Booster Robotics

What it builds

Booster Robotics, registered in Beijing as 北京加速进化科技有限公司, designs bipedal humanoid robots that it sells as development platforms rather than finished service machines. The T1 is a 1.1-metre, 29-kilogram humanoid first shown at the World Robot Conference in August 2024. It is joined by the smaller K1, which the company launched at $4,999 in October 2025 with 22 degrees of freedom and an NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX module. Both ship with an open SDK and simulation support, and the company frames its aim as making humanoid robots as simple, reliable and practical as personal computers.

Team and approach

Founder and chief executive Cheng Hao took bachelor's and master's degrees at Tsinghua University's automation department and competed on its Hephaestus RoboCup soccer team. He earlier founded the scheduling app Chaoxi Calendar and, after ByteDance acquired it, served as a product vice-president for Feishu. Zhao Mingguo, a Tsinghua researcher who heads the university's Robot Control Lab, is chief scientist. The company says its core team carries about two decades of humanoid experience and that it designs its force-controlled joints and robot bodies in-house.

Competition as proving ground

Robot sport is Booster's main technical showcase. At RoboCup 2025 in Brazil, Tsinghua's Hephaestus team won the AdultSize humanoid soccer division on T1 hardware, reported as the first Chinese gold in that division in the tournament's 28-year history, while both finalists in the KidSize league ran K1s. The RoboCup Federation has since named Booster, alongside Fourier and Unitree, in a humanoid research and education partnership, and the company lists wins in racing and obstacle events at the IEEE-RAS Humanoids conference. Exposure has also come from outside the labs: a T1 served as the house robot at an invite-only robot fight night in San Francisco, and a customer's K1 boarding a Southwest flight helped trigger US airline bans on humanoids in cabins.

Funding and traction

Booster raised an angel round in October 2023 and a Pre-A led by Source Code Capital in 2024, followed by a Series A led by Shenzhen Capital Group and a Series A+ of more than 100 million yuan, about $13.9 million, in July 2025 backed by Beijing municipal funds. In April 2026 it announced a round of nearly 1 billion yuan co-led by the Beijing High-Precision Industry Fund, Beijing Guosheng Fund and Huakun Fund, with Legend Star, Guohai Innovation Capital and BOCOM Capital joining and existing holders Shenzhen Capital, Source Code Capital, InnoAngel and IDG following on. Alongside that round the company disclosed cumulative K1 shipments above 1,000 units to roughly 400 customers in more than 20 countries, first-quarter 2026 shipments up 500 percent year on year, and positive operating cash flow in December 2025. Proceeds are earmarked for a global delivery network, embodied AI algorithms and product upgrades.

Where it sits

Booster occupies the research-and-education tier of the Chinese humanoid market, above consumer hardware such as Noetix's Bumi, priced below $1,400, and in the same band as Unitree's R1. Unlike peers drawn into SAP's embodied AI pilots, its revenue still rests on selling hardware to labs, schools and competition teams. It showed both T1 and K1 at CES 2026.