Picture the deployments the order book implies: a humanoid robot bends at the waist on an auto-parts line, picks a component, and places it within a tolerance most arms cannot hold. Across town, another unit sorts parcels at a logistics hub, scanning each one before it moves. Neither scene is a trade-show clip anymore — both are line items on a customer's purchase order, as the company describes them.
China's humanoid-robot sector has spent three years dazzling crowds with sprints and backflips. The harder question is who actually pays. One Beijing company now has an answer in writing.
Key takeaways
- Robot Era (星动纪元), a Beijing embodied-AI (具身智能) startup, closed a Series A+ round of nearly RMB 1 billion (≈ US$140M / HK$1.1B), led by Geely Capital (吉利资本).
- Its disclosed 2025 order book exceeded RMB 500 million (≈ US$70M / HK$545M), with the largest single logistics order near RMB 50 million (≈ US$7M / HK$54M).
- The company pairs a full-size bipedal body, Star1, with an end-to-end vision-language-action model, ERA-42, that also drives a five-finger dexterous hand.
- Overseas sales already make up about half of revenue, a rare split for a Chinese humanoid maker.
From lab demo to signed orders
Robot Era's November 2025 financing was notable less for its size than for who wrote the checks. Geely Capital led the round, with BAIC Industrial Investment (北汽产投) taking a strategic stake and two Beijing government-backed funds — the Beijing AI Industry Investment Fund and the Beijing Robotics Industry Development Fund — joining. For Geely, it was a rare bet outside its earlier investment in Unitree; for Robot Era, it was the first time an automaker's captive capital came on the cap table.
The money follows traction. According to disclosures carried by multiple Chinese financial outlets, Robot Era's total order value in 2025 crossed RMB 500 million (≈ US$70M / HK$545M). The biggest single logistics contract ran close to RMB 50 million (≈ US$7M / HK$54M) and has been packaged into a standardized solution. Co-founder Xi Yue (席悦) told reporters that much of the order flow comes from technology, logistics, and reception-guidance service buyers, with some deals structured as proofs-of-concept rather than outright purchases.
Two products, one brain
Robot Era sells what it calls a full-stack approach: a "body" and a "brain" developed in-house, with the company claiming more than 95% self-development of its hardware.
The body is Star1, a full-size bipedal humanoid unveiled in August 2024. The published specification sheet reads like a wish list for locomotion researchers: 171 cm tall, 63 kg, 55 degrees of freedom, a peak outdoor running speed of 3.6 m/s, joint torque up to 400 Nm, and 275 TOPS of onboard compute. Its XHAND1 dexterous hand carries 12 active degrees of freedom per hand and uses a fully direct-drive design meant to play well with reinforcement learning.
The brain is ERA-42, an end-to-end vision-language-action (VLA) model the company says can command the whole body and the five-finger hand at once. In logistics, the setup sorts and scans medicine, daily chemicals, and parcels. In manufacturing, the target tasks are part grasping, high-precision assembly, and quality checks. In commercial service, the robots handle store cleaning, item delivery, and guided tours. Robot Era claims some of these scenarios already reach around 70% of human efficiency.
A newer platform, the Star L7, was reported by Securities Times to have taken a high-jump title at the first World Humanoid Robot Games and set a long-jump record — a signal the company is also pushing raw athletic performance, though such sports metrics matter more for branding than for the factory floor.
Why car money is flowing in
The strategic investors are not accidental. Humanoid builders need proving grounds with repetitive, physically demanding, and increasingly automated workflows — exactly what automotive and logistics campuses provide. Robot Era lists partnerships with Geely, Renault, SF Express (顺丰), TCL, Haier, Lenovo, and Century Golden Resources. Geely and BAIC bring both capital and potentially captive demand: assembly lines, warehouses, and showrooms where a general-purpose body could replace purpose-built automation.
The overseas angle is the less-common story. Robot Era says roughly half its business is outside China, spanning North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Japan and South Korea, and that nine of the world's ten largest technology companies by market cap are customers — a claim it frames around developer and research sales rather than factory rollouts.
What the numbers really say
A near-RMB 1B raise and a half-billion order book do not make Robot Era profitable, and the company has not disclosed margins or a path to them. But they do mark a shift in how China's humanoid race is scored. Two years ago, the metric was running speed. Today, the metric investors cite is signed, deliverable demand — and Robot Era is one of the first to publish a number that large.
According to Li An, chief scientist at BrainNet (脑机网), the strategic question for humanoid makers is no longer whether the hardware can move, but whether a single general-purpose body can earn its keep across enough paid tasks to justify the bill of materials.
Li An's comments reflect his own views and do not represent NeuroAI's editorial position or an endorsement by BrainNet (脑机网).
Honest limitations
This article relies on company disclosures and Chinese financial-media reporting; Robot Era is privately held and does not publish audited financials, so order and revenue figures cannot be independently confirmed. The "nine of ten largest tech companies" and "70% human efficiency" claims are company statements, not third-party measurements. Overseas "customer" relationships may include research licenses rather than deployment contracts. Sports-record claims come from a single trade-press report and were not cross-checked against event results. We have not visited a deployment site, and unit economics, safety certification, and after-sales service remain outside this analysis.
What readers can do now
- Track Robot Era's disclosed order backlog quarter by quarter — a shrinking gap between announced orders and delivered units is the real test of commercialization.
- Watch whether Geely or BAIC names Robot Era in a public automation or showroom deployment; strategic capital usually wants a reference site.
- Compare Robot Era's "brain + body" claim against rivals that license a third-party model — vertical integration is easier to claim than to prove at scale.