Agibot, also known as Zhiyuan Robotics, plans to deliver 3,000 to 5,000 humanoid robots this year, up from less than 1,000 units in 2024.

The information was just revealed by Yao Maoqing, manager of Agibot. The surge in numbers reflects the rapid expansion of Chinese robotics startups as the industry flourishes.

China's industrial robot output rose 27% to 91,088 units in the first two months of 2025, while service robot output rose 36% to 1.5 million units, according to official government statistics.

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Agibot robot works at a supermarket cashier. Photo: Agibot

Founded in 2023, Agibot has grown to become a major player in Shanghai’s robotics industry, with a factory in Lingang. The startup plans to open a new factory in Pudong to increase its production capacity to more than 400 robots per month, according to Yao.

Sharing with SCMP , Yao said that this year the company aims to deploy new products in the industry, replacing humans in specific jobs to bring tangible value to customers. Humanoid robots in the family may appear in about 5 years.

Agibot was co-founded by Peng Zhihui, a former member of Huawei’s famous “Young Genius” recruitment program. Peng, along with Wang Xingxing, CEO of Unitree Robotics, are considered key figures in making China a robotics powerhouse.

Yao, who has worked in the self-driving car field for Google's Waymo as well as domestic electric car maker Nio, pointed out that China's advantage in developing humanoid robots is its comprehensive hardware supply chain and abundant AI talent.

He said the humanoid robot industry is still in its infancy and has not yet developed many applications, and production costs are still high. He hopes costs will drop significantly as production scales up and productivity improves.

According to Yao, humanoid robots can be widely applied once the cost drops to 50,000 yuan (more than 176 million VND) per unit.

Agibot currently offers three main product lines: Yuanzheng – a bipedal humanoid robot for commercial use, Genie – a two-armed wheeled robot, and Lingxi – a small robot for developers and consumers.

In January, the startup hit a milestone of 1,000 robots, including 269 Genies and 731 Yuanzhengs. Peng is now in charge of developing Lingxi.

Agibot has completed at least eight rounds of funding and is valued at around 10 billion yuan.

Like other robotics companies, however, Agibot faces data scarcity challenges. Unlike the abundant online data to train large language models, robots need multimodal models to analyze their surroundings.

Agibot has set up a data collection center in Shanghai, where about 100 robots generate about 50,000 high-quality motion data records daily in a 2,000-square-meter facility.

Each file contains tens of thousands of tokens. When it reaches billions of tokens, the robot will gain new capabilities, Yao stressed.

(According to SCMP)