CASBOT completes a funding round in the hundreds of millions of yuan (Series A++), with over 400 million yuan in shoe-making robot orders on hand

Beijing Zhongke Huiling Robot Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Zhongke Huiling") has recently completed an A++ round of financing worth several hundred million yuan. This round was jointly invested by institutions including Zhilai Investment, Yonghua Investment, Maotian Investment, Yuanhe Chenkun, Guoke Kezhi, and Luning Investment, with the funds to be mainly used for product mass-production delivery, R&D of embodied brain technology for key scenarios, and market expansion. This is the second large financing Zhongke Huiling has secured in recent months. In June 2025, the company had just completed a nearly 100-million-yuan A round led by Lens Technology. "Embodied intelligence is moving from concept to industrial validation, and we place more value on commercialization in real scenarios," said Tang Zheng, Managing Director of Yonghua Investment, explaining the investment logic. In his view, the directions chosen by Zhongke Huiling, such as smart mining and footwear and apparel manufacturing, have clear demand and quantifiable investment returns. Body + brain + dexterous hands, fully self-developed Zhongke Huiling was founded in 2023 and is a key incubated enterprise of the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Founder and Chairman Zhang Zhengtao is a researcher and doctoral supervisor at the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and director of the CAS Engineering Laboratory for Industrial Vision Intelligent Equipment Technology; the core team has participated in tasks such as micro-target precision assembly and flexible assembly of the C919 large aircraft. Relying on the scientific research accumulation of the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Zhongke Huiling has built a full-stack technology system of "body + embodied brain + dexterous hands." On the brain side, the company has self-developed the embodied large model CAS-brain, which, based on a vision-language multimodal large model and combined with embodied Agents, world models, and reinforcement learning, links robot hardware, real interaction data, model training and inference, and autonomous evolution into one system. For industrial scenarios, it has also launched the lightweight CASBOT PA (Perception-to-Action) perception-action model, with the pipeline of "visual perception → action generation → kinematics processing → real-machine execution," supporting training on a single consumer-grade GPU and featuring real-time error correction and failure retry capabilities, lowering the threshold for deployment and iteration in industrial scenarios. According to the plan, CASBOT PA is scheduled to be open-sourced in the second half of 2027. On the body side, Zhongke Huiling has independent R&D capabilities from end effectors to complete machines, with products including the full-size humanoid robots CASBOT 01 and CASBOT 02, the industrial wheeled-arm robot CASBOT W2, the half-size humanoid robot CASBOT Mini, and the CASBOT BAND robot band, corresponding to the four major directions of industrial, commercial, special, and embodied base. End-effector operation is mainly advanced by the joint venture Zhongke Huisi. Zhongke Huisi was jointly established by Zhongke Huiling, Lens Technology, and Hunan Huaxia Investment Group, focusing on the dexterous hand business, and has launched three products, L1, D1, and M1, covering tactile perception, fine manipulation, and flexible grasping. In addition, Zhongke Huiling has also self-developed an XR teleoperation system and a real-machine/real-human data collection platform, continuously accumulating robot operation and real-environment interaction data to support model training and software-hardware iteration. Footwear orders exceed 400 million yuan, three major scenarios implemented Beyond full-stack technology, Zhongke Huiling's commercialization has already been proven first in the footwear and apparel manufacturing scenario. In 2025, Zhongke Huiling has won tens-of-millions-level orders from multiple leading footwear enterprises, ranking among the industry's first tier. This year, the company's total in-hand orders for embodied footwear-making robots have exceeded 400 million yuan, with equipment production scheduling reaching thousands of units. Footwear and apparel is a tough nut to crack in industrial automation. For flexible materials such as shoe uppers and fabrics, the edges, wrinkles, and positions may differ each time they enter a workstation, and combined with multiple styles and frequent changeovers, traditional automation relying on fixed fixtures and preset trajectories is hard-pressed to cover. Zhongke Huiling's entry point is to use embodied operation to fill this gap. As early as August 2025, Zhongke Huiling's first footwear-making robot entered the factory of Fujian Xinbai Sports, a leading footwear and apparel enterprise in Putian, to carry out production-line POC testing for the insole stamping process. Xinbai Sports has long served brands such as Puma and Skechers. In October this year, Zhongke Huiling's CASBOT PA perception-action model was also put into application validation at actual footwear-making workstations in the factory, covering processes such as tongue insertion, outsole stamping, and sole pressing, and the wheeled-arm robot CASBOT W2 has been tested around sole feeding. The test data are: outsole stamping reaches a takt time of 7 seconds per piece, and sole pressing reaches 18 seconds per pair. Zhongke Huiling points out that, based on calculations from existing projects, the solution's annual return on investment is about 50%–70%, with an investment payback period of within two years. In this process, the factory has also fed back into the technology. Data on successful and failed operations corresponding to different materials and styles flow back to the model, and then the new model returns to the workstation for validation, forming a closed loop of "real task—data—training—real-machine validation." Beyond footwear and apparel manufacturing, mining energy and entertainment performances are also key focuses. The particularity of mining lies in the environment: underground dust is heavy, it is humid, passages are narrow, and communications are unstable, which is a real test of robot reliability. In June 2025, Zhongke Huiling, together with Shandong Zhaojin Group and Shandong Zhongkuang Group, jointly established Zhongke Shenkuang Embodied Intelligent Robot (Yantai) Co., Ltd., focusing on high-risk underground operations and safety patrols. At present, the mining charging robot has entered real mines for on-site training and validation. In the entertainment field, the CASBOT BAND robot band was launched in February this year, composed of four full-size humanoid robots CASBOT 02, and not only appeared at the Beijing Spring Festival Gala but subsequently also took the stage at the Zhongguancun Forum, the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, the World Robot Conference, and other events. Since August this year, the band has officially begun daily resident performances at the Qingdao Robot 6S Experience Store, transforming from a display device for single events into an operational product capable of providing long-term performance services. Around formats such as experience stores and commercial operation pods, Zhongke Huiling has signed framework cooperation and procurement agreements with relevant operating enterprises, while exploring multiple cooperation methods such as product sales, leasing operations, and scenario services. "The value of embodied intelligence must ultimately be tested in the real world," said Zhang Zhengtao. What Zhongke Huiling wants to do is to enable robots to truly enter factories and mines and take on high-risk, high-intensity, and repetitive work. After the completion of this round of financing, Zhongke Huiling will continue to advance its product matrix and technological iteration around the four major directions of industrial embodied, commercial embodied, special embodied, and embodied base; at the same time, using education and research and entertainment performances as entry points, and relying on products such as CASBOT Mini, CASBOT 02 Lite, and CASBOT BAND, it will gradually expand into the Middle East, Europe, Southeast Asia, and North American markets. (Statement: This article is reprinted from a third-party platform. The purpose of forwarding this article is to promote information exchange and does not involve profit-making purposes. 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