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| Leju Robotics | |
|---|---|
| Native name | 乐聚机器人 (Lèjù Jīqìrén) |
| Legal name | Leju Intelligence (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd. (formerly Leju (Shenzhen) Robotics Co., Ltd.) |
| Industry | Humanoid robotics, embodied AI |
| Founded | 2016 (Shenzhen incorporation); roots in 2015 student club at Harbin Institute of Technology |
| Founders | Leng Xiaokun (冷晓琨), Chang Lin (常琳), An Ziwei (安子威) |
| Headquarters | Shenzhen, Guangdong, China |
| Branch offices | Harbin, Hangzhou |
| Key people | Leng Xiaokun (chairman), Chang Lin (CEO) |
| Products | Kuavo bipedal humanoids, Aelos educational robots, Roban research humanoids, Pando edutainment robot, Fluvo hospital logistics robot |
| Key partners | Huawei, China Mobile, Tencent, NIO, Hengtong Group, Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence |
| Notable funding | RMB 1.5 billion (about US$210 million) pre-IPO round, October 2025 |
| Status | Operating; preparing for initial public offering |
| Website | lejurobot.com |
Leju Robotics (Chinese: 乐聚机器人; pinyin: Lèjù Jīqìrén), legally registered as Leju Intelligence (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd. since its 2025 corporate restructuring, is a Chinese humanoid robot manufacturer headquartered in Shenzhen, Guangdong. The company was founded in 2016 by a small team of doctoral and master's students from the Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT) and has grown into one of the most visible Chinese players in the embodied intelligence sector, alongside Unitree Robotics, UBTech Robotics, and Fourier Intelligence. Its flagship Kuavo bipedal humanoid was the first robot to ship with Huawei's OpenHarmony-based KaihongOS, and the company has positioned itself as the lead hardware partner in Huawei's broader push into humanoid robotics.
Leju's product strategy spans two ends of the market: small desktop-scale humanoids such as the Aelos series for K-12 and university STEM education, and full-size bipedal platforms such as the Kuavo-MY, Kuavo 4 Pro, and modular Kuavo 5 / 5-W targeted at research, industrial automation, and service applications. The company shipped its first Aelos in 2016, performed at the closing ceremony of the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang as part of the "Beijing 8 Minutes" segment, unveiled the first Kuavo prototype in March 2024, delivered its 100th full-size humanoid in early 2025, and closed a roughly US$210 million pre-IPO round in October 2025. In November 2025 a Kuavo unit (called "Kuafu", 夸父, in Chinese) became the world's first humanoid robot to serve as a torchbearer at a major multi-sport event, completing a 100-meter section of the relay for the 15th National Games of China in Shenzhen while carrying a 1.6 kg torch under remote 5G-Advanced control.[1][2][3][4][5][6]
Leju Robotics traces its roots to the Harbin Institute of Technology Intelligent Robot Club, where founder Leng Xiaokun and a group of fellow students began building low-cost bipedal robots for university research labs. Leng, born in 1992, had been admitted to HIT without taking the gaokao (China's national college entrance examination) on the strength of a silver medal at a national robotics competition.[7]
In January 2012 the team's small bipedal humanoids appeared on China Central Television's Spring Festival Gala. The exposure led the founders to pursue commercialization. Leng, Chang Lin, and An Ziwei recruited about 25 students from HIT's master's and doctoral programs and began assembling robots from a mix of imported parts and self-machined components. Leng later told reporters that replies from overseas suppliers could take two weeks, forcing the team to design around whatever parts they could obtain.[7][8]
The company was formally incorporated in Shenzhen in March 2016 as Leju (Shenzhen) Robotics Co., Ltd., choosing the city for its proximity to consumer electronics suppliers and venture capital. Songhe Capital provided the seed round of RMB 10 million in angel funding. In August 2016 Leju shipped its first commercial product, the Aelos humanoid, a 34.6 cm desktop biped weighing 1.8 kg with 16 servos. Marketed at children aged roughly 9 to 15, Aelos could dance, perform yoga moves, kick a small football, and respond to voice commands. The launch price was 2,999 yuan, and Leju sold about 1,200 units in the first months of production.[8][9]
In 2017 the company raised tens of millions of yuan in pre-A funding from Shenzhen Capital Group and a separate RMB 50 million strategic investment from Tencent. Tencent's involvement gave Leju access to the Tencent AI Accelerator, and the startup also joined the Microsoft Accelerator Shanghai (4th cohort) and Lenovo Star (12th cohort) programs.[1]
The Aelos line gained international visibility in February 2018 when Aelos units performed alongside human dancers in the "Beijing 8 Minutes" handover segment at the closing ceremony of the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea. Directed by filmmaker Zhang Yimou, the performance was framed as a showcase for China's intelligent manufacturing ahead of the 2022 Beijing Winter Games and remains one of the most widely cited early demonstrations of a Chinese-made humanoid platform.[10]
Following the Olympics, Leju expanded its educational catalog. Pando launched in 2018 as a cheaper companion to Aelos for elementary STEM curricula. Roban, introduced in 2019 and refreshed as Roban 2 in subsequent years, scaled the company's bipedal hardware up to medium-size (about 80 to 100 cm tall) platforms with 22 degrees of freedom, Python and C++ programming environments, and Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity. Roban was sold into university research labs and the RoboCup Humanoid League. Leju also built application-specific platforms during this period: the Fluvo wheeled hospital logistics robot, the Cube smart building-block kit, and the Clamber Man heavy-duty transport platform. The company closed a Series B round of about US$36 million in June 2019.[1][3]
Leju unveiled the first generation of its full-size Kuavo bipedal humanoid in March 2024 at the Appliance and Electronics World Expo (AWE) in Shanghai. Standing roughly 1.7 m tall, Kuavo was promoted as the first humanoid robot to run on KaihongOS, the OpenHarmony distribution maintained by Huawei's ecosystem partner Kaihong, and to integrate Huawei's Pangu family of large models for embodied tasks. The robot was showcased again in June 2024 at the Huawei Developer Conference (HDC 2024) as the lead reference design for the Pangu embodied intelligence stack.[11][12]
In July 2024 the Chinese electric-vehicle maker NIO confirmed that Kuavo units were undergoing pilot tests at NIO's smart factory for subassembly handling and quality inspection. The deployment was reported as the first time a HarmonyOS-powered humanoid had been validated on a working automotive line. Subsequent pilots followed at facilities operated by Jiangsu Hengtong Group and other industrial partners.[13][14]
Leju shipped its 100th full-size humanoid in January 2025, an inflection point at which the company said it transitioned from research deliveries to commercial-scale production. By the first quarter of 2025 chairman Leng Xiaokun told Chinese state media that Kuavo had logged about 250 paid orders, surpassing the half-year sales target. In mid-2025 Leju formally rebranded as Leju Intelligence (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd., dropping "robotics technology" in favor of "intelligence" and converting to a joint-stock structure as preparation for a planned IPO on a domestic Chinese exchange.[2][15]
In October 2025 Leju closed a pre-IPO round of approximately RMB 1.5 billion (about US$210 million) led by Greenwoods Asset Management, with participation from CITIC Golstone, Shenzhen Investment Holdings Capital, Shenzhen Longhua Capital, Qianhai Foundation Investment, Shijingshan Industrial Fund, Oriental Precision Tuopu Group, China Securities Investment, Daohe Long-term Investment, Shengyi Capital, Lianxin Capital, Probe Venture Capital, Hefei Industrial Investment, Jiuzhao Investment, and the Sino-US Green Fund. Tencent remained on the cap table from earlier rounds. The company said it would use the capital to scale Kuavo manufacturing, fund algorithm development, and expand partnerships with Huawei, Alibaba, and Haier.[2][3][16]
On 2 November 2025 a Kuavo unit served as the "Zero Torchbearer" at the relay for the 15th National Games of China in Shenzhen, completing a 100-meter segment under remote 5G-Advanced (5G-A) control supplied by China Mobile, with technical support from HIT and the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence. Leju described the event as the first time a humanoid robot had served as torchbearer at a major multi-sport games. In early 2026 Leju and listed manufacturer Dongfang Precision opened a joint humanoid assembly plant in eastern China designed to produce as many as 10,000 Kuavo-class humanoids per year, with takt times as short as one robot every 30 minutes.[5][6][17]
Leng Xiaokun (冷晓琨), born 1992, is the founder and chairman of Leju Robotics. He earned his doctorate in robotics from HIT and concurrently serves as associate director of HIT's Intelligent Robotics Research Center. Leng is a member of the Communist Youth League of China and in 2025 was awarded the May Fourth Medal, the league's highest cross-disciplinary recognition for people under 40, in part for his work on commercializing Chinese-made humanoid hardware. He is the company's main public spokesperson and has been quoted on its strategy in outlets including Caixin, Sixth Tone, and the Global Times.[7][9][12]
Chang Lin (常琳) is the chief executive officer and co-founder. He holds a doctorate from HIT and represents the company at international industry events including MWC Shanghai 2025 and the Huawei Developer Conference. Chang's responsibilities span product roadmap, AI partnerships, and overseas distribution.[18]
An Ziwei (安子威) is the third co-founder, joining Leng and Chang in spinning the original HIT Intelligent Robot Club into a commercial entity in 2015-2016. He has held senior engineering roles at the company since incorporation.[8]
Leju's catalog is organized around two parallel lines: small and medium educational humanoids built on the original Aelos and Roban platforms, and full-size industrial and research humanoids built on the Kuavo platform. Several application-specific products extend the catalog into hospital logistics, edutainment, and material handling.
| Product | Type | Year | Height | DOF | Primary use case |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aelos 1 / 1S | Educational desktop humanoid | 2016 | ~34 cm | 16 | K-12 STEM |
| Aelos Lite / Pro | Educational humanoid kit | 2018-2019 | ~30-40 cm | 19 | Classroom, competitions |
| Pando | Edutainment humanoid | 2018 | small | n/a | Children's edutainment |
| Cube | Smart building block kit | 2018 | n/a | n/a | Modular STEM kit |
| Roban / Roban 2 | Research bipedal humanoid | 2019 / ~2023 | ~80-100 cm | 22+ | University research, RoboCup |
| Fluvo | Wheeled service robot | ~2020 | n/a | n/a | Hospital logistics |
| Clamber Man | Heavy-duty transport robot | ~2021 | n/a | n/a | Warehouse, material handling |
| Kuavo (1.0 / 3.0) | Full-size bipedal humanoid | 2024 | ~170 cm | 26-40 | Embodied AI research, pilots |
| Kuavo-MY | Open development humanoid | 2024 | 147 cm | 26 | Research, education, industry |
| Kuavo 4 Pro | General humanoid | 2025 | ~170 cm | 40+ | General service, light industry |
| Kuavo 5 | Modular bipedal humanoid | 2025 | ~168 cm | 40+ | Industrial automation, home service |
| Kuavo 5-W | Modular wheeled humanoid | 2025 | ~168 cm | 40+ | High-stability industrial tasks |
The Aelos family is Leju's longest-running product line and remains its main educational platform. The original Aelos 1, launched in August 2016, is a 34.6 cm desktop humanoid with 16 servo joints, dual-channel speakers, infrared and ultrasonic sensors, and a smartphone-controlled programming interface. Later variants include Aelos Lite, Aelos Pro, and the Aelos 1S sold internationally through educational distributors. Aelos units use the Aelos STEM mobile app with a Google Blockly-based visual programming environment before progressing to Python and C++. Aelos has shipped into K-12 classrooms, science museums, and competitions across China and more than thirty countries.[19][20]
Roban is Leju's medium-size research bipedal platform. It carries 22 degrees of freedom across the body, supports Python programming on a Linux-based stack, and runs an in-house gait controller for the small bipedal robot category used in the RoboCup Humanoid League. Roban 2 is an incremental refresh adding modular access panels and improved manipulation. Pando is a smaller edutainment-class robot pitched at family use and elementary STEM curricula at a lower price point than Aelos.[1]
The Kuavo line is Leju's strategic flagship and the focus of essentially all of the company's post-2024 attention. All Kuavo variants share an electric-actuator drivetrain with self-developed quasi-direct-drive joints rated up to 360 N·m peak torque and 150 rpm rated speed, omnidirectional bipedal walking up to roughly 4.6 km/h, depth-camera-based perception, an open ROS 2 software stack on top of Linux, and integration with KaihongOS for application-layer functions including voice control, task planning, and remote teleoperation. The motion controller is open-sourced on Leju's official GitHub organization (LejuRobotics) under the kuavo-ros-opensource repository.[11][21]
Kuavo variants released since the original 2024 prototype include:
Leju has positioned Kuavo against Tesla's Optimus, Figure AI Figure 02, and Chinese rivals such as Unitree's H1 and H2 and UBTech's Walker series. The company's cost-down roadmap targets a sub-US$20,000 sticker price for a future Kuavo generation in order to expand into prosumer and home-service markets.
Fluvo is a wheeled hospital logistics platform piloted in Chinese tertiary hospitals from around 2020 for carrying medication trays, lab samples, and bedding. Clamber Man is a heavy-duty transport platform for warehouse and material-handling pilots. Cube is a modular smart building block kit sold mostly through educational channels in China.[1]
Leju's core technical assets are concentrated in three layers of the humanoid stack: actuation hardware, gait and motion control software, and embodied AI integration through partner large language and vision models.
Leju manufactures its own torque-controlled servo joints in-house. The high-end joints used in Kuavo deliver about 360 N·m of peak torque and 150 rpm of rated speed, with closed-loop force control and CAN-bus integration. The company has cited vertical integration of joint manufacturing as a key reason it can sell Kuavo well below comparable Western humanoids while maintaining payload capability. Leju also publishes a CAN-bus specification that allows research customers to mount custom end-effectors without redesigning the wrist.[1][22]
The company's self-stabilizing bipedal gait algorithms originated in the founders' HIT graduate research and are credited as the technical foundation that distinguished Leju from the many wheeled service-robot startups in China in the late 2010s. The motion stack includes whole-body model-predictive control, a learning-based locomotion policy for terrain such as sand and grass, and an imitation-learning pipeline used in factory pilots to teach Kuavo manipulation tasks from human demonstrations. Leju has open-sourced large parts of the motion controller and a related dataset (kuavo_data_challenge) on GitHub.[21][24]
Kuavo is the lead reference design for the Pangu embodied intelligence stack from Huawei. It runs KaihongOS, an OpenHarmony distribution from Huawei ecosystem partner Shenzhen Kaihong Digital Industry Development Co., as its real-time operating layer. Higher-level reasoning, voice control, computer vision, and task planning are handled by Pangu models called locally or via cloud APIs. Leju has said the Huawei integration substantially reduced its software development cost and shortened time to deploy voice and vision features for customer pilots. The company has also experimented with other Chinese large models, including reports of DeepSeek-class open models for kitchen-task demonstrations on Kuavo, and in September 2025 signed a research agreement with Peking University's Wuhan AI Research Institute to set up a joint humanoid robotics laboratory.[11][12][24]
Leju has built a dense network of strategic partnerships across operating systems, telecommunications, automotive manufacturing, and academic research. Several of these partnerships are anchored in Huawei's broader effort to position itself at the center of China's humanoid robotics ecosystem.
| Partner | Domain | Role | Since |
|---|---|---|---|
| Huawei | OS / AI models | KaihongOS and Pangu embodied intelligence; co-launched first HarmonyOS humanoid at HDC 2024 | 2023 |
| China Mobile | Telecom | 5G-Advanced connectivity for teleoperated Kuavo, including 15th National Games torch relay | 2024 |
| NIO | Automotive | Validates Kuavo on smart-factory lines for assembly and inspection | 2024 |
| Hengtong Group | Manufacturing | Hosts Kuavo scale-up application pilots | 2024 |
| Tencent | Strategic investor | RMB 50M Series A in 2017; Tencent AI Accelerator; on cap table through 2025 pre-IPO round | 2017 |
| Harbin Institute of Technology | Academic | Source of founders and core team; ongoing research collaboration | 2016 |
| Beijing Institute for General AI | Academic | Embodied AI research and 15th National Games torch demonstration | 2025 |
| Peking University Wuhan AI Research Institute | Academic | Joint humanoid robotics laboratory | 2025 |
| Dongfang Precision | Manufacturing | Joint humanoid assembly plant of up to 10,000 units per year | 2026 |
| Shenzhen Kaihong | OS vendor | Maintains KaihongOS, the OpenHarmony distribution Kuavo runs on | 2024 |
Kuavo has been deployed in commercial and research environments since 2024. The earliest publicized industrial trial was at a NIO smart factory in mid-2024, where the robot worked alongside human assemblers on subassembly handling and quality inspection. Subsequent pilots followed at Jiangsu Hengtong Group's manufacturing facilities and at exhibition halls in major Chinese cities. Kuavo has also appeared in classrooms; a widely shared Global Times video from early 2025 showed a Kuavo unit teaching young students about artificial intelligence at a school in Mianyang, Sichuan, paired with an education-tailored AI module reported as "Little Bee". By late 2025 Leju said Kuavo had been adopted by universities, exhibition halls, automotive plants, and selected service venues, with deliveries forecast in the thousands by year end. Internationally the Kuavo-MY is sold through distribution partners including Foxtech Robot.[2][13][22][25]
Leju has been backed since incorporation by a mix of Chinese state-affiliated funds, strategic corporate investors, and venture firms. Headline rounds include the 2016 RMB 10 million angel round from Songhe Capital, a 2017 pre-A round (tens of millions of RMB) from Shenzhen Capital Group, a 2017 RMB 50 million strategic round from Tencent, a Series B of about US$36 million in June 2019, and the October 2025 pre-IPO round of approximately RMB 1.5 billion (US$210 million) led by Greenwoods Asset Management, with participation from CITIC Golstone, Shenzhen Investment Holdings Capital, Qianhai Foundation Investment, Shijingshan Industrial Fund, Oriental Precision Tuopu Group, and others. Following the round Leju rebranded from Leju (Shenzhen) Robotics Co., Ltd. to Leju Intelligence (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd. and converted to a joint-stock structure as widely interpreted preparation for a domestic IPO.[1][2][3][15][16]
Leju is consistently named in industry overviews of the Chinese humanoid robotics sector alongside Unitree Robotics, UBTech, Fourier Intelligence, Agibot, and Xiaomi's CyberOne program. Analysts generally frame Leju's competitive position as resting on three factors: a strong technical lineage from HIT in bipedal control and joint design, tight integration with Huawei's KaihongOS and Pangu stack that lowers software cost relative to Western competitors, and aggressive pricing on platforms such as Kuavo 5 (about US$38,000) and Kuavo-MY (about US$50,000).
Critics have pointed to several risks. Most public Kuavo demonstrations through 2025 used remote teleoperation rather than fully autonomous behavior, raising questions about how much of the marketing reflects production-ready autonomy. The cost-down roadmap to a sub-US$20,000 humanoid will require both improved supply-chain economics and continued joint-manufacturing yields. The dependence on Huawei's software ecosystem ties Leju closely to one anchor partner, which is a strategic asset in the Chinese market but a constraint on overseas expansion. Despite these caveats, Leju's combination of HIT pedigree, Huawei alignment, Olympic-class demonstrations, and 2025 pre-IPO funding has established it as one of the most prominent Chinese humanoid pure-plays heading into 2026.[2][12][22]