China ships more humanoid robots than the U.S.
A staff member trains a humanoid robot to replicate human behavior at a training center in Hefei, Anhui province of China, on April 13, 2026.
Vcg | Visual China Group | Getty Images
Hi, this is Evelyn, writing to you from Beijing. Welcome to the latest edition of The China Connection — a succinct snapshot of what I’m seeing and hearing from local businesses.
Today, I dig into rising valuations for Chinese humanoid startups and why they still aren’t attracting the same kind of money as their U.S. rivals — despite delivering far more robots. Are U.S. VCs missing out?
The big story
Chinese humanoid startups are already shipping robots to factories and malls, while their U.S. rivals remain focused on development — and far higher valuations.
It’s a growing divide.
U.S. humanoid robot startup Figure commands a valuation of at least $39 billion; Texas-based rival Apptronik, meanwhile, achieved a $5 billion valuation in February.
That’s well above the $3 billion-plus valuation of Chinese startup Galbot, which claims to be the highest-valued privately-held Chinese company in the sector. And its backers come from China, Singapore and the Middle East — not the U.S.
Among private companies — and there are well over 100 humanoid startups in China — AI2 Robotics has achieved a 20 billion yuan ($2.93 billion) valuation, according to CEO and founder Eric Guo.
It might be a fraction of Figure’s valuation, but Guo claimed a large, foreign high-end manufacturer chose AI2’s robots over the U.S. startup’s for factory work. AI2 is also rolling out robots at airports in China, as well as in semiconductor and healthcare factories.
“Commercialization and tech capability aren’t contradictory,” Guo said in Mandarin, translated by CNBC.
It’s an investment thesis he expects investors — even from the U.S. — to start picking up on in just a few months.
If that shift happens, China is well-positioned.
Chinese humanoid startups took the top six spots in Omdia’s rankings of global robot shipments in 2025. Figure and Tesla were the only U.S. companies that made the top 10. While a Figure robot appeared beside U.S. first lady Melania Trump at a White House event in March, Tesla’s Optimus still largely remains in development.
Another reason for the valuation gap is how investors perceive the companies and their ambitions.
U.S. humanoid startups are being priced as wide-reaching artificial intelligence platforms, while Chinese ones are seen more as industrial hardware plays, said Rui Ma, founder of Tech Buzz China, which regularly brings U.S. investors to visit Chinese startups.
“If China ends up dominating manufacturing scale and real-world deployment,” U.S. venture capital funds may miss out on the opportunity to some degree, she said.
Playing both sides
Geopolitics has complicated the investment landscape.
U.S.-China tensions, along with domestic national security policies, have chilled cross-border investment. Large U.S. pension funds that once invested heavily in Chinese…