The Shanghai Stock Exchange recently announced that JAKA Robotics Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "JAKA Robotics") will undergo IPO review on the STAR Market on August 8, aiming to raise 700 million yuan.

Established in 2014, JAKA Robotics specializes in the research, development, production, and sales of collaborative robots, along with robot system integration services encompassing integrated equipment and automated production lines.

Collaborative robots, designed to work alongside humans in shared workspaces, offer a distinct advantage over traditional industrial robots, which operate behind safety barriers. These robots are highly safe, easy to deploy and program, and highly flexible, making them ideal for industries such as electronics manufacturing, automotive manufacturing, healthcare, logistics, warehousing, and food processing.

Li Mingyang, the 1981-born founder of JAKA Robotics, observed a significant gap while working at Tetra Pak, a leading equipment and packaging company. Despite the high automation of milk processing lines for high-end gift milk, the packaging of gift boxes relied heavily on manual labor. This inefficiency presented a business opportunity: Could robots replace this final manual step? This realization sparked the idea for JAKA Robotics.

In 2014, Li Mingyang founded JAKA Robotics. After a year and a half of R&D, the company launched a high-speed gift box production line capable of encapsulating 29,000 gift milk cartons per hour, reducing labor requirements from 75 to 110 workers per line to just one.

JAKA Robotics has enjoyed significant support from the capital market since its inception. Before going public, it completed six funding rounds, amassing over 1.4 billion yuan. In November 2022, it secured nearly 1 billion yuan in D-round funding, valuing the company at 3.5 billion yuan pre-investment, making it the largest funded enterprise in the collaborative robot industry.

Today, JAKA Robotics' collaborative robots are sold in over 100 countries and regions globally, and it is the exclusive global supplier of collaborative robots to Toyota Motor Corporation.

Financially, from 2022 to 2024, JAKA Robotics reported operating revenues of 281 million yuan, 350 million yuan, and 400 million yuan, respectively, with net profits of 5.7357 million yuan, -28.5473 million yuan, and 6.228 million yuan, respectively. In the first half of 2025, the company's audited revenue was 174 million yuan, up 4.29% year-on-year, while net profit was -19.9656 million yuan, down 513.55% year-on-year.

Looking ahead, China's collaborative robot industry will focus on enhancing intelligence, human-robot collaboration experience, and robot performance. The integration of AI technology with collaborative robots is accelerating, endowing them with environmental perception, autonomous decision-making, and learning capabilities.

However, despite their popularity in the capital market, collaborative robots currently occupy a relatively small market size.

According to MarketsandMarkets, the global collaborative robot market was valued at 1.9 billion USD in 2024 and is projected to reach 11.8 billion USD by 2030. In China, shipments of six-axis and above collaborative robots totaled 24,500 units in 2023, with sales expected to reach nearly 60,000 units by 2026, amounting to a market size of nearly 6 billion yuan. In comparison, national sales of industrial robots reached 303,000 units in 2022, with a market size exceeding 50 billion yuan.

OFweek Robotics attributes this contrast to several factors: Firstly, collaborative robots prioritize safety and collaboration, often compromising performance, making them suitable only for less demanding tasks as supplements to industrial robots. Secondly, their current high cost is a barrier, as demand primarily comes from cost-sensitive SMEs. Manufacturers must improve torque density and motion control while ensuring safety to broaden their application scenarios and accelerate market growth.