Booster bet robot soccer would sell its humanoid platform; RoboCup teams swept it

Builds affordable full-stack humanoid robot platforms — hardware, software and dev tools — sold to research teams, schools and companies.

Soccer is the best test of embodied AI; cheap, standardized humanoid hardware wins researchers over, and that platform carries robots into factories and homes.

US$14M+ Series A+ announced in July 2025, two days after Booster won RoboCup 2025 in Brazil.

Cheng Hao grew up watching soccer, fell for robots in high school, and studied training robots to play soccer as an undergraduate. He founded Booster in Beijing in 2023 to industrialize that idea.

In June 2025 Booster's RoBoLeague put four university teams on its robots for China's first fully autonomous 3v3 robot soccer night (Tsinghua won the final 5-3), livestreamed by state broadcaster CCTV with 700 tickets sold at $15. Two days after winning RoboCup 2025 in Brazil, it announced a $14M+ Series A+. Its robots carried Tsinghua's team at the first World Humanoid Robot Games that August. In October 2025 it launched a kid-size robot aimed at broader public uses.

At RoboCup 2026, 38 of 59 Humanoid League teams ran on Booster hardware and Booster-powered teams swept the Small, Middle and Large division titles — the Large final podium was all Booster T1. In August 2026 a Tsinghua-led paper on the T1 was the cover feature of Science Robotics's humanoid special issue.

Robot soccer bundles the hardest problems in robotics — vision, locomotion, adversarial real-time decisions — into one public, measurable contest, so progress is legible to buyers and investors.

Standardized cheap hardware converts potential rivals into tenants: 38 of 59 RoboCup 2026 teams built their AI on the same platform instead of rebuilding robots each year.

The shows became a business line: CCTV-streamed matches, sponsors and paid tickets earned money, and prize wins compressed fundraising — the Series A+ landed two days after the 2025 title.

A cover paper in Science Robotics certifies the platform as research infrastructure, which advertising cannot buy.

Pick a public benchmark your product can win, then hand it to your customers: when every team competes on the same cheap platform, the platform becomes the industry's lab.

As of August 2026 Booster has shipped Booster Studio, an IDE for embodied intelligence, and unveiled the Booster T2 — 1.4 meters tall, 31 degrees of freedom, up to 2,070 TFLOPS of onboard compute on NVIDIA Thor in the T2 Pro — pitched at research and early real-world use. At the second World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing (Aug 22, 2026) it says 80 T2 robots formed patterns autonomously and 14 played a 7v7 match, beating a human goalkeeper in a penalty shootout. Cheng Hao's stated sequence is unchanged: soccer pays for the talent, factories and homes are the destination.