, Galactic Universal has become the first "selected" target, which has obvious demonstration and benchmarking effects.
This will also be one of the most crucial features that distinguish Galactic Universal from other leading players.
02
Betting on the Brain
"Whoever can first use large - model technology to successfully manufacture a robot will be the world's top AI company and is worthy of a Nobel Prize," said Wang Xingxing, the founder of Unitree Technology, in an interview.
Since this year, most of the newly emerged super unicorns in the embodied intelligence field worth tens of billions of yuan belong to the "embodied brain" direction, which also indicates that the focus of capital has shifted from the "body" to the "brain" dimension.
The concept of the "embodied brain" is the foundation of the robot large model mentioned by Wang Xingxing.
If the PC era was mainly monopolized by Intel chips and Microsoft Windows operating systems, and the smartphone era was dominated by Qualcomm providing chips, Foxconn doing OEM, and Apple and Google developing iOS and Android systems, in the era of embodied intelligence, the body (the shell of the robot) will ultimately be led by China's strong supply - chain capabilities. Whoever masters the general embodied brain will have the final say in this trillion - level ecosystem.
Currently, the robot large model is the biggest bottleneck restricting the large - scale application of humanoid robots. The biggest obstacle to the intelligence of robots is the model problem, not the data problem.
At the 2026 CCTV Spring Festival Gala, robot companies competed to appear. Galactic Universal's Galbot completed operations such as playing with walnuts, picking up glass fragments, folding clothes, and skewering sausages autonomously without pre - programming. These operations were not "pre - set" in advance. Ultimately, the core lies in a "brain" that is becoming smarter.
Currently, various enterprise players in the market generally develop the "brain" (task planning), "cerebellum" (motion control), and "limbs" (perception and execution) separately, lacking an end - to - end unified large model.
This makes it difficult to seamlessly connect the various modules, resulting in delayed responses and weak generalization ability.
Due to technology and high training and inference costs, most robot companies do not have the ability to independently develop large models. Many embodied players can only rely on the general large models of giants such as Alibaba, ByteDance, and Huawei. This "borrowing - brain survival" model is difficult to sustain.
Galactic Universal has chosen a more difficult path. It integrates the brain, cerebellum, and neural control and has developed an end - to - end large model called AstraBrain.
AstraBrain is one of the few embodied large models that can connect the "brain - cerebellum - neural control". Its greatest advantage lies in its high - dimensional generalization ability. Traditional robot learning models can only perform tasks they have "seen and learned", while AstraBrain enables the robot body to experience billions of "trial - and - error games" in the virtual world, giving it the possibility to "observe, think, and act" like a human.
In March this year, Galactic Universal released a humanoid robot that can play tennis with humans, which is empowered by the whole - body real - time intelligent control algorithm LATENT. Once this video was released, it received a like from Elon Musk on X.
It is worth noting that this robot is not developed by Galactic Universal itself but is the G1 purchased from Unitree. Before this, Galactic Universal had always been a major customer of Unitree, contributing more than 18 million yuan in sales to Unitree in 2025.
Buying products from competitors is one of Galactic Universal's tactics. By collecting a large amount of data, it can help Galactic Universal learn complex and non - simplifiable movement abilities.
Different from Tesla's Optimus, which focuses on human - powered data collection, Galactic Universal has chosen a path that combines virtual and real data, with synthetic simulation data as the main source and real - machine data collection as a supplement, which is internally called the "Stellar Data Pyramid".
Wang He, the founder of Galactic Universal, once said that when the data reached 100,000 times, the training success rate was only 58%. Only when the data reached 1 billion times could the success rate increase to 87%, which is obviously an unacceptable figure.
It can be seen that simply relying on manual remote operation to accumulate data is almost impossible.
The synthetic data method is relatively feasible in terms of cost and scale and is not limited by time and space. By using popular robots on the market for training and with the empowerment of large - scale data, Galactic Universal's own Galbot becomes more intelligent.
03
Behind the Fund - Raising
Galactic Universal was founded by two academic elites in the robotics field.
One is Wang He, born in 1992. He graduated from the Department of Electronic Engineering of Tsinghua University in 2014 and obtained a Ph.D. from the Department of Electrical Engineering of Stanford University in 2021, under the tutelage of Professor Leonidas J. Guibas, a member of three academies in the United States. After returning to China, he joined Peking University and served as a tenured assistant professor at the Peking University Center for Frontier Computing Research. At the age of 34, he is already a doctoral supervisor.
Wang He also founded the Embodied Perception and Interaction Laboratory (EPIC Lab) at Peking University and has a profound academic foundation in the field of embodied intelligence.
Source: Peking University
The other founder, Yao Tengzhou, graduated from the Robotics Research Institute of Beihang University, under the tutelage of Professor Wang Tianmiao, a leading figure in the robotics industry and the dean of the Zhongguancun Zhiyou Research Institute. He once worked at the Shanghai Robotics R & D Center of ABB Group, engaged in robot R & D, and has experience in mass - producing and selling large - scale intelligent hardware.
In the current world of embodied intelligence, an academic background has become a pass. Xu Xiaoping, the founder of ZhenFund, proposed the concept of "Xiang in the South and Miao in the North" in 2016. "Xiang in the South" refers to Professor Li Zexiang from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, who incubated well - known technology projects such as DJI and Googoltech. "Miao in the North" is Wang Tianmiao. So far, he has nurtured three companies listed on the STAR Market: Tianzhihang, Effort Robotics, and Ninebot. The founders of Elite Robotics and Galactic Universal are his students.
The reason why Galactic Universal has received such crazy capital pursuit lies in the following factors.
First, the resumes of the two founders are extremely impressive. In particular, Wang He has a very profound scientific research background. With him as the CTO, the company can stay at the forefront of the track. Coupled with Yao Tengzhou's work experience, the company had both cutting - edge technology and rich business operation and hardware manufacturing experience from the very beginning;
Second, Wang Tianmiao is not only a subject professor but also a startup mentor and investor. His influence in the field of embodied intelligence is beyond doubt. Given that he has successfully invested in three STAR - Market - listed companies, investors have a greater preference for the projects he guides.
The focus on "brain" R & D has further increased its valuation center. As Wang Xingxing previously mentioned, the current development progress of the robot large model is similar to the stage 1 - 3 years before the release of ChatGPT. Therefore, in the eyes of investors, getting an investment share in Galactic Universal is equivalent to seizing the first - mover advantage in the industry's explosion.
However, just like all AI startup projects, whether it can ultimately form a commercial closed - loop is the ultimate concern of capital.
Li Pei, the former president of Huazhong University of Science and Technology, recently expressed his view, pointing out that "robots should not just practice dancing and somersaults. They should go to factories to do real work. The real value lies in solving practical industrial problems."
Currently, Galactic Universal has planned application scenarios in the new - energy vehicle industry, instant retail, healthcare, and smart cities.
With the help of shareholder resources, Galactic Universal has signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Meituan to jointly develop a humanoid - robot - based intelligent pharmacy solution.
Nearly ten Meituan unmanned pharmacies in Beijing have deployed Galactic Universal's robots. Galbot can complete all tasks such as inventory, restocking, pick - up, delivery, and packing.
If Galactic Universal's frequent financing in the early stage relied on the founders' brilliant backgrounds and the track's dividends, then the key to supporting its valuation in the future lies in being able to form a commercial closed - loop.
04
Conclusion
Wang He once said at the 2024 Yunqi Conference that the