Yizhuang in Beijing is set to witness the IPO of a robotic unicorn.
Another robotics startup is gearing up for an IPO.
Recently, Benmo Power (Beijing) Technology Co., Ltd. has successfully passed the hearing of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
In today's venture capital circle, as long as the word "robot" is mentioned, a restless atmosphere pervades everywhere.
Investing in the robotics sector has become an absolute mainstream in the investment community. Step into any tech summit, big or small, and the venue is filled with humanoid robots that can somersault, wipe tables with rags, serve coffee, and toast bread.
Yet beneath the bustle, project parties often slam their hardware BOM (Bill of Materials) on the table, only to burn through massive sums of financing just on purchasing components.
Looking through Benmo's prospectus, its true ambition lies in the "direct-drive technology system." From direct-drive power modules that make sweeping and scrubbing robots more precise and quieter at the foundational level, to wheel-legged robot units in industrial and commercial fields, and further to modular cluster splicing technology that dynamically combines multiple devices, Benmo has evolved from a component supplier into a foundational power and complete machine platform that enables efficient development of various robot forms.
According to data from Frost & Sullivan, Benmo is the world's first and only company with shipments of direct-drive power modules for consumer robots exceeding 5 million units. In 2025, its annual shipment of direct-drive power modules reached approximately 8.5 million units, firmly ranking first in China's consumer robot direct-drive power module niche track with a 61.1% market share.
This is a story of a 31-year-old top graduate from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology who, by relentlessly challenging the traditional "reducer" paradigm, brought direct-drive products to the Hong Kong stock market.
And in the undercurrent of this story, an invisible robotics empire woven by venture capital guru Li Zexiang, paired with the Beijing Yizhuang state-owned assets that are in the midst of an industrial boom, have become the most crucial annotations to the story's climax.
The 31-Year-Old Top Student Charges Toward the Hong Kong Stock Exchange
The origin of Benmo Power traces back to a groundbreaking idea that founder Zhang Di had in a laboratory at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Zhang Di is only 31 years old this year. In 2016, he graduated from Beijing Institute of Technology, then went on to pursue a degree in robotic systems and control engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. On HKUST's campus, a sacred ground for China's robotics entrepreneurship, he met his mentor — Professor Li Zexiang, known as the "Godfather of DJI."
Working with motors and drivers every day, he was deeply frustrated by traditional industry designs: traditional robot joints widely adopt the "motor + reducer" scheme. While reducers can amplify torque, they have bulky structures, high noise levels, short lifespans, and mechanical transmission inherently brings wear and backlash, making robot movements always as stiff as those of a marionette.
Zhang Di boldly attempted to remove the reducer from the traditional core components, and to his surprise, the control performance turned out to be better and more responsive without it.
Why not completely eliminate the reducer and let the motor directly output high torque?
This idea seemed a bit heretical at the time, but Zhang Di decided to take this path and devote himself entirely to "direct-drive power."
The so-called direct-drive module integrates the motor and driver, capable of directly outputting high torque without the need for an external reducer. Joints made with this solution allow robots to be as flexible and agile as human muscles, operate extremely quietly, and release force immediately when touched, so they won't accidentally injure people with rigid collisions.
In 2018, Zhang Di launched this concept in Hong Kong.
In 2020, he relocated the company's main operations to the Songshan Lake International Innovation and Entrepreneurship Community in Dongguan, officially establishing Benmo Power and stepping into the incubation system of the XbotPark Robotics Base co-founded by professors Li Zexiang, Gao Bingqiang, and Gan Jie. In this "headquarters" for hardware entrepreneurs, Benmo Power began to grow rapidly.
At that moment, China's direct-drive module market was on the eve of an explosion. Zhang Di and his team spent six years in quiet dedication, perfectly catching the wave of direct-drive modules replacing traditional ones.
Behind 12 Rounds of Financing: Li Zexiang's Fourth Robotics IPO
Benmo Power's submission of its listing application is not only a victory for its founding team, but also a moment of "great harvest" for the star-studded capital behind it.
In this long journey, Professor Li Zexiang played more than just the role of a spiritual mentor — he was also a visionary capital backer.
From its establishment in Dongguan at the end of 2020 to the end of 2025, Benmo Power completed 12 rounds of financing at a dizzying pace in just over five years. From the seed round and angel round, all the way to Series A, Series B, and Series C, it raised a total of nearly 650 million yuan. After the completion of the last round of financing, Benmo Power's post-money valuation reached nearly 3.2 billion yuan.
Benmo Power's investor list is packed with top-tier institutions, including the "Lenovo system" portfolio of Lenovo Capital, Lenovo Star, and Legend Capital, as well as leading institutions such as 5Y Capital and Songhe Capital.
Most notably, there are heavily invested local state-owned funds, such as Shunxi Fund, Beijing Advanced Manufacturing and Intelligent Equipment Industry Fund, Beijing New Materials Industry Fund, and Jingguorui Investment.
In this capital feast, the biggest winner is still that "invisible empire" that dared to place its bets at the very earliest stage — Li Zexiang's investment ecosystem.
During the 2020 seed round, the Songshan Lake Robotics Institute, ultimately controlled by Professor Li Zexiang, entered the scene. This approach of "providing space, funding, and an incubation ecosystem at the seed stage, even personally serving as a director to accompany the company through its early growth" is exactly the "hard tech incubation model" that Li Zexiang excels at.
In fact, Benmo Power is not an isolated case in Li Zexiang's incubation ecosystem. XbotPark Robotics Base states on its official website that the base has incubated over 50 robotics and smart hardware startups.
On this long track record, previous successes include Googol Technology (founded by Li Zexiang, Gao Bingqiang, and Wu Hong, listed on the ChiNext in 2023), the unmanned mining truck unicorn IDRIVERPLUS, and domestic household robot leader Ecovacs. In addition, Hai Robotics, a developer of box-type warehouse robots, has also submitted its listing application to the main board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
According to incomplete statistics, Li Zexiang has founded, deeply participated in incubating, or invested in more than 60 robotics-related companies. The founders of these companies include DJI's founder Frank Wang, Cloudminds founder Zhang Junbin, and Ecovacs founder Li Zhichen... all of whom are Li Zexiang's "disciples."
Regarding his criteria for selecting talents, Li Zexiang initially placed more emphasis on a person's academic background and professional grades, but later gradually valued more whether a person has passion for entrepreneurship and innovation, has their own genuine interests, and can continuously learn and explore from those passions to develop a sense of mission.
In a previous media interview, Li Zexiang said, "It's like walking on a dark road alone — you get scared easily. But if you walk with two or three others, and you're given a flashlight and a stick to fend off dogs, you won't be scared anymore. We are attracting more people and continuously passing on our experience of walking through the dark to them."
Once Benmo Power successfully rings the listing bell, it will become the fourth robotics IPO project under Professor Li Zexiang's belt.
Beijing Yizhuang's Robotics Puzzle
Among Benmo's investor list, there is another important investment institution — Yizhuang International Science and Technology Innovation Private Equity Fund, which is the management platform for Yizhuang State Investment's FOF.
In fact, Benmo Power originated in Songshan Lake, Dongguan, Guangdong, but the place that helped it make its crucial leap and step onto a larger capital stage is Beijing Yizhuang (Beijing Economic-Technological Development Area).
In this nationwide "competition to attract robotics enterprises," the core reason why Benmo Power chose to move north all the way lies in the policy dividends and city-level open scenarios offered by Yizhuang.
In Yizhuang, the robotics industry is not just an empty slogan. It not only has high-standard special support policies and tens of billions of yuan in industrial funds, but more importantly, Yizhuang has created a rare "full-domain open testing scenario" across the country.
For joint component enterprises like Benmo Power, whether a product works well cannot only be tested in the lab — it must be installed on complete machines and run in real, complex environments.
By building the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, Yizhuang has tightly integrated complete machine enterprises, algorithm teams, and component manufacturers from all across the industrial chain within a radius of just a few kilometers. Here, Benmo Power's direct-drive power modules can be immediately installed on the robot legs of leading complete machine manufacturers right outside the door, for on-site debugging and immediate iteration.
This industrial atmosphere of "promoting research through competitions and driving production through competitions" was vividly demonstrated at the recently concluded 2026 Beijing Yizhuang Half Marathon & Humanoid Robot Half Marathon.
On the morning of April 19, 2026, at the starting line on Yizhuang Kechuang 17th Street, 12,000 human runners gathered with more than 300 humanoid robots from 100 teams worldwide, safely separated only by isolation barriers. The 21-kilometer race route passed through Yizhuang's tech landmarks such as the National Information Technology Application Innovation Park, the Robot World, and the Paulownia Avenue.
This was not only a sports event, but also the most brutal "ultimate exam" for global embodied intelligent hardware.
In this extreme stress test, hundreds of humanoid robots started one by one at 30-second intervals in a pipeline-style manner. In the end, the "Lightning" robot with autonomous navigation from the Qitian Dasheng Team won the championship in the robot group with a net time of 50 minutes and 26 seconds — a result that even surpassed the men's half marathon world record set by humans.
Behind this stunning performance, what's being competed for is not just the path planning of AI large models, but also the energy management, heat dissipation efficiency, gait control, and structural durability of the robots' leg and foot joints during continuous high-frequency movements. During the race, audiences could even see staff replacing batteries for robots at supply stations on the spot, or the thrilling sight of robots getting back up after falling while running at high speed.
Yizhuang has hosted this world-first robot marathon event for two consecutive years, essentially using an almost obsessively realistic scenario to force enterprises across the industrial chain to solve underlying hardware pain points such as "energy efficiency optimization, joint reverse drive, and high-density power."
From a small hardware workshop in Songshan Lake to the capital hotbed of Beijing Yizhuang, Benmo Power's listing application journey reflects that China's robotics sector is bidding farewell to the era of simply competing on algorithm PPTs, and truly entering an era driven by precision manufacturing, foundational power innovation, and resonance among local industrial ecosystems.
Whether the "shovel-selling" business of direct-drive joints will achieve brilliant success on the Hong Kong stock market, and where Yizhuang's robot legion will head next — the answers are becoming increasingly clear as this prospectus is unveiled.
This article is from the WeChat official account Rongzhong Finance (ID: thecapital), author: Abu, editor: Wuren, published with authorization from 36Kr.