Zhiyuan has completed 47 financing investments in the past two years, and the majority of these investments have been placed in the upstream sectors supporting its self-developed robot business.
ZhiYuan is building an upstream industrial ecosystem to pave the way for a potential listing, with the final outcome to be verified by the market.
On October 20, Exinfinite, an embodied intelligence chip company, completed its Pre-A round of financing. ZhiYuan, along with Anhui Automotive Innovation Center, Guoyuan Equity Investment, Hefei Baohe Venture Capital and other institutions, appeared on the list of investors, and the financing amount was not disclosed.
The specific amount has not been made public, but the identity of the investors is more noteworthy. According to relevant data cited by Sci-Tech Innovation Board Daily, from August 2024 to October 2026, ZhiYuan has acted as an investor in 47 investment and financing events, most of which are concentrated in early-stage, small-scale key nodes upstream of ZhiYuan's complete machine business. It should be noted that the 47 counts refer to the number of events, and multiple rounds of financing of the same company are counted separately.
A robotics company founded for more than three years making external investments at such a density is rare in the embodied intelligence track. The person in charge of this set of strategies is Deng Taihua, who came out of Huawei's Computing Product Line.
01
The operator is a seasoned veteran from Huawei
According to public information, Deng Taihua was admitted to the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China in 1995, majoring in Computer Communication (Information and Communication Engineering). After graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1999, he joined Huawei and stayed there for more than 20 years. He once served as Huawei's Vice President, President of the Wireless Product Line, and President of the Computing Product Line, leading the construction of the Kunpeng and Ascend AI computing ecosystems. At the end of 2022, he invited Peng Zhihui, a "Huawei Genius Youth" talent, to start a business. ZhiYuan was established in February 2023, and Deng Taihua took office as Chairman and CEO in March 2025.
The team composition is an extension of this resume. According to partner information disclosed by Securities Daily, Tencent News and the company's official website, at least 6 of ZhiYuan's 9 partners are from Huawei, and more than 70% of the core management team have Huawei backgrounds.
Another detail emerged in the same period. Ebtel Embodied Technology completed industrial and commercial changes, and ZhiYuan and Huawei Hubble Investment appeared in the list of new shareholders at the same time. Hubble is Huawei's investment platform for the semiconductor industry chain, and the "student" and the "teacher" appeared on the same shareholder list.
Huawei's path to build the Kunpeng and Ascend ecosystems is to bring upstream and downstream enterprises in the industrial chain into the same technical system, and then deepen the binding through capital and certification. What ZhiYuan is doing has a similar structure, but the time frame has been compressed: the 47 investments shown in the data are concentrated in about two years.
The sense of urgency for compression comes from a specific technical reality: the "brain" of humanoid robots, high-computing-power chips, are still concentrated in the hands of a few manufacturers, and ZhiYuan has made more than one move in the chip sector. Exinfinite is a team rooted in Tsinghua University, founded in 2023. Its CTO Wei Jian once led the development of Qualcomm's first self-developed GPU; its smart motor control MCU shipments have exceeded 1 million units, and new orders signed in 2026 have reached 5.2 million units, while the high-end brain chip V1000 with a designed computing power of 1000 TOPS is still in the tape-out stage, and there are still multiple links before mass production.
02
Four-tier capital structure
The first layer is direct investment. The 47 investments spread upstream along the bill of materials of robots. According to statistics, ZhiYuan's direct investment covers Qianjue Robot, Blue Point Touch (tactile and force sensors), Exinfinite, Huaxi Intelligence (chips), Datayuanchuang (3D vision and data collection), Quan Zhibo (reducers), and Zhishen Technology (body and components). One of the investments has already delivered shipments: in February 2026, ZhiYuan participated in Huaxi Intelligence's Pre-B round of financing of over 800 million yuan. According to disclosure, Huaxi's shipments in the first half of the year accounted for about one-fifth of the global shipments of high-computing-power robot chips in the same period, second only to NVIDIA, ranking second in the world.
The second layer is funds. In February 2026, ZhiYuan joined listed companies such as Ocean's Electric, Zhimingda, Tongxing Technology, and Hongjing Optoelectronics to establish the Gongcheng Mu Zhi He Chuang Venture Capital Fund, with a target size of 290 million yuan. ZhiYuan subscribed 15 million yuan, making it the largest single limited partner, but it does not act as the fund manager; earlier, ZhiYuan also jointly launched the Embodied Intelligence Industry Fund with Muhua Kechuang. The subscription amount of 15 million yuan has allowed a group of listed companies to form a follow-investment pattern around embodied intelligence.
The third layer is holding listed companies. On July 8, 2025, ZhiYuan, through ZhiYuan Hengyue and persons acting in concert, obtained the control of composite material company Sino Wealth New Material through agreement transfer of 29.99% equity plus partial tender offer, with a total plan price of about 2.1 billion yuan, and the actual transaction amount was about 1.997 billion yuan calculated at 7.78 yuan per share; the delivery was completed in November 2025, with a total shareholding of 63.6232%. This is the first acquisition case of a listed company in the embodied intelligence sector on A-share market, and Peng Zhihui later served as the chairman of Sino Wealth New Material. After the transaction announcement, Sino Wealth New Material hit the 20% daily limit for 9 consecutive trading days, and the cumulative increase for the whole year of 2025 was 1820%, ranking first in the annual increase of A-shares that year.
Half a year after the acquisition was completed, Sino Wealth New Material added a consumer-grade robot brand "Sino Wealth Qiyuan". Qiyuan Q1 is 88 cm tall, weighs 16 kg, and is foldable. Qiyuan T1 supports switching between wheel-foot and quadruped forms. The two products were launched on September 20, with a starting price of 19,999 yuan. ZhiYuan's own body business continues to focus on industrial and commercial scenarios, while Sino Wealth enters the personal and family market with the "Qiyuan" brand.
The fourth layer is spin-off. According to a report by Sci-Tech Innovation Board Daily, since the end of 2025, ZhiYuan has launched a "one split into four" plan: the dexterous hand business is spun off as Critical Point, the data business as Mifeng Technology, the leasing business as Qingtian Leasing, and the quadruped robot business as ZhiYuan Kuotuo. The spun-off businesses can conduct independent financing from then on.
03
Three sets of contrasts faced by this business layout
The first set of contrasts lies between products and capital. Deng Taihua disclosed at the partner conference in April that ZhiYuan's shipments in 2025 exceeded 5,100 units, ranking first in the world; Counterpoint data shows that in the first half of 2026, ZhiYuan's shipments were about 9,700 units with a 43% market share, exceeding Unitree's about 7,000 units and 31% share, topping the list again. The revenue curve is steeper: 300,000 yuan in 2023, 60 million yuan in 2024, and 1.05 billion yuan in 2025. At the same time, the market value of Unitree Technology has evaporated by more than 240 billion yuan from its peak in the early stage of listing, and the IPO window for humanoid robot enterprises is also shrinking. One achieves breakthrough through products at a single point, the other builds an ecosystem through capital. In the knockout round of embodied intelligence, the two routes begin to diverge.
The second set of contrasts lies between valuation and market clearing. Deng Taihua stated at an embodied intelligence industry summit in Hong Kong in May that more than 20 enterprises have been invested through the "Venture Capital Plan A", and the average annualized valuation growth of the invested enterprises is 17 times. This is the caliber stated by the founder, which counts the growth of valuation, not revenue growth.
The China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, together with Tsinghua University and other institutions, released the "Embodied Intelligence Development Report (2026)" on October 16, judging that the industry is in the period of expansion of expectations, and the first round of market clearing may be completed through market competition in the next two to three years. The point when the valuation rises the fastest may also be the eve of market clearing. Among the 47 early-stage investments, how many projects can survive after the clearing is the real stress test of this layout.
The third set of contrasts lies between the capital platform and industrial value. Sino Wealth New Material, which ZhiYuan holds with about 2.1 billion yuan, saw its market value rise from about 3 billion yuan before the acquisition to 59.621 billion yuan at one point (September 21, 2026), and the total market value at the close of October 22 was about 43.966 billion yuan; while according to statistics from Everycai.com, the company's own net profit has turned from a profit of 29.9 million yuan to a loss of 167 million yuan.
Putting the four-tier structure on the table, capital binding solves the problem of "being choked by the neck". ZhiYuan has continuously invested in two chip companies, Huaxi and Exinfinite, aiming at the right to speak in the brain chip segment. But it cannot prevent another thing: the industry does not need so many complete machine manufacturers in the end; the invested upstream enterprises also supply products to ZhiYuan's competitors at the same time, and there is no public answer to how deep the binding is.
There are two verifications to come. The first is ZhiYuan's own pricing. The company confirmed in July 2026 that it has started preparations for listing in Hong Kong. According to a report by *Caijing* on October 13, it has launched a new round of financing of about 1 billion to 1.5 billion yuan, with a valuation of about 50 billion yuan; according to the rules of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, after submitting the listing application, it needs to stay static for 120 full days after completing the new financing, so listing within the year is almost impossible, and the IPO may be postponed to 2027. The second is the pricing of the spun-off assets. Among the four companies Critical Point, Mifeng Technology, Qingtian Leasing, and ZhiYuan Kuotuo, there is no timetable for which one will first achieve independent large-scale financing.
Whether the valuation of 50 billion yuan can be accepted by the market, and which of the spun-off companies will independently raise money first, the answers to these two questions cannot be given by ZhiYuan itself, and need to be given by the market.
This article is from the WeChat official account "Caineng Circle", authorized for release by 36Kr.