Yifei Automation

Yifei Automation (翼菲自动化) is a Chinese industrial robotics company founded in 2012 by Zhang Sai, a Tsinghua graduate who started the business from an 8-square-meter office in Jinan with a three-person team . The company initially focused on parallel robots—a niche where global competition was thin—rather than the more crowded six-axis serial robot segment dominated by incumbents like Estun and Siasun .

FreeS Fund invested in Yifei in 2016, when the company was pivoting from pure automation integration toward building its own robot bodies . The firm's thesis was that China would follow Japan and Europe's post-war path: rising labor costs and manufacturing upgrades would create conditions for a domestic "Big Four" in industrial robotics . Yifei validated this by grinding through punishing customer trials—most notably landing a trial order from Lens Technology for glass-panel handling that required 2,500 pieces per hour within a 2×2 meter footprint with zero defects, then scaling that to millions in follow-on orders within months .

By 2023, the company restructured: it spun out industrial robots into a subsidiary called "Yifei Robotics" and elevated "Yifei Automation" to a sub-brand under the parent "Yifei Technology" (翼菲科技), with the strategic push toward standardized products rather than custom integration projects . Revenue from robot bodies grew from 10% of total in 2023 to 20% in 2024 . In 2025, Yifei launched embodied-intelligence robotics R&D, targeting flexible assembly and soft-material handling—scenes where traditional industrial robots struggle—noting this was driven by industrial logic rather than hype .

Yifei Technology listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on May 18, 2026 (06871.HK), becoming the first light-industry full-category robotics company to go public under HKEX's Chapter 18C regime for specialist technology companies . The IPO drew 14,855 times oversubscription from retail investors, attracting over 330,000 participants and setting a record for HKEX main-board new issues . FreeS Fund, which had backed Yifei through multiple rounds including the Series A in 2017 alongside Chuxin Capital and others, counted this as its third Hong Kong IPO of 2026 .