Yale PhD Team's Embodied Startup Bets on Psychological Coach Robots, Avoiding General Humanoids
Shenzhen Fanbot Robotics announced on Sept. 22 a ten-million-yuan angel round; investors were not disclosed.
Incubated by Yale University's innovation center and based in Shenzhen's AI Moli Camp in Nanshan District, the startup is avoiding the crowded general-purpose humanoid track, focusing instead on psychological coach robots for students.
The funds will go toward iterating its vertical psychological large model and developing multiple robot form factors, extending products from campuses to homes and communities.
Fanbot Robotics was founded in June 2025, focusing on the intersection of AI, robotics and mental health. It makes AI companion robots and a proprietary multimodal MoodLLM psychological large model with 100 billion parameters.
Its founding team combines finance, top-tier AI engineering and neuropsychological research. Founder and CEO Fan Zheng holds an MBA from Johns Hopkins University and previously worked at Man Group, the world's largest listed hedge fund; he started his first company in Boston in 2015.
Co-founder and chief AI scientist Zhang Shiyang holds a PhD in computer science from Yale and has published nearly ten papers at ICLR, ICML and NeurIPS, leading full-process development of several foundation models.
Co-founder Zhang Xihan holds a PhD in neuroscience from Yale's psychology department and a master's in computational biology from Harvard, with long-term research on anxiety and depression mechanisms published in Nature Neuroscience and Neuron.
On products, Fanbot has built a matrix of 'proprietary multimodal AI psychological vertical model + multimodal AI agents + AI companion robots,' with hardware spanning humanoid robots, robot dogs and portable pet robots.
Unlike phone-based pure-software chat products that lack embodied presence, or consumer robots that merely repackage general large models, Fanbot's hardware serves as a multi-dimensional physiological data collection gateway. It incorporates facial expressions, vocal prosody and body posture—signals beyond text—into emotional judgment, addressing the industry's common failure to capture somatic emotional cues in text-only dialogue.
In its business model, hardware acts as a traffic and data entry point, with sustained commercial loops later built through campus SaaS subscriptions, customized solutions and large-model licensing.
The track choice responds to huge and urgent demand. According to 2025 Lancet data, the overall prevalence of mental illness among Chinese children and adolescents is 19.3%, and the total prevalence of mental disorders among students aged 6 to 16 is 17.5%.
The 2025 China Mental Health Blue Book further shows depression detection rates of 40% among high school students, 30% among middle school students and 10% among primary school students.
Policy signals are also accelerating. The Ministry of Education's 'Ten Measures to Further Strengthen Mental Health Work for Primary and Secondary School Students' calls for using AI and other modern information technologies to empower student mental health work, supporting local exploration of products such as 'AI psychological assistants' and 'smart decompression rooms.'
Meanwhile, the Interim Measures for the Administration of Anthropomorphic AI Interaction Services, jointly issued by the Cyberspace Administration of China and four other departments, took effect on July 15, 2026. It sets strict rules for anthropomorphic AI interaction, including banning virtual companion and other virtual intimate relationship services for minors.
This means psychological robot products must strike a precise balance between safety boundaries and intervention effectiveness: they cannot overstep to replace professional psychotherapy, yet must truly deliver the preventive value of routine emotional support.
In market size, China's intelligent psychological counseling robot market reached about RMB 5 billion in 2025 and is expected to exceed RMB 10 billion in 2026, with a compound annual growth rate above 30%.
Globally, the AI mental health services track is also heating up. In May 2026, The Path, an AI psychotherapy platform co-founded by renowned coach Tony Robbins, completed a $14.3 million seed round led by Prime Movers Lab.
However, The Path focuses on pure-software conversational AI therapy, while Fanbot enters student scenarios with an 'integrated software-hardware, embodied interaction' route; its differentiation still has room for exploration.