Bet on Bots

Beijing-based Galaxea AI is gearing up to sell its AI-powered R1 humanoids globally, pitting itself against a raft of rivals, from homegrown contenders to international heavyweights like Tesla

- BY YUE WANG

In a nondescript building in Beijing’s Zhongguancun district, sometimes called China’s Silicon Valley, a training session is taking place one sweltering July afternoon. In a small, cluttered lab at Chinese robotics startup Galaxea AI, a young employee toggles a switch to direct a base-mounted robotic arm to turn on a nearby lamp. His colleague records a pair of mechanical arms smoothing out a wrinkled bedsheet as they attempt to make a bed.

These images and video clips will be used to help train the company’s proprietary AI model powering its R1 series of wheel-based humanoids. Standing at 1.7-meters tall, they’re designed to assist in factories, and in the not-so- distant future, in homes. That’s an ambitious goal for a two-year-old outfit in an industry racing to deliver next-generation robots expected to transform daily life.

“Our industry is actually developing very fast,” says Xu Huazhe, Galaxea AI’s 32-year-old co-founder and co-chief science officer, from a meeting room at the company’s modest headquarters. “To show our own progress, we need to work harder and even faster."

An honoree of last year’s 100 To Watch list of small companies on the rise in the region, Galaxea AI derives its name from the words “galaxy” and “sea”, reflecting the co-founders’ shoot-for-the-stars ambition while navigating challenges along the way, says Xu. The first target, adds the soft-spoken Stanford-trained engineer, is to deploy the R1 robots across assembly lines at scale within the next three years.