Astribot Raises Another RMB 1 Billion at a RMB 15 Billion Valuation — Its Fourth Round in Six Months — to Scale Rope-Driven Humanoids

Astribot, the Shenzhen-based embodied AI company behind a line of rope-driven humanoid robots, announced that it has completed a new financing round of about RMB 1 billion, lifting its valuation to RMB 15 billion — roughly $140 million raised at an implied $2.1 billion valuation. The round was led by Toukong Donghai, the investment platform under Shenzhen state-owned Shenzhen Investment Holdings, with Hongtai Fund, the Ninghai Xingtaihe fund managed by Guanghua Yangguang, and Shanheng Capital participating, and existing investor Xianmu adding again.

The pace is the story. Since March 2026 the company has closed an A+, an A++, a B round and now this one — its fourth round in roughly six months. The B series, completed in June, brought in more than RMB 1 billion and pushed the valuation past RMB 10 billion for the first time. Earlier backers include Yunqi Capital, Matrix Partners China, Jinqiu Fund, Ant Group and Guoke Investment.

Astribot's pitch is a full stack rather than a single robot. The company builds its own Lumo embodied foundation model for environment understanding, reasoning and action generation, its own Astribot OS to expose those capabilities to users and developers, and its own tendon-driven — what it calls rope-driven — robot bodies for execution. Data collected from deployments feeds back into the next model iteration, which is the loop investors are paying for.

On the model side, Astribot released Lumo-2 in July 2026, aimed at home scenarios, and says it ranked first among evaluated models on more than 22 real-robot complex evaluations spanning temporal reasoning, physical understanding and manipulation complexity. Those are the company's own figures, not independently verified. It has also published SmoothRL, an online reinforcement learning framework intended to let robots keep improving behavior during task execution instead of waiting for the next offline training run, and hired Sun Peng in September to lead reinforcement learning work.

Commercially, the company says it has achieved mass production of its rope-driven AI robots: the S flagship series opened thousand-unit-scale orders in September 2025, the newer T1 humanoid began shipping in June 2026 at a price in the RMB 90,000 range, and combined S and T series capacity has reached the 10,000-unit level. Disclosed customers include amusement-ride maker Jinma, software firm ThunderSoft, robotics platform company SEER, state broadcaster CCTV and JD.com.

Astribot is riding the same wave lifting the rest of China's embodied AI sector, where robotics and physical AI companies have raised roughly $48 billion this year by PitchBook's count and humanoid makers are being urged by regulators to convert hype into real orders. The valuation multiple — RMB 15 billion for a company whose B round priced at RMB 10 billion four months ago — shows how fast capital is re-rating the sector.

What separates the survivors from the video-demo companies, as Chinese financial media have spent the past month arguing, is verifiable delivery: robots actually running in customer sites, at prices that make economic sense. Astribot's RMB 90,000-class T1 and a claimed 10,000-unit capacity put it closer to that bar than most. The next test is not another round — it is whether those units stay busy after the ribbon-cutting.