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"The embodied intelligence market feels like it's cooled down lately," lamented Xiao Bei, an FA in China specializing in the sector. "Several projects have been launched in succession, but due to high valuations and disputes over commercialization, investors are adopting a wait-and-see approach."

However, the industry's heat has not fully dissipated. Earlier this month, the first embodied intelligence acquisition on the STAR Market sparked public interest—Zhiyuan Robotics plans to conduct a "reverse takeover" of listed STAR Market company SWANCOR for RMB 2.1 billion. Previously, Unitree Robotics was favored as the "first humanoid robot stock," but Zhiyuan Robotics' bold move has shifted the industry's focus from technological breakthroughs and application landings back to capital operations.

Financing activities in the embodied intelligence sector remain robust. Recently, XinghaiTu has successively completed A4 and A5 rounds of strategic financing, totaling over US$100 million. Xingdong Jiyuan secured nearly RMB 500 million in Series A funding, CloudMinds raised hundreds of millions of yuan, XiaoYu Robotics secured hundreds of millions of yuan in Series A+ funding, and Tashi Robotics completed US$122 million in Angel+ round funding. The most sensational news was Galaxy Robotics' completion of a new round of financing exceeding RMB 1 billion, setting a record for the largest single financing in the embodied intelligence sector this year.

The current embodied intelligence sector finds itself in a state of "extreme contrasts." While Zhu Xiaohu warns about "clearing positions and being bearish" on humanoid robots, state-owned assets and companies like JD.com, Meituan, Tencent, and Huawei are investing RMB 1.1 billion in Galaxy Robotics. Tashi Robotics even secured US$120 million in Angel round funding, establishing a record for the largest Angel round funding in China's embodied intelligence field.

However, these large financing deals seem to involve only head institutions and enterprises, with small and medium-sized players rarely seen. This may indicate that the embodied intelligence industry is undergoing a critical turning point from "unbridled growth" to "bubble clearance." Ultimately, no matter how compelling the financing story, it requires real market money and sustainable profitability to validate its worth.

Part 1: Division

Investor Exits vs. Huge Financing and IPOs

The embodied intelligence sector in the first half of 2025 can be described as "divided." On one hand, investors are cautious, with some institutions publicly questioning "bubble risks" due to insufficient technology maturity and excessively long commercialization return periods. For example, Zhu Xiaohu exited XinghaiTu and Songyan Power in batches, stating that "the main customers are only research institutions, and the commercialization path is vague." On the other hand, there have been continuous large financing records.

According to ITjuzi data, there were 286 financing events in the domestic robotics field's primary market in the first half of the year, an increase of 166 compared to the same period last year, with a year-on-year growth rate of 138%. It is estimated that the total financing amount for robotics startups in the first half of the year reached RMB 27 billion.

Let's first look at Zhiyuan Robotics, which ignited public interest. It plans to acquire control of listed STAR Market company SWANCOR through agreement transfers and tender offers, acquiring at least 63.62% of the other party's shares. Since the announcement, SWANCOR has seen 11 consecutive trading days of rising limits.

Although relevant executives of Zhiyuan Robotics denied that this constituted a reorganization listing or backdoor listing, the fact that a startup founded only two years ago could initiate a controlling acquisition of a listed company so quickly is striking. This rare "reverse takeover" operation reflects profound changes in the capital structure of AI and robotics startup projects.

Zhiyuan Robotics currently has three major robot families: Yuanzheng, Jingling, and Lingxi, with products covering various commercial scenarios such as interactive services, industrial intelligence, commercial logistics, and scientific research education. It is expected that shipments will reach several thousand units in 2025. Its shareholder list includes industrial giants such as Tencent, JD.com, BYD, SAIC, BAIC, and TCL. It also recently received strategic investment from CP Group's CP Robotics. Strong capital support has not only driven its valuation upwards but also given it the opportunity to "dominate" resource integration.

Another protagonist in the financing boom is the equally young Galaxy Robotics. Founded in 2023, the company has completed a new round of financing exceeding RMB 1 billion, setting a record for the largest single financing in the embodied intelligence sector this year. Its founder, Wang He, born in 1992, graduated from Tsinghua University in 2014 and obtained a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2021. He subsequently joined Peking University as an assistant professor and doctoral supervisor at the Frontier Computing Research Center, focusing on embodied intelligence research.

In June 2024, Galaxy Robotics released its first embodied large model robot, Galbot G1, which is also its only robot product. G1 adopts a "dual arms + foldable body + wheeled chassis" body structure, not a bipedal form, and places more emphasis on upper limb manipulation capabilities. Since its establishment, the company has developed multiple embodied intelligence models, including the end-to-end embodied grasping basic large model GraspVLA, the end-to-end embodied large model GroceryVLA, and the product-level end-to-end navigation large model TrackVLA.

Since Unitree Robotics gained popularity with its "yangko dance" during the Year of the Snake Spring Festival Gala, although the entire embodied intelligence market has continued to heat up, the excessively long commercialization return period has always been a critical obstacle facing the industry, causing doubts among investors and the market. Zhiyuan's aggressive capital operations, Galaxy's record-breaking financing, and hundreds of financing events undoubtedly demonstrate the firm optimism of some capital towards the sector's future. However, whether these substantial investments will ultimately yield adequate returns remains uncertain.

Part 2: Delivery

Not Fully Cooled Down, but Entering a Period of Value Reassessment

Currently, the competition focus in the humanoid robot industry is more concentrated on companies' delivery capabilities. The landing of head enterprises' orders, accelerated mass production, price reductions, and scenario expansion all mark that the industry is moving from conceptual disputes towards a critical stage of value reassessment.

On July 11, China Mobile invested RMB 124 million to purchase robot products from Zhiyuan Robotics and Unitree Robotics, becoming the largest known single humanoid robot order in China to date.

Additionally, Zhiyuan Robotics has announced a total of 8 winning bid projects since December 2024. Its new agile robot, Lingxi X2, started recruiting partners in May this year. The price range of this series of products is between hundreds of thousands to three to four hundred thousand yuan, and it is expected to achieve large-scale shipments in the second half of this year. Zhiyuan will adjust production capacity and output based on market feedback, aiming to achieve delivery of several thousand units by the end of 2026.

Unitree Robotics, established earlier, has also made earlier progress in commercialization. Since 2025, the company's winning bid projects have mainly focused on fields such as education and research and factory inspections. In March alone, it won over a dozen projects, with application scenarios including universities, science and technology venues, intelligent inspections, and more. Procurement parties include the School of Artificial Intelligence at Sun Yat-sen University, Shenzhen University, the permanent exhibition hall of the Weihai Science and Technology Museum, Shanghai Lingang Water Supply and Drainage Development Co., Ltd., the humanoid robot laboratory system platform at Qilu University of Technology, China Mobile (Hangzhou) Information Technology Co., Ltd., the College of Mechanical and Electronic Engineering at Northwest A&F University, and the general-purpose humanoid robot training platform at Tongji University.

After the CES 2025 exhibition, Unitree also received multiple overseas orders, including a procurement agreement with a US warehousing and logistics company for hundreds of quadruped robots for warehouse inspections.

In 2025, UBTech also made progress in product orders and commercialization for humanoid robots. In the middle of this month, UBTech's TianGongWalker humanoid robot received orders for hundreds of units, with over 300 units expected to be delivered in 2025. Among its main products, the industrial humanoid robots WalkerS1 and WalkerS2 and the commercial humanoid robot WalkerC, the WalkerS series has become the humanoid robot that has entered the most automaker training facilities globally. According to internal sources at UBTech, it has received intent orders for over 500 units from automakers. Although the price per unit has not been disclosed, the high-performance version is expected to be priced at up to RMB 500,000 in the high-end market.

From a market size perspective, the humanoid robot industry is a potential multi-billion-yuan sector. The GGII (Gaogong Robotics Industry Research Institute) predicts in the "2025 Humanoid Robot Industry Development Blue Book" that the global humanoid robot market size will be RMB 6.339 billion in 2025 and will exceed RMB 64 billion by 2030.

In the domestic market, analysts at the China Commerce Industry Research Institute predict that the scale of China's humanoid robot industry will reach RMB 5.3 billion by 2025. The "2025 Humanoid Robot and Embodied Intelligence Industry Research Report" shows that the market size of China's humanoid robots is expected to reach RMB 8.239 billion in 2025, accounting for about 50% of the global market.

As head enterprises accelerate mass production, price competition in the humanoid robot industry has begun to emerge. It is reported that Tesla has clearly set its target cost at US$10,000, and domestic enterprises' product prices have also fluctuated. The Unitree G1 humanoid robot, which was priced at RMB 99,000, can now be purchased for only RMB 50,000-60,000 on a second-hand platform. In the future, humanoid robots may also experience price wars, similar to what is happening now in the new energy vehicle industry.

At the same time, the industry is actively exploring emerging scenarios. For example, Galaxy Robotics has deployed robots in unmanned pharmacies, Unitree's quadruped robots have entered 30 university laboratories, and application scenarios such as logistics and power inspections in industrial settings are gradually verifying feasibility.

Currently, the industry is experiencing a painful stage of transition from bubble disputes to value reassessment, with "delivery" becoming the core and key factor in competition among embodied intelligence enterprises.

Part 3: Life-or-Death Situation

Breaking the Mismatch Between Technology and Market Demand

Although humanoid robot orders seem to be blooming everywhere, about half of the current orders are concentrated in non-core application scenarios such as performance displays and data collection.

The difficulty in landing humanoid robots lies in the disconnect between technological ideals and commercial realities. The contradictions focus on dimensions such as technological bottlenecks, scenario mismatches, mass production dilemmas, and lack of standardization.

First, there are still few companies in China that make the "brain" of humanoid robots. The error rate of language models in handling cross-modal tasks is still high, and due to the lack of physical interaction training data, execution deviations often occur, such as misinterpreting "get a glass of water" as "pour the kettle." The control delay issue of the "cerebellum" is also prominent, with bipedal robots taking much longer to navigate stepped terrain than humans. For example, the lack of reliability in motion control previously caused widespread discussion when robots fell frequently during the Beijing Marathon. Additionally, there are disadvantages in the hardware cost structure, as dexterous hands still rely heavily on imports.

"The market's demand for humanoid robots has always existed, but because the product's technical capabilities have not met the expectations of the public, there has been an imbalance or mismatch between the market and demand. This is the core reason for the overall market cooling down," Li Jun, the technical director of a leading robotics company, told Zhengjian TrueView.

Secondly, the issue of scenario mismatches also restricts development. Different scenarios have significantly different demands for robots. Nursing homes require a "humanoid appearance" to reduce alienation, while industrial scenarios prioritize "function first." At the same time, due to fragmented needs and relatively cost-sensitive consumers, the penetration cycle of humanoid robots in household scenarios will be longer.

Thirdly, the humanoid robot industry still faces mass production dilemmas. In 2025, Tesla plans to produce 10,000 units of Optimus, while the average delivery volume of domestic enterprises is less than 100 units, and the delivered products are mainly used for data collection. "In terms of price, humanoid robots cost hundreds of thousands of yuan each, making companies and consumers hesitant to purchase," Li Jun pointed out the constraint of high prices on market expansion.

Unitree Robotics, renowned for its robust cost control in the industry, has priced its Unitree G1 standard version at an affordable RMB 99,000, with the EDU version further enabling secondary development (including integration of the NVIDIA Jetson Orin module). This pricing strategy offers a significant cost-effectiveness advantage over competitor products, which typically retail for around RMB 500,000. Evidently, Unitree's cost control prowess stands as a cornerstone of its success.

However, the absence of standardization poses numerous challenges. Beyond the pressing need to address joint compatibility issues in service/industrial robots, there exist legal hurdles as well. In instances of negative occurrences, such as injury or violence, during the deployment of humanoid robots, there is currently a dearth of clear-cut laws, regulations, and safety standards for oversight.

A tug-of-war is now underway between the frenzy of capital investment and the realities of worldly challenges. While policies and industrial capital continue to propel the sector, anticipated to lead to the mass production of thousands of humanoid robots in industrial settings within the next 2-3 years, enterprises must ultimately confront technological hurdles head-on in the long term.

The current state of the embodied intelligence sector mirrors the fervor surrounding new energy vehicle manufacturing years ago. Since embodied intelligence garnered widespread market attention in the latter half of 2023, two years have passed, witnessing a shift in capital allocation from "blind pursuit" to "rational screening." The market, in turn, has gradually transitioned from a "concept fever" to a focus on "scenario fever."

The crux of competition among enterprises in the upcoming phase hinges on who can effectively establish a stronghold in segmented scenarios and who can efficiently reduce costs, enhance efficiency, or even generate revenue for customers. Enterprises possessing self-sustaining capabilities inherently possess the resilience to navigate market fluctuations with confidence.