Galbot

Galbot (Chinese: 银河通用机器人, also known as Galaxy General Robotics; corporate name Beijing Galbot Co., Ltd.) is a Chinese embodied-AI and general-purpose robotics company headquartered in Beijing.^[1] Founded in May 2023 by Peking University assistant professor Wang He, the company builds wheeled, dual-arm humanoid robots driven by vision-language-action (VLA) foundation models trained largely on synthetic simulation data.^[2][5][16] Its flagship robot, the Galbot G1, operates unmanned convenience stores and pharmacies around the clock in dozens of Chinese cities and runs pilot and production tasks on automotive and battery manufacturing lines.^[8][14] Galbot raised more than $300 million in December 2025 at a $3 billion post-money valuation, then another RMB 2.5 billion (about $362 million) in March 2026, a round the company said made it the highest-valued unlisted firm in the humanoid robotics sector; Caixin reported that Galbot is preparing a Hong Kong listing.^[8][12][13]

Key facts

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History

Galbot was founded in Beijing in May 2023.^[2][5] The company came out of the embodied-AI research orbit of Peking University, where founder Wang He runs a research group focused on robotic manipulation, dexterous grasping, and vision-language-action models.^[16][17] By June 2024 Galbot had closed an angel round of approximately RMB 700 million (about $99.75 million), which Xinhua described as a record for China's embodied intelligence sector that year; the largest investment came from the on-demand services platform Meituan.^[2] Xinhua also reported at the time that the young company had developed grasping technology with a 95 percent success rate "for objects of any material and stacking configuration" and would begin testing a 24-hour unmanned operation scenario with Meituan by the end of 2024.^[2]

That scenario became the company's signature commercial format. At the China International Fair for Trade in Services in September 2024, Galbot and Meituan's pharmacy arm debuted what state media called "the world's first humanoid robot-powered smart pharmacy system," a 24/7 unmanned pharmacy stocked and served by a Galbot robot.^[3]

In 2025 the company moved from pilots to scale. It released its first VLA foundation model, GraspVLA, in January 2025, closed an RMB 1.1 billion (about $153 million) round led by battery giant CATL in June 2025, formed a joint venture with the Bosch Group's investment platform the same month, and won gold in the robot skills competition at the inaugural World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing in August 2025.^[4][5][6][7] In December 2025 it raised over $300 million at a $3 billion valuation, and in January 2026 it launched the Galbot S1, an industrial heavy-duty robot already working on CATL production lines.^[8][10]

The company reached mass-audience visibility in China on February 16, 2026, when its robots performed alongside actors Shen Teng and Ma Li in a short film during the CCTV Spring Festival Gala, folding clothes and rolling walnuts in hand; Global Times reported that two G1 units priced at approximately 630,000 yuan (about $91,000) sold out instantly in a livestream sales event tied to the broadcast.^[11] According to Wang He's academic homepage, Chinese President Xi Jinping inspected the Galbot G1 and met Wang during an inspection visit in Beijing on February 9, 2026.^[17] In March 2026 Galbot closed a further RMB 2.5 billion round and, per Caixin, began preparing for a Hong Kong Stock Exchange listing.^[12][13]

Founder and leadership

Wang He (王鹤) is Galbot's founder and chief technology officer. He is a tenure-track assistant professor at Peking University and a Stanford University PhD graduate whose academic work spans dexterous grasping, object pose estimation, and embodied navigation.^[6][13][17] His research group's output feeds directly into Galbot's model stack: he is a senior author of the GraspVLA paper, and his lab's honors include MIT Technology Review's Innovators Under 35 (TR35 China) in 2025 and the Beijing Youth May Fourth Medal in 2026.^[16][17] Zhao Yuli serves as chief strategy officer and has been the company's public voice on its pharmacy and retail automation business.^[15]

Products

Galbot G1

The Galbot G1 is a wheeled semi-humanoid mobile manipulator: two dexterous arms and a lifting torso on an omnidirectional wheeled base, rather than a bipedal walker. The Robot Report describes it as designed to "automate inventory, replenishment, delivery, and packaging," with AI models that let it handle around 5,000 different types of goods and a deployment time of about one day per store.^[5] The G1 is the platform behind the Galbot Store retail format, the unmanned pharmacies, hospital pilots, and most of the company's factory proof-of-concept work. TechNode reported in June 2025 that Galbot's wheeled robots had been deployed in Mercedes-Benz and Zeekr factories in China.^[4]

Galbot S1

In January 2026 Galbot launched the Galbot S1, an industrial-grade heavy-duty robot that the company says achieves a continuous dual-arm payload of 50 kg, runs up to 8 hours per charge, and can swap its own batteries via a dual-battery quick-swap design for 24/7 operation.^[10] The S1 navigates by visual perception without QR codes or markers and, according to Galbot, was already handling heavy-load tasks on CATL production lines at launch.^[10]

Galbot Store

Galbot Store is the company's fully autonomous retail format, described by Galbot as "the world's first smart retail solution operated fully autonomously by humanoid robots."^[8] In mid 2025 the format ran in roughly 10 stores in Beijing with a target of 100 stores nationwide; by December 2025 the company said Galbot Store was operational in over 30 cities across China.^[5][8][9]

Foundation models

Galbot develops its models, datasets, and hardware in house, and describes itself as "the world's first company to fully achieve full-stack in-house development across hundreds-of-billion-scale high-quality datasets, embodied foundation models, and robotic hardware," a marketing claim that nonetheless reflects an unusually vertically integrated approach.^[8] Its training strategy is simulation-first: synthetic action data for pre-training, real-world data for post-training.^[9] The company has said it works with NVIDIA Isaac Sim for simulation.^[5]

Three named VLA models anchor the stack:^[5]

• GraspVLA, released in January 2025, is a grasping foundation model pre-trained on SynGrasp-1B, a billion-frame synthetic grasping dataset generated with photorealistic rendering and extensive domain randomization. The accompanying paper, whose authors include Wang He, integrates autoregressive perception and flow-matching action generation in a unified chain-of-thought process and reports zero-shot generalization to unseen objects.^[16]
• GroceryVLA targets retail commercialization, handling densely packed consumer goods in complex store environments.^[5]
• TrackVLA is a navigation model covering visual environment perception, natural-language command following, and dynamic target tracking.^[5]

For the 2026 Spring Festival Gala performance, Galbot said its robots ran AstraBrain, an integrated end-to-end large model combining "brain-cerebellum-neural control" for full-body and full-hand coordination.^[11]

Commercial deployments

Unmanned retail and pharmacies

Galbot's most distinctive commercial bet is running its own 24/7 unmanned storefronts. The pharmacy line began with the Meituan partnership unveiled in September 2024.^[3] By March 2026, CGTN reported a Galbot pharmacy in Beijing's Haidian district in which a G1 handles order processing, sorting, packaging, replenishment, and inventory across roughly 5,000 drug SKUs in a 70-square-meter store, with a reported grasping success rate of about 99.5 percent; pharmacy staff said the system can cut labor demand by more than half.^[14] The Seoul Economic Daily reported in March 2026 that Galbot plans to expand its smart pharmacies and unmanned convenience stores from approximately 200 locations to more than 1,000 by the end of 2026.^[15]

At the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing in August 2025, Galbot won the gold medal in the robot skills competition's pharmaceutical sorting challenge. According to the company, its robot competed fully autonomously while most of the 22 teams relied on teleoperation, ranked first in every round, and finished with 336 points, about 160 points ahead of the runner-up, in 10 minutes and 22 seconds.^[7]

Healthcare and logistics

Beyond pharmacies, Galbot works with Beijing's Xuanwu Hospital to deploy robots that assist in patient rooms, in-hospital pharmacies, and hospital guidance.^[8] The company also operates autonomous warehouse-logistics deployments that it says have run stable, continuous 24/7 operations for over a year.^[8]

Industrial and automotive

Galbot has stated that it has secured cumulative orders totaling several thousand units from industrial clients including CATL, Bosch, Toyota, BAIC Group, and SAIC Motor.^[12] Its December 2025 release names CATL, Bosch, Toyota, and Hyundai as manufacturing partners and claims it was "the first company globally to deploy humanoid robots for real autonomous operations on manufacturing floors," a contested first given competing claims by US humanoid makers.^[8] In June 2025, Boyuan Capital, the Bosch Group's market-oriented investment platform, and Galbot announced a joint venture named Boyin Innovation Alliance to industrialize embodied AI in high-precision manufacturing; as an early milestone the venture signed a memorandum of understanding with UAES, a Bosch automotive joint venture in China, to establish RoboFab, a joint laboratory for automotive-operations embodied AI.^[6]

Funding and valuation

Galbot's disclosed funding through March 2026 totals well over $1.1 billion, combining the $800 million cumulative figure the company reported in December 2025 with the RMB 2.5 billion round announced in March 2026.^[8][12]

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The investor base is notably heavy on industrial and state-linked strategics, from Meituan and CATL to Sinopec, CITIC, and SAIC, mirroring the company's deployment pipeline in retail, battery, and automotive manufacturing.^[2][4][12] Caixin framed the March 2026 round within a sharp post-Lunar New Year acceleration of investment into Chinese embodied-AI startups racing to fund mass production and position for public listings.^[13]

Position in China's humanoid landscape

Galbot occupies a distinct niche among China's leading humanoid robot companies. Where Unitree, UBTech, and AgiBot are best known for bipedal (or quadrupedal) locomotion platforms, Galbot has deliberately built wheeled manipulators optimized for flat indoor commercial floors, prioritizing manipulation, uptime, and cost over legged mobility. It is also unusual in operating its own consumer-facing retail network rather than only selling robots to integrators, which gives it a continuous stream of real-world manipulation data for model training.^[5][8]

Within the broader humanoid robot market, Galbot's December 2025 valuation of $3 billion placed it among the most valuable privately held Chinese humanoid companies, in a cohort that also includes AgiBot and Galaxea Dynamics, while Unitree pursued a public listing.^[8][13] The company's Spring Festival Gala appearance in February 2026, alongside robots from Unitree, Noetix, and MagicLab, and the reported Xi Jinping inspection days earlier, underscored how central the sector has become to Chinese industrial policy.^[11][17] A fuller list of competitors is at humanoid robot manufacturers.

See also

• Galbot G1
• Unitree
• AgiBot
• UBTech
• Galaxea Dynamics
• Humanoid robot

References

1. ^Galbot. "Galbot-银河通用机器人官方网站." galbot.com.
2. ^Xinhua. "Xinhua Headlines: Chinese startups embrace new opportunities for high-quality development." October 12, 2024. english.news.cn/...c
3. ^ChinAfrica (China International Communications Group). "A Powerful Transformer." April 3, 2025. chinafrica.cn/...t20250403_800397429
4. ^TechNode. "CATL backs humanoid robotics startup Galbot in $153 million funding." June 25, 2025. technode.com/...galbot
5. ^The Robot Report. "Galbot picks up $153M to commercialize G1 semi-humanoid." July 2, 2025. therobotreport.com/...mmercialize-g1-semi-humanoid
6. ^Boyuan Capital via GlobeNewswire. "Boyuan Capital (investment platform under Bosch Group) and Galbot Forged JV." June 23, 2025. globenewswire.com/...ch-Group-and-Galbot-Forged-JV
7. ^Galbot via PR Newswire. "Galbot Clinches Gold Medal at World Humanoid Robot Games, Redefining Autonomous Robotics in Real-World Applications." August 20, 2025. prnewswire.com/...eal-world-applications-302534958
8. ^Beijing Galbot AI Co., Ltd. via PR Newswire. "Galbot Secures Over $300 Million in New Funding, Breaking Records with $3 Billion Valuation in China's Humanoid Robot Sector." December 19, 2025. prnewswire.com/...-humanoid-robot-sector-302647204
9. ^The Robot Report. "Galbot brings in $300M to scale mobile manipulator deployments." December 23, 2025. therobotreport.com/...bile-manipulator-deployments
10. ^Beijing Galbot AI Co., Ltd. via PR Newswire. "Galbot S1 Breaks Industry Load Limits with 50KG Heavy-Duty Capacity." January 20, 2026. prnewswire.com/...kg-heavy-duty-capacity-302665348
11. ^Global Times. "Humanoid robots at Spring Festival Gala grab headlines, showcasing China's tech leap in just one year." February 17, 2026. globaltimes.cn/...1355460.shtml
12. ^TechNode. "Humanoid robot maker Galbot raises RMB 2.5 billion." March 2, 2026. technode.com/...aker-galbot-raises-rmb-2-5-billion
13. ^Caixin Global. "Galbot Raises $362 Million in Fresh Funding, Eyes Hong Kong IPO." March 3, 2026. caixinglobal.com/...g-eyes-hong-kong-ipo-102418742
14. ^CGTN. "China's first pharmacy robot goes into service in Beijing." March 13, 2026. news.cgtn.com/...p
15. ^Seoul Economic Daily. "China's Robot Pharmacies Find, Sort, Package 6,000 Drugs, 24-Hour Unmanned Operations Imminent." March 25, 2026. en.sedaily.com/...-find-sort-package-6000-drugs-24
16. ^Deng, Shengliang, et al. "GraspVLA: a Grasping Foundation Model Pre-trained on Billion-scale Synthetic Action Data." arXiv:2505.03233, May 6, 2025. arxiv.org/...2505.03233
17. ^Wang, He. Academic homepage. hughw19.github.io