Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Limited (CATL), the world’s largest electric vehicle battery manufacturer, has made a rare direct strategic investment into the embodied artificial intelligence sector, exclusively backing the Pre-A funding round of humanoid robot startup RoboParty. According to a report by 36kr, the Shanghai-based robotics company has successfully completed nearly 500 million yuan ($70 million) in combined Angel++ and Pre-A financing.
The investment by CATL as a group-level strategic entity is highly unusual and signals a significant endorsement of RoboParty’s unique approach to the rapidly crowding humanoid market. The startup, which focuses on full-stack open-source bipedal robots, has now completed six rounds of financing in just eight months, driving its valuation up by more than 20 times since its inception.
The rapid ascent of RoboParty is inextricably linked to its founder, 22-year-old Huang Yi. Born in 2004, Huang is widely regarded within the Chinese venture capital community as an engineering prodigy. Admitted to the School of Future Technology at the prestigious Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT) in 2022, he independently developed a bipedal humanoid robot named AlexBot in his dormitory during his freshman year. After fully open-sourcing the design, AlexBot was reproduced and utilized by over a dozen enterprises and universities.
Huang graduated a year early in 2025 and relocated to Shanghai’s Zhangjiang Robot Valley with a team of classmates to formally launch RoboParty. The company has since attracted elite post-2000s engineering talent from top-tier institutions, including Tsinghua University’s Yao Class, Peking University’s Zhi Class, and Stanford University.
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The “DeepSeek Moment” for Embodied AI
CATL’s investment in RoboParty is being described by industry insiders as a bet on the “DeepSeek moment” of embodied intelligence. Just as DeepSeek disrupted the large language model market by open-sourcing highly capable, low-cost architectures, RoboParty aims to reshape the foundational infrastructure of humanoid robotics through radical transparency. The company is positioned as an open-source full-stack embodied platform, meaning that all technologies, from the physical robotic body to the joint modules and the underlying software, are fully open to developers. This approach stands in stark contrast to the closed, proprietary systems favored by most established robotics manufacturers, which Huang argues stifles innovation and limits the broader application of embodied AI.
In January 2026, RoboParty released RPO, an entry-level open-source bipedal humanoid robot project designed to help global developers build from zero to one. The project has gained massive traction in the open-source community, accumulating nearly 10,000 followers and over 2,000 stars on GitHub, while generating approximately 1,000 hardware orders from developers, universities, and AI model teams worldwide.
To support this hardware, the company also launched Party OS, a reusable and continuously expandable research and development base. Party OS includes core tools like MimicLite for general motion tracking and UFO for unsupervised reinforcement learning, providing developers with a complete ecosystem to quickly deploy and test new AI models on physical hardware.
Prioritizing Ecosystem Over Immediate Revenue
Despite its youth, the RoboParty leadership team has demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of long-term business strategy, frequently prioritizing ecosystem development over short-term revenue generation. Shortly after the company’s founding, when capital was extremely tight, Huang Yi reportedly rejected a lucrative offer from a listed company that would have provided immediate funding and locked in hundreds of overseas orders.
Huang declined the deal because he believed that pursuing rapid volume expansion before the technology and brand were fully mature would be a superficial success. He argued that high-volume commercial orders would not attract the high-quality developers necessary to build a robust open-source community, which remains the company’s primary strategic objective.
This principled approach has resonated strongly with top-tier venture capital firms. In addition to CATL, RoboParty’s investor roster includes a who’s who of Chinese tech finance, featuring Matrix Partners China, Mi Strategic Investment, Galaxy General, SenseTime Guoxiang Capital, Baidu Ventures, and Shunwei Capital.
Notably, 36kr reports that all of the company’s investment terms are exceptionally founder-friendly, containing no gambling or repurchase clauses. This rare level of trust indicates that investors are not merely looking for a quick financial return, but are fully aligned with RoboParty’s long-term vision of becoming the foundational infrastructure provider for the entire embodied AI industry.
The Post-Unitree Era of Robotics
RoboParty’s emergence highlights a shifting dynamic in the Chinese robotics landscape, which Huang Yi refers to as the “post-Unitree era.” While acknowledging the success of established players like Unitree Robotics, whose G1 model remains a benchmark in the industry, Huang has criticized the tendency of many companies to prematurely push for mass production and commercial landing before fully verifying product-market fit. RoboParty’s strategy is to maintain a singular focus on achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance metrics through rapid, uninterrupted iteration of algorithms, data, and engineering, rather than rushing a flawed product to market.
Looking forward, the strategic partnership with CATL opens up massive potential for RoboParty in industrial applications. The two companies plan to jointly explore the deployment of humanoid robots in complex manufacturing, energy, and supply chain scenarios. By combining RoboParty’s open-source agility with CATL’s unparalleled manufacturing scale and industrial expertise, the alliance could significantly accelerate the integration of embodied AI into real-world production environments. As RoboParty prepares to launch its more advanced RP1 model in the fourth quarter of 2026, the startup is well-positioned to transition from a darling of the developer community to a major disruptive force in global industrial robotics.
(Related: Unitree Robotics Opens IPO Book-Building August 5 in First-Ever Humanoid Robot A-Share Listing)