After AI, humanoid robots have gradually become a new industrial hot spot. On this track, Chinese companies are frequently making efforts, but when we look across the ocean, we find that American startups standing on the crest of the wave are also full of “Chinese faces”.
Why is it that the Chinese community is once again playing a key role in the globally recognized fields of embodied intelligence and humanoid robotics?
01
American Humanoid Robotics Startups with Chinese Leadership
In the past two years, more and more American embodied intelligence and humanoid robotics startups have emerged, and many of them have one thing in common: a Chinese core.
1. Dexmate
Dexmate was founded by a team of PhDs from robotics labs at top U.S. universities, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). With dexterous manipulation at its core, the company is focused on building AI-driven dexterous manipulation macromodels that enable robots to use a variety of tools.
Dexmate recently announced Vega, a dual-armed mobile robot that performs a variety of tasks with a high-load robotic arm, dexterous manipulator, and foldable torso and arm design.Vega is equipped with an omni-directional base that allows it to run for more than 10 hours of continuous operation. The robot’s folding design allows it to extend up to 2.2 meters for overhead work, and it can be easily folded into a compact size for easy transportation.
Core Team:
Tao Chen, Founder, CEO, PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, 22 papers in AI and Robotics, including one of the best papers in CORL 2021 and one of the papers in Science Robotics.
Yuzhe Qin, Founder, CTO, Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCSD, 25 papers in AI and robotics, core developer of Sapien emulator, core developer of NVIDIA telematics system, Qualcomm Scholarship recipient.
Wang Chongyang, Founder, COO, MIT M.Sc., INSEAD MBA, has more than 10 years of experience in operation and management in the technology industry, and has founded a robotics company in the US.
2. IntBot
IntBot is dedicated to developing interactive humanoid robots for the retail, healthcare and education sectors, utilizing advanced motion control algorithms and multi-modal interaction technologies to enhance user experience and task efficiency.
At CES 2025, IntBot unveiled its latest product, Nylo, based on the NVIDIA Cosmos platform, which dramatically improves Nylo’s physical AI capabilities through collaboration with NVIDIA in synthetic motion generation and advanced AI training, enabling smoother movements and more advanced decision-making processes.
Core Team:
Lei Yang, Co-Founder and President, B.S./M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Tsinghua University, Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Santa Barbara, Senior Member of IEEE, has published more than 30 top conference papers in the field of system and AI, and owns more than 30 U.S. patents, and has worked for Ant Group, Intel and Intel Labs.
David Yuan, co-founder, B.S. in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and former researcher at Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL).
3. RoboForce
Robotics company RoboForce recently closed $10 million in early-stage funding from investors including Nobel Prize-winning economist Myron Scholes, Gary Rieschel and Carnegie Mellon University. The funds will be used to advance the company’s AI robot, RF-04, from the lab toward real-world applications in solar power plants.
RF-04 is a four-wheel-drive, two-armed robot that stands about a meter and a half tall, with a rigid black metal body image, strong robotic arms and gripping claws, a rotating torso for agile work, no head, 3D visual perception, and AI-powered for large construction sites, manufacturing, energy, and outdoor work.
Core Team:
Leo Ma, Founder, CEO, M.S., Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), former co-founder of Cyngn, a NASDAQ-listed company, and head of Baidu’s U.S. self-driving software.
4. Yondu Yondu
Dedicated to building the future robotic workforce through logistics automation technology, Yondu is currently developing the first flexible, embedded picking automation solution for third-party logistics companies (3PLs) and deploying humanoid robots for the first time.
Core Team:
Michael Chen: Founder, graduated from MIT, has extensive experience in cutting-edge research in robotics and AI, and has helped develop open source bipedal robots for the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).
5. Proception Proception.ai
Specializes in developing advanced humanoid manipulators and robots, first launching a high-precision research manipulator. The company successfully built its first functional prototype in just 4 months, and its unique model of collecting data by human-robot interaction (non-remote-controlled robots) significantly improves the efficiency of data collection and makes AI model training more efficient.
Core Team:
Jay Li: Founder, CEO, former Tesla Optimus manager, graduated from Harbin Institute of Technology with a bachelor’s degree and Stanford University with a master’s degree.
Jianxiang (Jack) Xu: Co-founder, graduated from University of Waterloo with a Master’s degree, former Tesla engineer, former Trexo employee.
6. Under Control Robotics (UCR)
UCR is revolutionizing the construction industry by developing rugged humanoid robots that combine artificial intelligence to provide universal mobility and advanced manipulation capabilities. By automating repetitive and risky tasks, it will increase overall productivity, address labor shortages, and enable faster, safer, and more cost-effective construction projects.
Core Team:
Wei Ding: Co-founder, CEO, Bachelor’s degree from Beihang University, Master’s degree from University of Michigan, worked for Apple Inc.
Wen-Loong (Wenlong) Ma: Co-founder, Engineer and CTO, PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Caltech.
Wenda Wang: Co-founder, M.S. from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), worked as a machine learning engineer at Apple.
02
Humanoid robots, why Chinese are once again the backbone?
1. The “school bully effect”: Chinese figures in top colleges and universities
If you have the opportunity to enter the robotics labs at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) or Stanford, you may find that young Chinese faces often occupy more than half of the lab.
This phenomenon is no accident. For a long time, Chinese students and scholars have been occupying an important position in the field of robotics, artificial intelligence, automation and other “hard science and technology” specialties.
According to public data from the National Science Foundation (NSF), in 2021 alone, Chinese (including Chinese students and Chinese Americans) will account for nearly 35% of doctoral graduates in computer science, robotics and AI, much higher than other ethnic groups.
This trend is not a recent development, but the result of more than a decade of continuous accumulation. It is thanks to this “academic effect” that a large number of Chinese top researchers are getting out of the lab and starting their own businesses, transforming theories and technologies into commercial results.
2. From AI to robotics: obvious advantages in technology migration
Why do Chinese people occupy a leading position in the field of AI, and can quickly migrate to the track of embodied intelligence and humanoid robotics?
It starts with the technology itself. Embodied Intelligence (EI) is essentially a natural extension of AI from the virtual world to the physical world. Whether it’s visual perception, voice interaction, or deep reinforcement learning, the underlying core technologies of these “humanoid robots” are exactly the strengths that Chinese people have accumulated in the AI field over the past decade.
As a simple example, the ability of humanoid robots to accurately recognize and grasp objects cannot be separated from computer vision and motion planning algorithms, and the Chinese team in the field of computer vision has dominated the list of winners of all the top conferences (such as CVPR, ICCV) in the past decade. Therefore, the Chinese engineers behind these robots are technically proficient.
Furthermore, these humanoid robots are able to achieve generalized learning of complex tasks, mainly due to the AI system developed by the team, whose core developers are mostly from the top AI labs in the U.S., and naturally, there is no lack of Chinese elites among them.
One sentence summarizes: “After practicing AI for many years, once stepping into the robotics track, Chinese entrepreneurs are like opening up the two veins.”
3. Utilizing cross-border industrial chain resources: “Made in China” meets “Chinese wisdom”.
In embodied intelligence or robotics entrepreneurship, technology alone is not enough, and what is more critical is whether it can be quickly landed and mass-produced. The natural advantage of the Chinese team is that they are good at utilizing China’s strong manufacturing supply chain and Chinese and American industrial resources.
For example, many U.S. humanoid robotics team’s initial prototype research and development, many of the key components of the rapid iteration of Shenzhen or Suzhou and other places to complete the industrial chain resources. This is not a secret: China has the world’s most complete, fastest and most flexible hardware manufacturing ecosystem, and Chinese teams familiar with the culture and supply chain resources of the two countries are an important bridge for the efficient connection of the industrial chain between the two places.
A few years ago, a joke was circulated: “The secret formula of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship is: find Chinese people to do AI, find Chinese manufacturers to do hardware, find Chinese VC investment, and finally go public on NASDAQ.” This is a joke, but it also reflects the path and mode of the Chinese team is good at.
Write in the end:
On the surface, this competition in the field of humanoid robots seems to have turned into a “Chinese versus Chinese Americans” game. However, if we think about it more deeply, this is not a simple ethnic competition, but a key scene in the process of reshaping the global technology ecosystem.
The reason why Chinese entrepreneurs and research teams can once again stand in the world’s science and technology arena.
