Galbot

Origins

Galbot — known in Chinese as 银河通用, or Galaxy General — was incorporated in Beijing in May 2023 by He Wang, a tenure-track assistant professor at Peking University's Center on Frontiers of Computing Studies who also directs the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence's embodied AI centre. Wang, who holds a Stanford doctorate, is identified by his own profile and by outside reporting as founder and chief technology officer rather than chief executive. The company operates R&D centres in Beijing, Shenzhen, Suzhou and Hong Kong, and joint laboratories with Peking University, BAAI and Xuanwu Hospital.

Technical approach

Galbot's software centre is AstraBrain (银河星脑), an end-to-end embodied model that the company says folds task planning, whole-body motion control and dexterous hand control into one network instead of separate "brain" and "cerebellum" modules. Training leans heavily on synthetic data generated in simulation; in August 2025 China's National Data Administration cited Galbot's synthetic dataset as a reference case for high-quality data. Research output has widened alongside the product line: a co-speech gesture system built with Tsinghua and Peking University collaborators operates in a 41-DoF upper-body space, and an athletic control stack underpinned the 100-plus consecutive tennis rallies its robots played against human opponents at the second World Humanoid Robot Games.

Products and deployments

The commercial base is the wheeled, dual-armed G1, aimed at shelf restocking, pharmacy picking and similar structured tasks, and used to run unattended retail outlets under the Galbot Store banner. In January 2026 the company released the S1, a heavier industrial platform it says works autonomously on production lines at battery maker CATL, itself an investor; it has also signed a deployment agreement with parts manufacturer Baida Precision covering more than 1,000 machines, and works with Xuanwu Hospital on ward, pharmacy and guidance tasks. G1 units appeared on CCTV's 2026 Spring Festival Gala. The bipedal ET1, teased ahead of WRC 2026 and put up for pre-order on JD.com in September, is its first walking platform and targets performance and greeting work rather than logistics.

Funding and market position

Counterpoint Research placed Galbot third globally with more than 1,100 shipments in H1 2026, behind AGIBOT and Unitree. Capital has arrived in quick succession: a 700-million-yuan angel round in June 2024, a CATL-led B round of more than 1.1 billion yuan in mid-2025, a China Mobile-led C round of over $300 million in December 2025 that the company said valued it at $3 billion, and 2.5 billion yuan in early 2026 from investors including the National AI Industry Investment Fund and Sinopec. Galbot puts cumulative fundraising above 6.96 billion yuan. It completed a shareholding reform in November 2025 and has been linked to a Hong Kong listing, which the company played down at the time.

Competitive context

Galbot sits between AGIBOT's multi-form portfolio and Unitree's low-cost bipeds, with a narrower bet on mobile manipulation in structured commercial and industrial settings. The ET1 moves it onto ground those rivals already occupy, while its industrial contracts test whether wheeled platforms can hold share as bipedal deployments scale.