RoboParty bets open-source humanoids need a shared stack; CATL backs 22-year-old founder

Shanghai startup building fully open-source, full-stack bipedal humanoid robots - open hardware, Party OS, and training tools - sold to developers, universities, labs and model companies, with higher-end RP1 robots for real-world deployment.

Embodied AI needs an open DeepSeek moment: RoboParty open-sources robot bodies and tools so model firms share one stack, and the ecosystem becomes the moat.

Reported raises: ~$10M seed (mid-2025, Matrix Partners China/Xiaomi/Galbot/LightSource founders fund), $20M angel (Mar 2026, SenseTime Guoxiang/IDG), multi-$10M angel+ (May 2026, Shunwei lead), and a combined ~¥500M angel++ plus CATL-exclusive Pre-A (Jul 2026).

Huang Yi, born 2004, entered Harbin Institute of Technology's Future Technology College in 2022; in late 2023 he and a roommate built a ~1.2m biped robot, AlexBot, in their dorm in weeks and open-sourced the full design. Over a dozen companies and universities replicated it, and in Feb 2025 Huang graduated early and co-founded RoboParty in Shanghai's Zhangjiang Robot Valley with HIT classmates.

A listed company offered money plus hundreds of locked-in overseas orders; Huang refused, arguing immature tech would poison first users. Instead, Matrix Partners China, Xiaomi Strategic Investment, Galbot and LightSource backed a ~$10M seed in summer 2025. Funding then closed almost monthly: a $20M angel in March 2026, an angel+ led by Shunwei in May 2026, and in July 2026 an ~¥500M angel++ plus a Pre-A led exclusively by CATL - 6 rounds in 8 months, ~20x valuation. In Jan 2026 the team released RPO, a fully open-source biped; by Aug 2026 it claimed 2,000+ GitHub stars, ~10k developer-community followers and ~1,000 orders, and open-sourced Party OS tools including MimicLite (SOTA whole-body tracking on ~1/500 the compute) and INTACT (JEPA-based, ~300x lower planning latency).

Scaling pre-revenue: ~90 staff, RPO in developers' hands, RP1 for real-world deployment scheduled for Q4 2026, and CATL co-developing manufacturing/energy applications.

Closed body makers force every model company to reinvent hardware, so an open standard can become the industry substrate.

AlexBot's replication by 10+ firms and universities proved demand for open robot designs before RoboParty existed as a company.

Refusing volume orders to protect first-user experience kept the developer-focused strategy credible to investors.

CATL's direct strategic investment signals industrial customers see open humanoids as a shared infrastructure play.

DeepSeek's open-model precedent makes the 'open full-stack for embodied AI' story legible to Chinese capital.

An open-source strategy can outbid locked order books: when the product is a standard others build on, quality developers and follow-on investors arrive faster than volume deals.

As of early September 2026 RoboParty is the fastest-rising Chinese open-source humanoid startup, with RPO in developers' hands and RP1 scheduled for Q4 2026. Huang is deliberately anti-hype: he keeps benchmarks and product reliability ahead of volume, and internal research claims SOTA whole-body tracking with radically less compute. CATL is exploring real manufacturing and energy applications with the team. The gap between a ~20x valuation in eight months and shipped, repeatable deployments remains the open risk.