Tianlan Shao
邵天兰
Tianlan Shao is the founder and chairman/CEO of Mech-Mind Robotics, the "robot brain" company that listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in late August 2026, where he said the combination of AI and robotics is "one of the biggest opportunities of this era." He graduated from Tsinghua's School of Software in 2012, earned a master's in robotics from TU Munich in 2015 with top honors, worked at a German robotics firm, and returned to China in October 2016 to found Mech-Mind — building AI-driven industrial robots centered on 3D vision and deep learning for logistics and manufacturing. Six years in, per Source Code Capital's account, he had grown it into one of the largest and fastest-scaling AI + industrial robotics companies globally while still calling himself "the company's No. 1 customer service rep." Qiming's Alex Zhou, who backed the company in 2019, credits Shao with sharp technical insight plus a rare "plain commercial discipline" — insisting on standardized product lines and multilevel delivery ecosystems rather than burning capital for market share, which he says underpinned the company's strong financials at IPO. In January 2026 he also appeared at Davos, arguing physical AI matters more than humanoids and that large-scale deployment in well-bounded manufacturing and logistics tasks is now essentially mature.
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Coverage
Qiming Venture Partners' Alex Zhou: Robotics and Embodied AI Will Rise Over the Next Decade, with Quality Startup Opportunities Emerging Across the Supply Chain
In the robotics and Embodied Artificial Intelligence space, Qiming Venture Partners continues to closely track industry evolution and seize investment opportunities in line with market trends, but it does not simply chase hot topics.
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Qiming Venture Partners was the sole investor in Mech-Mind's Series A+ round in early 2019, and has been a partner to the company ever since.
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Join us in celebrating milestone moments for Qiming Venture Partners' portfolio companies
MaHui Entrepreneurs · 2025 WRC Series | On Embodied Artificial Intelligence, What Do Three Founders Have to Say?
Galaxy Universal founder & CTO He Wang, Mech-Mind founder & CEO Tianlan Shao, and Stande founder & CEO Yongkun Wang shared their latest explorations in robotics, as well as their observations and reflections on China's robotics industry, in keynote speeches.
ROBOT+AI Summit Series | Mech-Mind: The People Giving Machines "Eyes"
How does an intelligent brain graft onto a mechanical body?
MaHui Exchange | Foxconn and Source Code Capital Explore Smart Manufacturing Together to Accelerate Digital Transformation
Focusing on "Digital Transformation" to Build a Smart Manufacturing Ecosystem
Source Code Capital | Be the "Number One" Customer Service Rep, Focus on Real Needs
MaKe | Belief Leap Livestream Returns Tonight at 8 PM
Code Moment | Belief Leap Livestream: Six Years Into Entrepreneurship, I'm Still the Company's No. 1 Customer Service Rep
MaHui Entrepreneurs | Mid-Autumn Moon, Shared Across the Four Seas
MaHui Entrepreneurs | Exploring the Known Unknowns and the Unknown Unknowns
MaHui Entrepreneurs | Webb Telescope's First Images Released: Seeing the Unknown
Infinitely outward, and at the same time infinitely inward.
MaHui Founder | Mech-Mind's Tianlan Shao: Some of My "Grassroots" Experience
MaHui | Nearly 40 MaHui Members Named to 36Kr's X·36Under36 S-Class Young Entrepreneurs List
Source Code Capital closes fifth RMB fund, raising over 7 billion yuan to back tech innovation and SMEs
Invest early, invest small, invest in tech
Mech-Mind Robotics announced the completion of a nearly RMB 100 million Series B+ funding round, jointly invested by Source Code Capital and HSG.
Focused on the R&D of AI-enabled intelligent solutions for industrial robots, it has become one of the fastest-growing and largest startups globally in the AI + industrial robotics space.
















