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On July 15, a reporter from the First Financial Daily learned that Zhuji Power, a general humanoid robot startup, completed its Series A financing, led by China Merchants Venture Capital and Shangqi Capital, a private equity investment platform under SAIC Group, with follow-up investments from old shareholders Frees Capital, Oasis Capital and Vision Capital. The financing amount has not yet been disclosed.

Zhuji Power completed a round of strategic financing in May this year, and Hangzhou Haoyue Enterprise Management Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Hangzhou Haoyue") participated in this round of investment. Industrial and commercial registration information shows that Hangzhou Haoyue holds 18.7797% of Zhuji Power. Hangzhou Haoyue is an investment platform under Alibaba. This is also the first humanoid robot company invested by Alibaba.

Zhuji Power was founded in 2022. Its founder, Zhang Wei, is a tenured professor at the Southern University of Science and Technology. Before founding Zhuji Power, Zhang Wei was a tenured professor at Ohio State University, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and holds a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University. In November 2023, Zhang Li, the former COO of self-driving startup WeRide, joined Zhuji Power as co-founder and COO.

Zhang Wei said that the company's Series A financing has locked in industrial investors from the beginning, because the scene is time, money, and technology. The AI ​​era of general humanoid robots requires technology companies to understand the scene. At the recent AI&Society Artificial Intelligence + Social Development High-end Seminar, Zhang Wei said that embodied intelligence is essentially multimodal AI, and large models are changing the paradigm of robot research and development, from the past in-depth study of a scene to fine-tuning for industries or scenes based on general models. Now we can see the possibility of robots having strong generalization capabilities.

Zhuji Power's products include full-size humanoid robots, four-wheeled and legged robots, bipedal robots and related solutions, and the application scenarios include intelligent manufacturing, industrial inspection, logistics distribution, home services and other fields. Zhuji Power will release the humanoid robot product CL-1 at the end of 2023. In March this year, it released a video of the bipedal robot P1 undergoing field development and testing in Tanglang Mountain, Shenzhen.

Many humanoid robot companies are still in the process of financing. This year, there have been continuous financing events in the humanoid robot track. In January this year, Xingdong Jiyuan announced that it had completed an angel round of financing of over 100 million yuan, led by Lenovo Capital, followed by Jinding Capital and Tsinghua Holdings Tiancheng, and old shareholder Century Golden Resources invested more than the amount. In February, Yushu Technology announced that it had completed a B2 round of financing of 1 billion yuan, and investors included Meituan, Jinshi Investment, Source Code Capital, etc. In April, Kepler Exploration Robotics completed its angel round of financing, and participating institutions included Shangshi Capital and Beiyang Begonia Fund. In June, Galaxy General Robots completed an angel round of financing of 700 million yuan, and investors included Meituan Strategic Investment, BAIC Capital, Qiming Venture Partners, etc.

Among the major Internet companies, Tencent invested in UBTECH Robotics, the "first humanoid robot stock" on the Hong Kong stock market; Baidu's Sanya Baichuan Zhixin Private Equity Investment Fund Partnership (Limited Partnership) invested in Zhiyuan Robotics; Alibaba invested in Zhuji Power; and Meituan invested in Galaxy General Robotics and Yushu Robotics.