Ant Group’s lead in a 500 million yuan pre-Series A for Zeroth Robotics signals a new phase for China’s companion-robot market: rapidly rising revenues, meaningful order books and an expanding investor roster that includes strategic automotive and entertainment players. The round, reported by MLQ.ai, increases Zeroth’s cumulative financing to about 1 billion yuan and is the latest in Ant’s aggressive push into humanoid robotics since early 2025.
Ant Group’s robotics playbook: scale through portfolio and partnerships
Ant Group’s participation in the Zeroth round is notable because it is the company’s 12th humanoid-related investment since early 2025. Its growing robotics portfolio includes names such as Unitree, Galaxea, Linkerbot, Hypershell and Genrobot AI. The investment strategy appears to combine direct funding with in-house product development: Ant also operates a robotics subsidiary, Ant Lingbo Technology (branded RobbyAnt), which began operating in Pudong in March 2025 and has deployed its R1 robot at a public institution in Shanghai. For more on Ant’s growing robotics portfolio, EastFrontier has tracked its expansion across hardware and application-layer startups.
The pattern is familiar in Chinese tech: deep-pocketed platform players place multiple bets across hardware, component suppliers and application-layer startups to capture whole product stacks. For Ant, backing Zeroth is both a financial and strategic move — a way to broaden exposure to consumer-facing humanoids while the group continues to develop its own larger-format robots.
Zeroth’s M1: a commercially priced companion with real traction
Founded in late 2024 under the corporate name Suzhou JoyIn Intelligent Technology, Zeroth Robotics has moved from founding to significant sales velocity within a short window. Its flagship M1 is a 50 cm-tall companion robot priced at about 10,000 yuan in China and $2,899 in the U.S. The M1 is marketed to households for social interaction and child engagement; product features include facial-expression sensing, conversation initiation when the system detects loneliness, and the ability to read aloud to children.
Those product claims are backed by commercial momentum: Zeroth has recorded orders exceeding 30,000 units and reported operating revenue that rose roughly 600% year-on-year in the first half of 2026. Prior to this financing, the company carried an estimated valuation of approximately $351 million as of October 2025. On the components side, Zeroth sources chips from Horizon Robotics, keeping much of its stack focused on the domestic market.
Companion robots are moving from demo to market at scale
Zeroth’s figures show a broader phenomenon: companion robots are graduating from lab demos and limited runs to higher-volume production and consumer sales. This follows the broader trend EastFrontier has documented as China’s humanoid robots move from stadiums to living rooms. Peer companies are pursuing similar plays in the sector. For instance, UBTech’s recently launched UWORLD U1 family — another mass-produced full-size companion line, reported thousands of orders at launch and emphasizes emotion-aware large language models and privacy-first architectures; EastFrontier covered the UBTech U1 launch and pre-sales. These parallel developments underline that multiple Chinese firms are now targeting companionship, elder care, and solo-living segments with commercially priced hardware and software bundles.
This shift matters because companion robots sit at the intersection of hardware manufacturing, on-device perception and large-scale cloud services. When consumer demand and order volumes hit the tens of thousands, ecosystems of suppliers for sensors, actuators, local compute and specialized chips quickly become economically viable. That appears to be happening now in China.
Strategic investors and geopolitics: supply chain choices matter
The Zeroth round attracted a mixed set of co-investors: Monolith, Geely Capital, 37 Interactive Entertainment and Hua Capital. The presence of an automaker-linked investor (Geely) points to potential cross-industry synergies, ranging from motion platforms to manufacturing capacity, while an entertainment firm suggests product use-cases and distribution channels beyond conventional retail.
China’s domestic supply chain is an enabler here. Zeroth’s use of Horizon Robotics chips is a deliberate choice that aligns with government and industry trends favoring domestic AI silicon. At the same time, Ant’s own R1 robot — a wheeled, two-armed platform weighing 110 kg and standing 1.6–1.75 m with 34 degrees of freedom, demonstrates the group’s appetite to serve both consumer-facing smaller units like M1 and larger public-facing form factors.
Ant’s investments in robotics are happening as Alibaba — Ant Group’s corporate neighbor and ecosystem partner in many threads — faces market pressure: the research notes reference Alibaba’s share price and year-to-date decline, a reminder that corporate-level performance and investor appetite shape strategic moves into adjacent growth areas like robotics. For context on Alibaba’s broader cloud and AI trajectory, Pandaily has reported on its overseas compute push.
What this means for international expansion and the market
Zeroth plans to push into North America and Europe in the fall of 2026. International expansion will be an important test: price points, content and privacy expectations vary widely across regions, and hardware players must meet regulatory and after-sales expectations in new markets. Zeroth’s dual-pricing strategy — a local Chinese price and a higher U.S. MSRP — reflects how companies are hedging between volume-driven domestic sales and premium pricing overseas.
For investors and incumbents, several implications are clear:
• Companion robots are attracting strategic capital beyond pure VC, suggesting long-term industrial ambitions rather than short-term hardware hype.
• Domestic suppliers (chips, sensors, contract manufacturers) are scaling alongside OEMs, reducing dependency on any single foreign supplier.
• Consumer demand in China is already reaching sizes that justify larger factories, product-support networks and software ecosystems.
What to watch next
Key signals to follow include Zeroth’s international launch execution in fall 2026, whether the company can sustain its reported order shipments into completed revenue, and how Ant coordinates its portfolio companies to avoid internal competition while maximizing cross-selling opportunities. Broader industry indicators to monitor are production ramp rates, component supply resilience, and competing launches from other Chinese players like UBTech.
Ant’s financial backing transforms Zeroth from a promising startup into a credible challenger in the field of companion robotics. If demand and execution hold, the sector will increasingly resemble a mainstream consumer-electronics market rather than a string of high-profile prototypes, and China’s robotics ecosystem will be a major reason why.