Yunqi Capital | Premier Li Qiang Inspects Guangdong, Astribot, X Variable Robotics, and Robotsquare Demo Their Tech

According to Xinwen Lianbo, on January 4, Li Qiang, member of the Politburo Standing Committee and Premier of the State Council, conducted research in Guangdong. He engaged in in-depth exchanges with companies and relevant departments on themes including technological innovation, new quality productive forces, and high-quality development.

During the visit, portfolio companies of Yunqi Capital — Astribot, Variables Robotics, and AI Square, among other Yunqi-backed tech firms — participated as representative enterprises in relevant presentations and briefings. This edition of "Yunqi Capital" brings you the details.

In his remarks, Premier Li Qiang emphasized that this year marks the beginning of the 15th Five-Year Plan period. He expressed hope that enterprises would seize opportunities, pursue bold innovation, strive for greater development, and inject strong momentum into steady economic growth.

Astribot

During the demonstration, Astribot founder Lai Jie introduced to the Premier the company's fully self-developed cable-driven AI robot, the S1: one robot demonstrated fine manipulation capabilities in a biochemical laboratory setting — seamlessly switching between tools including pipettes, droppers, and spatulas, and continuously completing standard experimental steps such as powder sampling, grasping, liquid pouring, and mixing, while maintaining safety, compliance, and stability across different tasks and contact conditions. Another robot leveraged the company's unique cable-drive technology to achieve full-body coordinated motion with high dynamic responsiveness, exhibiting fluid movements and natural posture with highly expressive locomotion.

The demonstrations showcased not only the S1's scalability and general-purpose potential across multiple industry scenarios, but also Astribot's full-stack hardware and software capabilities, earning inquiries and affirmation from Premier Li Qiang.

Astribot is the pioneer that defined cable-driven AI robots, and the industry's first company to mass-produce them, advancing fully independent R&D across "top-tier hardware — leading teleoperation — efficient models." The robot's distinctive cable-drive transmission design mimics human tendon movement and force control, achieving the high dynamic response, high dexterity manipulation, and high interaction safety that traditional rigid robots struggle to balance — making it particularly suited for complex dexterous operations and close human-robot interaction. Currently, the robot has been deployed across research, commercial services, entertainment, and industrial applications, combining AI large models with specific scenarios to accelerate industry adoption and commercialization.

Variables Robotics

Li Qiang visited Shenzhen Robot Valley, where he watched Variables' self-developed general-purpose robot "Quantum No. 1" autonomously complete a long-sequence complex task — making a sachet — based on its self-developed embodied intelligence foundation model. He interacted with the robot and expressed affirmation and encouragement afterward.

During the research, Li Qiang held discussions with founders of three representative tech companies and relevant Shenzhen municipal government officials. Variables Robotics founder and CEO Wang Qian attended, reporting to Premier Li Qiang on his thinking about the embodied intelligence industry's development and Variables' forward-looking explorations.

Variables Robotics founder and CEO Wang Qian stated: "The historical inflection point for embodied intelligence has arrived — 2026 will be the year of qualitative transformation. On the most critical technical paradigm, the industry is already converging on a consensus: embodied intelligence foundation models are not simply AI applications, but are gradually forming a parallel foundation model for the physical world, distinct from the virtual-world foundation models represented by large language models.

Under this judgment, the world is accelerating investment across data, models, and computing power to rapidly advance embodied intelligence. Meanwhile, application scenarios are evolving from simple emotional value to human-robot collaboration and fully autonomous practical value.

Most importantly, we see embodied intelligence as, for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, having the potential to free entire industrial chains from human manual labor — the possibility of fully autonomous machine production of machines — thereby potentially triggering exponential growth in all material production. Fully autonomous robots are no longer science fiction, but the critical variable that will fundamentally reshape future productive forces and production relations. They are new quality productive forces, and the strategic high ground for national development of new quality productive forces going forward."

In its two years since founding, Variables has consistently pursued self-developed, physical-world-native foundation models, building AI-native hardware-software integrated solutions that serve genuinely useful commercial and life scenarios.

On commercialization, it prioritizes useful scenarios and practical robot value, and is currently approaching inflection points from quantitative to qualitative change in elder care, industry, and other sectors. On ecosystem, it leverages AI capabilities to empower hardware design, having driven and helped industry chain partners progress from zero to world-leading development. It also fully supports open-source model ecosystems — the company's released open-source models have achieved leading results in authoritative international public benchmarks, helping academia and industry peers expand numerous downstream applications.

AI Square

Premier Li Qiang watched on-site as AI Square's Aibao robot demonstrated fine manipulation of multiple devices and long-horizon task decomposition based on large models. AI Square founder and CEO Dr. Guo Yandong reported to the Premier on the company's progress in developing domestically produced large models, as well as the real-world applications of its self-produced general-purpose humanoid robots — integrated with large models — in industrial flexible manufacturing, public services, and new retail scenarios.

The Premier showed particular concern for the application and rapid iterative upgrading of technology in practice. AI Square has proposed and continues to practice a Chinese path to embodied intelligence development: "reach for the stars" in training large models, "keep feet on the ground" in building real applications.

Founded in 2023, AI Square is a globally leading general-purpose intelligent robotics enterprise, focused on using a unified robot form factor equipped with embodied large models to learn, transfer, and complete new tasks across different scenarios.

Technologically, AI Square was among the earliest Chinese companies to systematically develop end-to-end VLA (Vision-Language-Action) embodied large models. It self-developed the world-leading GOVLA (General Omni-embodied Vision-Language-Action) model, achieving integrated capabilities from perception and understanding to full-body motion control. Related results have been published at top international conferences and open-sourced, outperforming the international benchmark π0 by 30%.

On product, AI Square's forward-designed Aibao robot series has iterated through three generations in under two years, achieving industrial-grade reliability with 50,000 hours of failure-free operation. Its own production line launched in September 2025 with annual capacity of one thousand units, with plans to scale to ten thousand in 2026.

On application, AI Square's Aibao robots are already operating in high-value scenarios including automotive manufacturing, semiconductors, biomedicine, and public services, generating real commercial orders and forming a "the more they're used, the smarter they get" data flywheel — not remaining at the demonstration stage.

Embodied intelligence and general-purpose robotics are moving from technological breakthroughs toward industrial application, becoming an important vehicle for accelerating the formation of new quality productive forces. Yunqi Capital will continue supporting entrepreneurial teams in refining products and system capabilities in real-world scenarios, driving the long-term release of technological value.