ROPET

ROPET is a Chinese AI pet robot designed as a desktop companion for urban women aged 25–35, founded and led by Jiabin He, a former ByteDance product designer who left the company to build what he calls a "future pet company" . The product takes a deliberately "weak robot" approach: rather than stuffing a large language model inside to make it talk, ROPET simulates the cognitive level of a 0–3 year old child, communicating through tones and movements to trigger caregiving instincts and sustained emotional attachment .

The company gained sudden prominence at CES 2025 in Las Vegas, where Forbes coverage helped generate a reported 6 billion global impressions and made it one of the show's breakout Chinese hardware stories . That momentum translated into commercial traction: a December 2024 Kickstarter campaign raised $400,000, and a subsequent August 2025 launch on Japanese crowdfunding platform Makuake hit ¥27 million within its first hour . As of late 2025, Ropet had shipped nearly 10,000 units and gone through three to four major hardware iterations .

The device runs entirely offline on a 1 TOPS chip with 30GB of local storage, using on-device models across auditory, visual, touch, and motion sensing dimensions to recognize faces, track emotions, and build memory of individual users—He has been transparent that the underlying technology is relatively simple and that the real moat lies in product execution and scene exploration . Ropet is backed by FreeS Capital (峰瑞资本), among others .