Zhongyi Embodied's Nearly RMB 100M Angel Round: Industrial Capital Acceleration or Bubble?
Zhongyi (Shenzhen) Embodied Technology Co., Ltd. recently disclosed the completion of a nearly RMB 100 million angel round, led by the controlling shareholder of Andar Intelligent, with Shenzhen-Hong Kong Hengtian and Beijing Junrui participating as co-investors. After the seed round brought the company into the multi-hundred-million-yuan valuation tier, this angel round has lifted its post-money valuation by an order of magnitude.
The company's Pre-A round is already being advanced in parallel. Multiple leading investment institutions have expressed clear intentions, and some have begun on-site due diligence. Zhongyi relies on its physical-world OS and edge-side technology foundation, using the TianGongJi full-lifecycle service platform as a link to focus on three scenarios: cultural tourism, buildings, and inspection.
Industrial capital has become the main investor. In the first half of 2026, total financing in China's embodied AI sector exceeded RMB 90 billion, five times the level in the same period of 2025. In earlier years, most investors willing to bet on embodied AI were pure financial VCs, often watching technology prototypes with a gamble-on-the-future mindset. Entering 2026, industrial capital from manufacturing and automation has begun to enter at scale. The surge highlights how quickly capital has rotated from prototype watching to industrial deployment bets.
Andar Intelligent, an industrial shareholder rooted in industrial automation, is investing to lock in technical teams and fill gaps in its own capability map for robot bases and heterogeneous collaboration. The financing market shows two features: many short-established startups receive tens of millions to hundreds of millions of yuan at angel or seed stages; and industrial strategic shareholders continue to rise in investor lists, while pure financial VCs have become more cautious. The trend suggests strategic investors are using minority stakes as windows into robotics platforms.
Unitree Technology's post-IPO capital market performance offers a reality check for the whole industry. As the first intelligent embodied stock on the A-share market, Unitree's opening market cap surged to RMB 444.9 billion before falling rapidly. The company itself still grew revenue, reporting RMB 1.699 billion in 2025 revenue and RMB 278 million in net profit attributable to shareholders, making it one of the few profitable whole-machine makers in the sector. But in the first half of 2026, revenue growth narrowed sharply to 48.5%, and non-GAAP net profit fell 19.34% year on year.
Its prospectus also reveals an unavoidable industry reality: in the first three quarters of 2025, 73.6% of Unitree's humanoid robot revenue came from universities and research/education clients, while only 17.39% came from industrial and consumer normalized commercial scenarios. At the Bund Conference industry forum, several practitioners noted that a considerable number of robot products need deep reconfiguration before they can be deployed in real business environments and adapt to complex on-site conditions.
Valuation anchors are built on imagination. When capital sentiment runs high, early-stage project valuations are easily pushed up, with anchors based on future imagination rather than current orders or revenue data. According to Analysys, more than a dozen companies are now valued at at least USD 2 billion. According to incomplete statistics, as of August this year, at least 28 domestic embodied AI robot companies are advancing or planning listings.
Some observers believe one effect of Unitree's rollercoaster ride may be to shatter the industry's previously imagined valuation anchor. However, if subsequent product deployment falls short of market expectations, valuations will face sharp corrections. Capital can supply ammunition for R&D, but it cannot conjure orders or mature products out of thin air.
Embodied AI as a whole remains in an early stage, with substantial uncertainties in technology, supply chains, and scenarios. Capital injections alone cannot smooth over the industry's objective shortcomings. Zhongyi Embodied's hundred-million-yuan angel round is a microcosm of the current capital wave in embodied AI. Industrial capital provides R&D ammunition to hard-tech startups and shortens technology iteration cycles, but beneath the carnival-like capital boom, risks of duplicate construction and inflated valuations accompany the excitement.