CHINA'S EMBODIED AI STARTUPS RAISED $13B IN H1 2026, FIVE TIMES LAST YEAR, AS ROBOT MAKERS SHIFT FROM MOVES TO BRAINS

Summary from the TLDR Hardware newsletter

After years of building humanoids that run, dance, and backflip, Chinese companies are pouring money into the AI that would make them useful across more jobs, meaning software that lets robots understand their surroundings and learn new tasks without per-job programming. Chinese embodied AI companies raised 93.5 billion yuan across 322 deals in the first half of 2026, five times a year earlier, with funding increasingly going to specialist robot-intelligence developers as well as manufacturers.