Yifei Automation

Yifei Automation (翼菲自动化) is a Chinese industrial robotics company founded in 2012 by Zhang Sai, a Tsinghua University graduate who started the business in an 8-square-meter office in Jinan with a three-person team . The company carved out an early niche in parallel robots—a less crowded segment where domestic competition was scarce—rather than competing directly in the saturated six-axis serial robot market dominated by established players . By 2018, Yifei had become the top domestic shipper of parallel robots by volume .

FreeS Fund (峰瑞资本) first invested in 2016 when the company was still focused on non-standard, customized automation solutions built around parallel robot hardware . The firm continued backing Yifei through subsequent rounds, including a Series D in early 2022 led by Primavera Capital, with FreeS among the returning shareholders .

In 2023, Yifei reorganized: it spun out its industrial robot arm into a subsidiary called "Yifei Robotics," upgraded the parent to "Yifei Technology" (翼菲科技), and began systematically shifting from project-based custom integration to standardized, productized robot sales—the same model sold identically whether to a phone factory or a bakery . That same year, Zhang Sai committed the company to embodied intelligence R&D, targeting applications like flexible assembly and soft-material handling that conventional industrial robots struggle with, while explicitly avoiding "reinventing the wheel" for tasks already well-served by existing automation .

Yifei Technology listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in May 2026 under ticker 06871.HK, becoming the first light-industry full-category robotics company to go public under HKEX's Chapter 18C regime for specialist technology firms . The IPO attracted record retail demand—over 14,855 times oversubscribed, drawing more than 330,000 individual investors .