Booster Robotics raises nearly 1 billion yuan as Q1 shipments surge 500%

Booster Robotics has completed a financing round worth nearly 1 billion yuan (~$140M) jointly led by the Beijing High-Precision Industry Fund, Beijing Guosheng Fund, and Huakun Fund, with participation from Legend Star, Guohai Innovation Capital, and BOCOM Capital. Existing investors including Shenzhen Capital, Source Code Capital, InnoAngel Fund, and IDG also reinvested. Proceeds will be used to build a global delivery network, develop embodied AI algorithms, and upgrade robot products.

The Company

Booster Robotics was founded in August 2023 in Beijing. Its core team has accumulated more than twenty years of expertise in humanoid robots through competition robotics; many founding members participated in the RoboCup Humanoid League before starting the company. Booster describes its goal as providing developers with stable, user-friendly humanoid robots and efficient development tools to drive deployment of embodied AI. That framing reflects a deliberate strategic choice: rather than pitching enterprise customers with factory demos, Booster built its commercial base through robot competition and STEM education, segments with real and immediate demand for reliable hardware.

The Products

Booster's two platforms reflect its strategy directly. T1 is a full-size bipedal humanoid built around RoboCup Adult Size standards, designed for robustness and fall resistance, and sold primarily to research institutions, universities, and competition teams. K1 is a smaller platform weighing under 20 kilograms, packaged with a dedicated carry case and designed for out-of-the-box use in robot soccer, STEM education, and research experiments; it supports mobile app control and continuous action library updates.

Competition performance has validated the T1's motion control architecture. At the 2025 RoboCup German Open Adult Size finals, the Tsinghua Hephaestus team using T1 defeated the host German team 9:0. At the IEEE-RAS Humanoids 2024 conference in Nancy, France, T1 claimed first place in both the Speed Competition and the Obstacle Avoidance and Door Opening Challenge. These results are not incidental to the business; they are how Booster has built its customer base and demonstrated that its locomotion and control software holds up under real competitive conditions.

Commercial traction

Booster K1 has been delivered to more than 400 customers across 20 countries, giving the company a distributed international commercial footprint that most humanoid startups at a comparable stage cannot point to. At CES 2026 in January, every K1 unit displayed at Booster's booth was made available for on-site reservation and delivery; all units sold out before the event ended. The company described the strategy as turning the booth into a pop-up sales terminal for global customers rather than a demo environment.

Q1 2026 shipments rose 500% year-over-year, matching the total volume of the first eight months of 2025. New orders in January and February increased more than 800%, pushing the backlog into the hundreds of millions of yuan. The company reached positive operating cash flow in December 2025.

The round

The April 2026 round follows a compressed funding sequence. Earlier rounds include a Pre-A led by Source Code Capital in May 2024, a Series A in June 2025 backed by Shenzhen Capital Group and CMBC International, and a Series A+ in July 2025 led by the Beijing Robot Industry Development Fund alongside the Beijing Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund. The participation of three Beijing-linked government funds in the April round alongside private investors reflects the Chinese state's interest in building domestic humanoid capacity through companies with demonstrated commercial traction rather than only through headline-stage startups.

Maturity

Booster's K1 revenue model spans hardware sales, tournament IP, sponsorships, and educational courses now used across Chinese schools and universities. The company has not disclosed revenue figures, customer names, or industrial deployment agreements beyond the competition and education sectors. The 400-customer, 20-country figure covers K1; T1's commercial deployment base has not been quantified separately. The April 2026 round is the company's largest financing to date and the first to follow confirmed positive operating cash flow.

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