Analysis
Ant Group, the Alibaba-affiliated fintech giant, led a 500 million yuan ($73.6 million) pre-Series A round in Zeroth, a Chinese companion-robot maker founded in late 2024, with participation from Monolith, Geely Capital, 37 Interactive Entertainment and Hua Capital. The round brings Zeroth's total capital raised to 1 billion yuan and marks Ant Group's twelfth investment in the humanoid and companion robotics sector since 2025.
That cadence -- a dozen robotics deals in roughly eighteen months -- reflects a deliberate strategic push rather than opportunistic dealmaking. Ant Group has built its own robotics subsidiary, Ant Lingbo Technology, branded RobbyAnt, which formally launched in Shanghai's Pudong district in March 2025 and debuted its first humanoid, the R1, at IFA 2025 in Berlin. Backing Zeroth alongside that internal effort gives Ant exposure across multiple approaches to the consumer and companion robotics market simultaneously.
Zeroth's specific positioning is notably different from the industrial and general-purpose humanoid robots dominating most Western robotics headlines. The company targets elderly care, pet care and children's education, with a consumer price point around $1,500 for its M1 model in China -- a fraction of the tens-of-thousands-of-dollars cost of industrial humanoids from competitors like Unitree and Figure AI. That affordability-first strategy has translated into real commercial traction: Zeroth reports orders for more than 30,000 units and first-half 2026 operating revenue up 600% year-over-year.
“That cadence -- a dozen robotics deals in roughly eighteen months -- reflects a deliberate strategic push rather than opportunistic dealmaking.”
The company plans to expand into North America and Europe this fall, pending regulatory compliance, which would be its first major test of whether the affordable-companion-robot model translates outside the Chinese market where it was built and validated.
For robotics investors, Zeroth's traction is a useful counterpoint to the industrial-humanoid narrative dominating Western robotics funding: there's a genuinely large addressable market in affordable, consumer-facing companion robots for elder care and childcare that doesn't require matching Figure AI or Unitree's price point or general-purpose capability. For founders in adjacent consumer hardware categories, Ant Group's twelve-deal cadence shows a major strategic investor is actively building a robotics portfolio across multiple bets rather than picking one winner, similar to Nvidia's parallel-bet strategy in voice AI.
The bear case: companion robots targeting elder care and childcare carry unique safety, liability and cultural-adoption hurdles that industrial robots deployed in controlled warehouse environments don't face, and Zeroth's planned Western expansion will test all of those simultaneously against a market that hasn't yet demonstrated demand at China's price sensitivity. What to watch next: whether Zeroth's North American and European launches proceed on schedule this fall, and how regulators in those markets treat companion robots interacting directly with children and elderly users.
