Briefs · Emerging Technologies
China's wheeled humanoid just raised $735 million to work in factories
Shenzhen’s AI² Robotics has raised about $735 million at a valuation past RMB 50 billion, roughly $2.8 billion, for a robot that looks like a person from the waist up and a warehouse trolley from the waist down.
The AlphaBot is a wheeled humanoid: a humanoid torso with five-fingered hands, mounted on wheels instead of legs, driven by the company’s Alpha Brain vision-language-action model. Wheels are cheaper, faster and less likely to fall over than legs, which is a feature, not a failure, when your customer is a factory.
The pitch is industrial, not domestic. No one is selling this robot to fold your laundry. It is built for production lines, logistics and the sort of repetitive work that humans do badly and machines do tirelessly.
Conclusion: AI² is not building a butler, but rather a colleague with wheels, and investors have just paid $735 million to meet it.
Read the original at SiliconANGLE
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