Yunqi Capital | Astribot Raises Hundreds of Millions in A++ Round to Accelerate Scale Deployment of Cable-Driven AI Robots

On November 18, Astribot — a Yunqi Capital-backed, cable-driven AI robotics company in which Yunqi led the angel round — announced it had raised hundreds of millions of RMB in an A++ round co-led by CASIC Investment and Ant Group, with participation from Bloom Advance Capital, Times Brilliance (the fund manager for Jinma Amusement's industrial fund), Nanshan Strategic Emerging Industry Investment, and other notable financial and industrial investors. This edition of Yunqi Capital brings you the details.

The new funding will primarily go toward building out its R&D talent pipeline, scaling manufacturing readiness for its cable-driven hardware, deepening multi-scenario solutions, and strengthening industrialization capabilities — all to further advance the engineering and commercial deployment of embodied intelligence.

Yunqi Capital led Astribot's angel round in 2023 and has continued to invest in subsequent rounds. Over the past year, Astribot has raised multiple rounds, each led by Ant Group.

The World's First Mass-Produced Cable-Driven AI Robot

Building a Leading Full-Stack "Hardware-Teleoperation-Model" Platform

Astribot is the company that defined cable-driven AI robotics and the first globally to achieve mass production of such robots. Its products use a unique cable-driven transmission design that mimics the fluid motion and precise force control of human tendons, giving the robots both flexibility and strength. This delivers inherent operational advantages: high human-like expressiveness, high dynamic responsiveness, and high interaction safety — making them especially suited for scenarios requiring complex dexterous manipulation and human-robot collaborative interaction, areas where traditional rigid robots struggle.

From day one, Astribot has pursued a "Design for AI" hardware and software architecture, convinced this is the foundational paradigm for humanoid robots in the AI era: cables act like "tendons," delivering low friction, high fidelity, and continuous force domains. Unlike traditional rigid transmissions, they don't lose critical force-control information to gear backlash, friction, or impact — allowing AI to access continuous mechanical data and learn how humans apply force. The natural elasticity of cables also gives the robot built-in shock absorption, making it "safe for people, safe for itself, and safe for its environment," enabling high-frequency trial-and-error learning and continuous evolution in the real world.

Notably, this June Astribot became the first to solve the mass-production challenge for cable-driven systems, achieving stable multi-month batch deliveries — putting it at least one cycle ahead of 1X, the cable-driven robotics company backed by OpenAI.

Thousands of Units in Production and Delivery

Accelerating Deployment Across Research, Commercial, and Industrial Scenarios

On the commercial front, Astribot has leveraged its "top-tier hardware + leading teleoperation + efficient models" combination to secure thousands of unit orders, with traction across high-value scenarios including research, cultural tourism and entertainment, commercial services, and industrial logistics.

On November 15, the company formed a strategic partnership with Jinma Amusement (300756) to jointly develop a new generation of cultural tourism and entertainment robotics products — representing one of the earliest large-scale orders for humanoid robots in China's cultural tourism, entertainment, and commercial service sectors. The world's first fully autonomous retail service store operated by cable-driven AI robots, "Robot MART," promptly launched in Zhongshan, where an "AI manager" autonomously handles voice-based customer service, order and payment processing, snack preparation, beverage sales, and product retrieval and delivery — a solution replicable to scenic areas, airports, commercial complexes, and districts. On September 2, Astribot also signed with Seer Robotics, the world's largest controller systems manufacturer, securing one of the earliest large-scale industrial orders in China at that time.

First Robot MART Opens in Guangdong: Embodied Intelligence Powers Cultural Tourism and Entertainment

Additionally, Astribot is collaborating with leading customers across multiple industries including ByteDance, Tencent, Baidu, CCTV, and JD.com to accelerate the deployment of cable-driven AI robots in diverse scenarios. The company is also actively building an open research ecosystem, partnering with top domestic and international teams including Physical Intelligence, MIT, Tsinghua University, the University of Hong Kong, and ByteDance AI Lab to produce embodied intelligence research outcomes and accelerate the engineering validation of scientific breakthroughs.

Jie Lai, Founder and CEO of Astribot, said: "The development of embodied intelligence requires the coordinated evolution of AI and robotics, software and hardware. From day one, Astribot has insisted on full-stack self-development, building long-term capabilities across hardware, teleoperation, and models. Large-scale deployment in open scenarios is the true test of a robot's capabilities and engineering systems. In the coming years, we hope to bring AI robots into the real world as stable, reliable nodes of new-quality productive forces."