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Published 2026-07-24 · Updated 2026-08-23 Week 29 | 2026 — Ken Zhang If 2025 was the year of the "Humanoid Concept," Week 29 of 2026 is the moment the market bifurcated. The capital markets are finally demanding discrimination between "sci-fi renderings" and "industrial
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Published 2026-07-23 · Updated 2026-08-22 The Simulation Trap Here is what I believe: the humanoid robotics market is currently mispricing the value of software hallucinations over physical friction, and the companies winning the next decade will be those that stop trying to "scale" their way
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Published 2026-07-22 · Updated 2026-08-20 By Ken ZHANG (Maze Intelligence) Date: July 2026 Welcome to Funding Flow. If last year was the "Peak of Inflated Expectations" for humanoid robotics, this quarter is the beginning of the "Slope of Enlightenment." Markets are no longer
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Published 2026-07-21 · Updated 2026-08-21 Issue #011 — Vertical Slice | By Ken ZHANG (Maze Intelligence) | Theme: Humanoid Robotics & Embodied AI Infrastructure If 2023 was the year of the "concept video" and 2024 was the year of the "factory pilot," 2026 is shaping up
Published 2026-07-21 · Updated 2026-08-18 WAIC 2026 drew 1,100+ exhibitors and over 100,000 m² of exhibition space, with embodied-intelligence exhibitors expanding from roughly 80 to 200+ companies year-over-year — a 2.5× jump (per show-floor reporting from Robotics Today and The Robotics
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Published 2026-07-21 · Updated 2026-08-21 The Last Mile of the SPAC Boom By Ken ZHANG (Maze Intelligence) If the robotics hype cycle of the early 2020s was defined by the promise of a general-purpose butler in every home, the coming era will be defined by the
Published 2026-07-20 · Updated 2026-08-17 WAIC 2026 is over. If you walked the floors of Shanghai in mid-July, you saw it: over 1,100 exhibitors total, with embodied intelligence as the organizing theme, and nearly 60 humanoid robots deployed at scale to provide real-world services
Published 2026-07-17 · Updated 2026-08-17 Last week I mapped the embodied-data collection industry: roughly 97 active players — with ~70 focused specifically on data collection — that pulled in 4.47B yuan (~$620M) in about a year (QbitAI, July 2026). The entire industry is optimizing for one metric:
Published 2026-07-16 · Updated 2026-08-18 When a single humanoid company's financing hits $200 million, the story stops being about that company. It becomes a story about the structure of the market. LimX Dynamics closed a Pre-IPO round in mid-July at 15 billion RMB
Published 2026-07-14 · Updated 2026-08-17 China's robotics companies raised $5.6 billion across 176 deals — but note the fine print: that figure is through mid-May 2026, not the full first half (Crunchbase data, reported May 20). It still matches the full-year record from
Published 2026-07-13 · Updated 2026-08-16 The humanoid headline is always the same two names: Unitree and Agibot, shipping thousands of units, raising the largest rounds, getting the press. The story underneath is less reported. I spent the last few weeks going through every humanoid company's
Published 2026-07-10 · Updated 2026-08-18 Last week I admitted I didn't have a defensible funding number. This week I went and got one — not from an AI-generated valuation table, but from primary sources: a STAR Market prospectus, a Hong Kong exchange filing, and a