The core subsidiary of a 14-billion-yuan unicorn has gone bankrupt, owing 23 million yuan to its employees.

A once-promising star company that planned to sell 20,000 robots a year ended up being unable to pay its employees.

In September 2026, the bankruptcy case of DeepBlue Robotics (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. once again caught public attention.

The latest publicly available employee claim information shows that DeepBlue Robotics owes more than 100 employees over 23 million yuan, of which unpaid wages and economic compensation exceed 21 million yuan, and the unpaid public housing fund and individual social security contributions are calculated separately.

Five months ago, the Shanghai Pudong New Area People's Court had already ruled to accept its bankruptcy liquidation. In August, DeepBlue Robotics (Changzhou), which holds a 94% stake, was also accepted for bankruptcy by the Tianning District Court of Changzhou City.

An insider told Pencil News that the bankruptcy of DeepBlue Robotics was caused by "insufficient working capital turnover."

DeepBlue Robotics is no unknown player. It is a robotics subsidiary 96% owned by DeepBlue Technology, an AI unicorn valued at 14 billion yuan. It once announced orders for 25,000 disinfection robots, a procurement intent for tens of thousands of units over three years from LG, and planned an industrial park in Shangqiu with an annual output of 20,000 units and an annual output value of 1 billion yuan.

The big order vanished

Founded in 2012, DeepBlue Technology was once a star company that received investments from Yunfeng Capital, China International Capital Corporation, and Pudong Venture Capital Group.

DeepBlue Robotics was established in 2018, and a year later, its robot factory in Changzhou was put into operation.

DeepBlue Robotics planned multiple product lines: "Little Blue Whale" for indoor cleaning, "Little Rhino" for outdoor cleaning, "Lan Elf" for ultraviolet disinfection, "Little Penguin" for delivery, as well as lawn mowing robots, gardening robots, and manned AGVs.

DeepBlue Robotics has landed large orders, the most famous of which came from South Korea's LG.

Around 2021, DeepBlue Robotics announced a cooperation with LG on disinfection robots. According to the agreement, LG planned to purchase tens of thousands of robots within three years based on global demand. The official later disclosed that the value of this order exceeded 700 million yuan. A 2021 report by China Central Television also visited the Changzhou factory, stating that the company planned to export 25,000 disinfection robots overseas within two years.

To meet the order, production capacity began to expand.

In addition to the Changzhou factory, DeepBlue Robotics built a production base in Shangqiu, Henan Province in 2023. Public reports show that its temporary plant covers an area of about 4,000 square meters, with three semi-automatic production lines planned in the initial stage, and the expected annual production capacity exceeds 20,000 units; the subsequent plan even includes an industrial park of about 500 mu and more than 10 production lines, targeting an annual output value of about 1 billion yuan.

However, many former employees later told the media that the LG order was not implemented on a large scale as originally envisaged. After the end of the epidemic, the demand for disinfection robots changed rapidly, and this big order that had high hopes did not become a long-term cash flow.

Signs of unpaid wages emerged early

DeepBlue Technology expanded its business scope very widely.

A promotional PPT of DeepBlue obtained by Caiwen shows that it has laid out more than a dozen fields including smart retail, self-driving buses, self-driving freight vehicles, robots, big health, industrial automation, military industry, medical equipment, and biotechnology, with 49 outward-invested enterprises and 91 controlled enterprises, and the group's member enterprises once reached 159.

DeepBlue Technology once had more than 1,000 scientific researchers. According to founder Chen Haibo's statement in 2023, the monthly salary expenditure of the Academy of Sciences alone reached tens of millions of yuan.

According to reports by Caiwen, DeepBlue Technology began to default on wages as early as 2022 and has experienced a large loss of personnel.

On the robotics side, public information shows that DeepBlue Robotics Changzhou once owed wages to 30 employees from May to October 2023, totaling about 718,300 yuan, and the local human resources and social security department later made an administrative decision on handling the issue.

The problem was not resolved afterwards.

Media reports citing employees said that in 2024, many employees signed agreements on installment payment of unpaid wages when they left the company, and the company promised to repay within one year; in 2025, some employees formed new repayment arrangements through litigation and mediation.

The money still has not been fully recovered.

In the end, some employees began to apply for compulsory enforcement, and then applied for the company's bankruptcy.

On May 7, 2026, the Shanghai Pudong New Area People's Court officially accepted the bankruptcy liquidation case of DeepBlue Robotics (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. On May 12, Deloitte Huayong Certified Public Accountants was appointed as the administrator; on May 25, the remaining on-the-job employees of the company were terminated from their labor contracts.

By July, the administrator had identified 101 potential employee creditors, and the claims of only the first batch of 65 initially confirmed employees reached 12.7573 million yuan.

In September, this number continued to increase.

While the subsidiary was in trouble, the parent company continued to raise financing. In April 2025, DeepBlue Technology obtained a Pre-IPO round of investment of several hundred million yuan from Pudong Venture Capital Group. In July 2026, DeepBlue Technology issued a statement saying that the group had not filed for bankruptcy and its main business was still in operation. In the past two years, it has cut multiple loss-making sectors, closed many long-term loss-making joint-stock controlled companies, and its Shenzhen branch has been closed down.

However, many former employees and departing executives of DeepBlue Technology revealed to the media that most of the orders signed by the company "were mainly demonstration products". The products can be demonstrated in the ideal environment of the exhibition hall, but cannot adapt to real scenarios, and cannot form stable repeat purchases and large-scale revenue.

The previous generation of robotics companies is starting to exit the market

The experience of DeepBlue Robotics is not an isolated case in the industry.

The most typical example is CloudMinds Robotics.

Founded in 2015, CloudMinds was once one of the robotics unicorns with the highest valuation in China. Public reports show that the company has raised a total of about 5.4 billion yuan in financing, with a maximum valuation of more than 20 billion yuan, and its investors include institutions such as SoftBank, Shanghai Guosheng, and Zhuhai State-owned Assets. In 2023, it also completed a Series C financing of more than 1 billion yuan.

But just two years later, the problems erupted intensively.

In March 2025, a field visit to CloudMinds' Shanghai base by 21st Century Business Herald found that the previous main office building was already empty. Founder Huang Xiaoqing later admitted that the company "did encounter great difficulties", and was reducing personnel, adjusting strategies, and raising financing to resolve unpaid employee wages.

Some former employees estimated that in the Beijing area alone, the unpaid wages and compensation owed to about 200 people amounted to tens of millions of yuan. At its peak, CloudMinds had more than 800 employees, and then carried out large-scale layoffs.

In the end, the company failed to solve the problem only by relying on the next round of financing.

The People's Court of Fangshan District, Beijing officially ruled to accept the bankruptcy liquidation case of CloudMinds Robotics (Beijing) Co., Ltd. on October 10, 2025. By June 2026, the court appointed an administrator and began to accept claim declarations.

It and DeepBlue have a notable common point: both once tried to do too many things.

CloudMinds once laid out multiple product lines at the same time, including cloud robots, delivery robots, security robots, and humanoid robots; while DeepBlue expanded its business to cleaning, delivery, disinfection, gardening, and even autonomous driving, medical treatment, chips and other fields.

When capital was abundant, more product lines meant a more attractive business story; when financing slowed down, each product line represented expenditure on R&D personnel, supply chain, and cash.

This wave of elimination has even spread to more segmented robotics tracks.

Longhui Medical, which makes surgical robots, Chuangze Intelligent, which makes service robots, Lesheng Robotics, which makes consumer robots, Hongda Xingye Robotics, which makes industrial robots... have all entered bankruptcy liquidation.

In 2026, the robotics industry is still one of the hottest tracks in the primary market. But on the other side of the continuously refreshed figures of financing, valuation and order volume, a number of star companies from the last round of robotics startup boom have begun to exit the market.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Pencil News" (ID: pencilnews), author: Pencil News, published with authorization from 36Kr.