Ant Group has spent the last 18 months quietly assembling one of China’s most aggressive corporate bets on humanoid robotics. The Alibaba-affiliated fintech company has closed roughly a dozen deals in the space, ranging from founding its own robotics subsidiary to co-leading multi-hundred-million yuan funding rounds alongside Didi.

In late 2024, Ant Group established Shanghai Ant Lingbo Technology, operating under the brand Robbyant. The subsidiary launched with a registered capital of 100 million yuan, roughly $13.73 million. Ant’s total R&D spending hit RMB 35.03 billion in 2025.

The first tangible output from Robbyant arrived in September 2025, when the company unveiled its R1 humanoid robot at the Inclusion Conference in Shanghai. The R1 is built for service environments, not factory floors. Ant demoed the machine guiding tours, sorting pharmaceuticals, and handling basic medical consultations.

One notable bet was a funding round exceeding 100 million yuan for AheadForm, a startup focused on emotional intelligence for human-robot interaction.

The larger signal came in June 2026, when Ant and Didi jointly led a financing round worth several hundred million yuan for Jianzhi Robotics, also known as Genrobot. Jianzhi focuses on embodied AI data infrastructure, which is effectively the plumbing that makes humanoid robots learn from real-world experience.

Ant is not alone in this rush. Baidu, Tencent, and Huawei have each made moves into robotics, and the Chinese government has signaled that humanoid robots are a national technology priority.