Hangzhou Little Giant raises another 1 billion yuan! Meituan joins the luxurious shareholder group

The AI ​​trend that swept the world in 2023 has heated up the concept of embodied intelligence.

Humanoid robots, which are regarded as the ideal carriers of embodied intelligence , have naturally become the biggest vested interests, attracting countless giants and capital to buy shares and bet on the next stop of artificial intelligence.

At the end of 2023, UBTECH, which had been holding out for ten years, rang the bell in China and successfully landed on the "first humanoid stock"; and a post-90s doctoral supervisor at Tsinghua University, who had been in business for half a year, received over 100 million yuan in financing. 1X, which was personally selected by OpenAI, raised $100 million with a 13-page PPT; Figure AI, which aimed at Tesla, joined hands with BMW and won up to $500 million in financing...

With huge amounts of financing easily reaching hundreds of millions, one can't help but sigh that humanoid robots have taken advantage of the momentum and their ability to attract attention and money have far surpassed the players in other segments.

At the beginning of 2024, a four-legged robot company in Hangzhou made a good start, and invested 1 billion at once!

Yushu completed nearly 1 billion yuan in B2 round financing

In early February, Hangzhou Yushu Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Yushu Technology") underwent industrial and commercial changes, adding several new shareholders, including Shenzhen Innovation Capital Investment Co., Ltd., Meituan's Hanhai Information Technology (Shanghai) Co., Ltd., and CITIC Securities' Jinshi Growth Equity Investment (Hangzhou) Partnership. The company's registered capital increased from 1.935 million yuan to 2.399 million yuan.

On February 22, Yushu Technology’s official WeChat public account published a message, officially stamping the official announcement of this financing.

It is reported that Yushu had completed its B2 round of financing before the Spring Festival in 2024, with a financing amount of nearly 1 billion yuan. The financing parties include Meituan, Jinshi Investment, Source Code Capital, and old shareholders Shenzhen Capital Group, China Internet Investment, Rongyi, Dunhong and Mida Junshi followed suit. The funds raised will be mainly used for product research and development, business expansion and team building.

Since leading the investment in Galaxy General last year, Meituan’s investment in Yushu is both reasonable and expected.

Meituan founder Wang Xing has repeatedly stated that Meituan is a technology-driven company. Public data shows that Meituan's R&D expenditure in 2022 increased by 24% year-on-year to 20.7 billion yuan. Its Robotics Research Institute was officially established in July 2022, and a robot subsidiary was established in 2023... In the field of robots, Meituan has been planning for a long time and has made frequent moves.

Currently, leading Internet companies such as Meituan have taken robots as a strategic direction and actively deployed them. As the industrial chain continues to mature, the robot market space and application scenarios will continue to open up, ushering in a critical period of growth and momentum. Such market expectations will also attract more capital to enter the market, forming a virtuous circle.

Leading the four legs, looking at the human form

Yushu Technology was founded in 2016 and has already made a name for itself in the field of quadruped robots.

The Go series of quadruped robots not only appeared on CCTV's Spring Festival Gala and attracted a lot of attention, but also appeared in the 2022 Winter Olympics, the 2023 Asian Games and the Asian Para Games, and were able to "work" in events such as picking up discus and guiding the blind. They successfully gave the world a little "China shock".

Yushu's quadruped robot Go integrates independent core technologies and has fully autonomous and controllable core components such as motors, reducers, and controllers. It also reaches the industry-leading level in control algorithms and realizes flexible movement in complex environments.

It is also the complete set of mature technical systems that enables Yushu to be the first to achieve a certain scale of commercialization in the field of quadruped robots. It is revealed that Yushu's quadruped robots, which are priced at 10,000 yuan, have been sold well in dozens of countries around the world, accounting for more than 60% of global shipments, and the results are very impressive.

Today, Yushu Technology, which has established a firm foothold in the field of quadruped robots, is actively expanding into a new battlefield - general humanoid robots.

Domestic general-purpose humanoid robot "first run"

In the second half of last year, Yushu launched its first full-size universal humanoid robot H1. Once released, the product quickly became popular both at home and abroad, and even Nvidia's technical leaders shouted: "I want it!"

H1 is 1.8 meters tall and weighs 47 kilograms. It has 5 degrees of freedom for each leg and 19 degrees of freedom for the whole body. Its bionic design simulates human skeletal muscles and is equipped with 3D lidar and depth camera. It is fully comparable to Tesla's Optimus and can even run ahead of it.

Power is always a challenge for robots to achieve human-like agility. According to official data, the maximum torque of the H1's knee motor is 360N·m, the hip joint is 220N·m, and the ankle joint is 45N·m. With the agile power brought by the powerful "big" motor, H1 can achieve a walking speed comparable to that of an ordinary adult, and the potential running speed can even reach 5m/s.

H1 was very stable and smooth when performing difficult actions such as dodging and jumping, which was amazing for a robot that was only "half a year old" at the time, and fully demonstrated Yushu's technical maturity in high-dynamic motion control.

At the 2024 "Technology Spring Festival Gala" CES, compared to most humanoid robots that are still in the concept and prototype stages, the H1, which can achieve automatic operation, is really a "win"!

Last words

The emergence of H1 and other general humanoid robots indicates that humanoid will become the mainstream form of future intelligent robots .

Compared with robots of other forms, deeply anthropomorphic humanoid robots can adapt more naturally to human interaction methods and work scenarios. This advantage also makes them more acceptable in the commercialization process.

More importantly, humanoid robots represent the possibility of robotics moving toward higher-order intelligence.

The difficulty in developing humanoid robots lies in achieving true autonomous movement, rather than controlling them through "recording and then replaying". It requires a higher level of intelligence in perception, decision-making, control, etc., so that robots have the ability to make active choices in complex environments.

It can be foreseen that the popularization of humanoid robots will drive the rapid development of the entire industry. From core components to algorithm systems, they will continue to be improved around enhancing the intelligence level of robots.

However, humanoid robot technology currently faces many challenges, and there is still a long way to go before it can completely replace humans in various complex tasks. The technical routes of major companies and research institutes also have different focuses, one is the "experimental school" represented by Boston Dynamics, and the other is the "practical school" represented by Tesla.

The core difference between the two lineups lies in the trade-off between technology and commercialization timetable.

The "experimentalists" pay more attention to the integrity and comprehensiveness of the intelligence level of humanoid robots; while the "pragmatists" hope that robots can be commercialized in local application scenarios as soon as possible, and put the robots to use first. Even if they can only replace a small proportion of human work, they can obtain feedback and accumulate experience through market-oriented applications, thereby iterating and optimizing and expanding to more scenarios.

For Yushu Technology, its product roadmap seems to be more in line with the "pragmatic" concept. While it has been the champion in mass production and shipment of quadruped robots for many consecutive years, it is also actively expanding its product lines such as robotic arms and general humanoid robots.

In fact, in the field of humanoid robots, no company has yet achieved true commercial mass production. The market for general humanoid robots that are truly oriented to C-end users can be said to be a brand new blue ocean.

Whether it is consumer or industrial, Yushu Technology has successfully opened up commercial applications in segmented scenarios. This strategic layout from point to surface is also the key to its standing out at the cusp of the trend and becoming a new representative of technological innovation and industrialization system. This round of financing will further inject momentum into its development.

Although there are technical difficulties ahead and powerful enemies chasing behind, the current trend is favorable and both humanoid robots and Yushu Technology have a very promising future.

We are waiting for the next good news.