Juqiao Industrial completes hundred-million-yuan Series A funding, led by Ant Group, for robotic fabric electronic skin

In the 2026 embodied intelligence sector, the financing winds are shifting.

IT Juzi statistics show that in October 2026, the embodied intelligence sector saw 33 financing deals totaling 10.105 billion yuan, while the September figure was 60 deals and 11.028 billion yuan—a significant downward trend.

However, although the bustling scene of capital chasing body manufacturing and large models has cooled somewhat, some investors have begun to shift their gaze upstream. Dexterous hands, tactile sensors, electronic skin—these core components that determine a robot's "physical capabilities"—have become one of the few segments still attracting capital against the trend.

(Image source: Juqiao Industry official website)

On October 29, Shandong flexible fabric tactile sensing company Juqiao Industry announced the completion of a hundred-million-yuan Series A funding round, led by Ant Group, with existing shareholders Lingyi Venture Capital, Weihai Gangrong and Qingdao Hexin following. This is Ant's second move in the tactile sensing sector; two months earlier, it had just led the round for vision-based tactile route company Daimon Robotics.

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01

The financing logic of embodied intelligence has changed

The financing logic of embodied intelligence seems to be shifting from "building a smart body" to "letting the body perceive the world."

After all, vision can be fed by internet video, language can be fed by text, but tactile data can hardly be obtained from ready-made corpora. Physical quantities such as shear force and material texture are difficult for simulation engines to generate with high fidelity and must be collected frame by frame through real manipulation.

Industry data shows that in terms of price, tactile data costs about twice as much as visual data. Visual and other video data may cost a few hundred yuan per hour, while tactile data costs several hundred yuan.

This difference is directly reflected in financing data. In the first seven months of 2026, nearly 20 financing deals occurred in the domestic humanoid robot sensor field, totaling over 3.1 billion yuan, with July alone absorbing about 1.56 billion yuan. To some extent, this also means that whoever can provide a high-efficiency, low-cost, scalable tactile data collection entry point will have seized the "data chokepoint" of embodied intelligence at this stage.

However, at present the domestic tactile sensing sector does not have only one unified technical route. The Hall magnetic sensing solution represented by PaXini leans toward high-precision multi-dimensional force detection at dexterous fingertips; the vision-based tactile route represented by Daimon Robotics offers higher resolution—tactile resolution can reach tens of thousands of sensing points per square centimeter—and outputs image data, naturally suited to end-to-end networks.

There is also the fabric route represented by Juqiao Industry. Its technical logic is to break conductive and piezoresistive structures all the way down to the fiber level, directly weaving functional fibers into a sensing network. When an external force touches it, the conductive pathways within the fibers deform, and the acquisition system reads the signals and algorithms convert them into tactile data.

These three routes are not mutually substitutive; rather, they each correspond to different tasks. For example, fingertips and dexterous hands require high resolution, multi-dimensional force and fast response, where vision-based tactile and Hall magnetic sensing solutions currently have advantages; torso, robotic arms, soles and other large curved surfaces require large-area, bendable, breathable and cost-controllable coverage, where the fabric route seems easier to deploy.

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02

A "counterintuitive" technical path

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Founded at the end of 2023, the company's founder Zhang Jingqi graduated from the Department of Electronic Engineering at the University of York in the UK, previously served as CTO of a Xiaomi ecosystem company, and holds multiple related invention patents. The core team mainly comes from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and major smart hardware companies, with deep technical accumulation as well as experience in smart hardware product definition and mass production.

The company's technical path is quite "counterintuitive." The structure of traditional piezoresistive film stacks a flexible substrate, pressure-sensitive layer and conductive layer one on top of another, but Juqiao Industry chose nylon as the fiber core and made the piezoresistive material and electrodes into separate functional fibers.

The advantage of this solution is that the sensing fabric it weaves can be cut, folded and quickly revised, and can conform to complex curved surfaces of robots. This innovation successfully pushed fabric-form electronic skin toward true large-scale mass production. In May 2025, the company disclosed that its roll-to-roll production line had an annual capacity of 200,000 pieces and a yield rate of 95%; in July, Weihai Lingang District reported that orders were already booked through October, with first-year output value of nearly 10 million yuan; in September, the 1,000th set of humanoid robot fabric electronic skin rolled off the line. The company said that in less than half a year on the market, nearly 100 customers at home and abroad had placed orders and made repeat purchases, including but not limited to Unitree, Songyan Power and Zero One.

However, the shortcomings of the fabric route are equally obvious: its single-point precision is inferior to vision-tactile solutions, which determines that it is better suited to large-area coverage scenarios such as the torso, soles of the feet, and robotic arms, rather than high-precision fingertip manipulation. So the company is also extending toward fine interaction, launching Tactile Skin 2.0, which further expands its sensing capabilities for force direction, sliding tendency, and tangential force by adjusting the weaving structure and combining model training; however, whether it can meet the high-end precision requirements of dexterous hands remains to be verified.

The deeper challenge lies in the business model. It is reported that MatrixQiao Industry's current product matrix spans three tracks, among which robotic electronic skin serves as the valuation anchor, establishing the company's position as a technology benchmark; however, at this stage the business is highly dependent on a small number of leading customers such as Unitree, and the sustainability of orders remains to be observed.

Smart health and elderly care, as the cash-flow business, saw orders exceed 10 million yuan in 2024 and has been deployed at well-known institutions such as Taikang Home, SDIC Health, and China Resources Runjia; as for automotive smart cockpits, they serve as a growth lever supporting performance.

Therefore, the more accurate meaning of this hundred-million-yuan financing is not that capital has cast a "confirmation vote" for MatrixQiao Industry's fabric route, but rather that, in a window period when tactile technology routes have not yet converged and the data entry point has not yet been settled, it is staking out an early position in a differentiated player with mass-production delivery capability.

What it really tests is whether the company can convert its first-mover process advantages into stable delivery, standardized modules, and tactile data usable by models; if this step succeeds, the fabric route has a chance to become the infrastructure for full-body robotic tactile sensing; if it fails, the capital window may also be rapidly compressed by latecomers.

03

Who can seize the commanding heights of humanoid robot perception?

The reason MatrixQiao's financing has attracted industry attention actually reflects the changes taking place in robotic skin.

In the past, robots wearing clothes or being wrapped in soft leather was mostly understood as a matter of appearance and protection. Now, this outer covering is simultaneously carrying four functions: safety, approachability, scenario adaptation, and tactile perception.

In near-human scenarios such as shopping malls, health and elderly care, and homes, whether users touch hard metal or a flexible covering directly determines the experience of human-robot coexistence; in industrial scenarios, high-temperature resistance, corrosion resistance, dust resistance, and anti-static properties are hard requirements...

This has also made the track's growth particularly notable. According to industry forecasts, by 2030 the market demand for electronic skin for humanoid robots in China will reach 1.525 million square meters, corresponding to an overall market size of about 27.4 billion yuan. Traditional textile enterprises, professional sensor companies, and materials companies are accelerating their entry, and the linkage effect across the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain is obvious.

But behind the heat, industrial development is still at an early stage. The lack of standardization is one of the most prominent pain points: robots of different brands and models have different structures, and electronic skin mostly requires customized development with one version per machine; molds and patterns cannot be reused at scale, resulting in high costs and long cycles.

High-end electronic skin modules are limited by packaging processes, sensor chips, and material costs, and the price of a full set remains difficult for whole-machine manufacturers focused on cost-effectiveness to bear. In addition, flexible sensing products are prone to problems such as signal drift, decreased sensitivity, and shortened service life under long-term high-frequency bending, complex industrial dust, and temperature-varying working conditions, and product stability and consistency need to be improved. For robotic skin to truly move from optional to essential, it still has to cross the three thresholds of consistency, reliability, and cost.

In short, for a machine to enter human space, what people first perceive is often not algorithms and parameters, but whether it is hard or soft, cold or warm when it touches a person, and that is precisely where the value of touch lies.

But the sign of maturity in this track will not be a financing round or a new product, but skin becoming an inconspicuous yet indispensable ordinary component. By then, the focus of discussion will no longer be which technology route is more advanced, but who can stably supply under real working conditions, control costs, and keep pace with whole-machine iteration. What capital is betting on today is precisely this certainty. As for which route will ultimately win, perhaps the answer will only come after robots truly enter daily life.

This article comes from the WeChat public account "Machine Frontline", author: Machine Frontline, published by 36Kr with authorization.