Galbot: Company Profile

Founding

Galbot — Galaxy General Robotics — was founded in May 2023 in Beijing by He Wang (王鹤), born in 1992, who holds a doctorate from Stanford and is an assistant professor at Peking University, where the company keeps a joint laboratory. He also directs the Center of Embodied AI at the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, and is described in most sources as Galbot's CTO rather than its CEO — a founder who stayed on the technical side.

The academic lineage is the closest parallel in this section to Apptronik's UT Austin origins or Agility's Oregon State roots, but it is far more recent, and the company reached a market faster than either.

Country and Headquarters

Galbot is a Chinese company headquartered in Beijing, trading as Beijing Galbot Co., Ltd.

Leadership

He Wang is founder and CTO, and remains the company's public face — simultaneously a Peking University academic, a BAAI research director and the technical head of a company valued in the billions, which is a combination that says something about how China's embodied-AI sector is organised. He was among the founders featured on CCTV's 2026 Spring Festival Gala coverage of the country's robotics industry.

Company Size and Funding

Galbot has raised roughly $1.15 billion in three years, and by its own account is the highest-valued unlisted humanoid robotics company:

• Angel round — RMB 700 million.
• 2024, strategic — RMB 500 million.
• June 2025 — RMB 1.1 billion, led by battery giant CATL, pushing the valuation past $1 billion.
• December 2025 — over $300 million at a $3 billion post-money valuation.
• March 2026 — RMB 2.5 billion (about $350 million), with the China Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, Sinopec, CITIC entities, SAIC Motor's financial arm and the Bank of China.

Earlier backers include Meituan, IDG Capital, HongShan, GGV and the China Development Bank. Bloomberg reported in December 2025 that the company had selected banks for a 2026 Hong Kong listing. Separately, a joint venture with Bosch's investment arm has raised close to RMB 300 million of its own.

The shape of that investor list is worth a moment. A battery manufacturer, a petrochemical major, a state semiconductor fund, a carmaker's finance arm and two banks are not growth investors chasing a multiple — they are industrial and state actors placing a strategic bet.

Development Directions and Products

Galbot's shipping products are wheeled, dual-armed machines, not bipeds, and that is a decision rather than a limitation. A wheeled base cannot fall over, needs far less power for balance, and carries more — which is exactly what you want from a machine that has to stand in a shop unattended for years:

• G1 — 1,730 mm, dual arms with a 10 kg payload, running on NVIDIA AGX Orin. The retail workhorse.
• S1 — the heavy-duty version: 30 kg across both arms, 1.5 m/s, and an eight-hour battery, which is a full shift without intervention.
• ET1 — the company's first bipedal humanoid, unveiled at the World Robot Conference in August 2026 with pre-orders opening on 3 September. It is driven by an Astrobrain whole-body-control model trained on around 100,000 hours of human movement, learns by watching rather than replaying recorded routines, and is being taught to play tennis. Published dimensions vary sharply between sources — figures of both 123 cm / 30 kg and roughly 173 cm / 65 kg circulate — so treat any single spec as unconfirmed. One detail that is consistent and telling: ET1 uses motors sourced from Unitree, a direct competitor.

Underneath all three is Galaxy Star Brain, a shared embodied foundation model that unifies perception, task planning and motion control across the wheeled, heavy-duty and bipedal bodies — the same platform argument NEURA makes with Neuraverse, made across one company's own range.

Markets and Customers

The shop is the product

Galbot's flagship deployment is not a pilot with a manufacturer. It is a retail chain. Galbot Stores — unstaffed convenience units where the robot identifies products on the shelves, retrieves what is asked for, handles the transaction and answers questions — run around the clock, and the estate has grown from roughly 100 locations in over 20 cities in early 2026 to reported figures above 170 units across more than 40 cities, with some taking more than 500 orders a day. One is a FamilyMart in Beijing's Zhongguancun district.

This is the largest deployment anywhere of a humanoid as the primary service provider rather than as a material handler, and it has a regulatory milestone attached: a Beijing pharmacy running Galbot robots became the first in China licensed for robot-assisted dispensing. Getting a pharmaceutical licence is a harder test than any factory pilot, because a regulator had to be persuaded rather than a plant manager.

The robots also run pilot and production work on automotive and battery lines, with CATL, Bosch, Toyota, BAIC and SAIC named, and a joint research programme with Beijing's Xuanwu Hospital. In September 2026 a G1 worked real pharmacy shifts at IFA in Berlin — the company's first substantial European exposure, and one that drew immediate questions there about Chinese data legislation, which is a problem no amount of engineering solves.

The honest framing: measured against Agility's logged industrial hours or UBTECH's audited factory revenue, Galbot is doing something different rather than something further along. But hundreds of daily transactions with ordinary members of the public, under a licence, is a kind of proof that no amount of warehouse piloting provides — and the counterintuitive reason it works is that these robots are on wheels.