By Eduardo Baptista
BEIJING, Aug 18 (Reuters) – Chinese startup Lumos Robotics is weighing a further fundraising round in the run-up to a possible stock-market listing next year, its founder said, betting that factory cost savings rather than flashy humanoid demonstrations will decide the survivors of China’s robot boom.
Lumos has raised about 1 billion yuan ($147 million) across seven funding rounds, the company said. Founder and CEO Yu Chao told Reuters fresh capital would be used mainly for industrial deployments, hardware development, and AI models, including computing infrastructure.
Japanese industrial group Mitsubishi Electric is Lumos’ largest outside shareholder and is working with the Chinese firm on robotics solutions for manufacturing.
Lumos develops bipedal robots but is focusing commercially on MOS 2, a wheeled, dual-arm machine designed for factory work including quality inspection and material handling.
Lumos is one of a growing number of companies in China’s nascent embodied AI and humanoid robot sector looking to gain an edge by proving its machines can deliver the best results on the factory floor even if they may not be the most human-like.
“The stage of running and jumping has basically passed,” Yu said ahead of the opening of the World Robot Conference in Beijing on Wednesday. “The most important thing now is improving reliability in actual industrial deployment.”
Yu said Lumos, founded in 2024 — later than several companies already pursuing initial public offerings — would seek to begin moving towards a listing next year.
LUMOS CLAIMS EFFICIENCY GAINS
The company has deployed around 30 MOS robots in inspection and material-handling applications, with about five more due soon, Yu said. More than 10 other customers are at various stages of deployment or proof-of-concept testing.
Lumos has shipped dozens of MOS robots domestically and expects to deliver about 50 more over the next month or so, targeting around 300 deliveries this year, Yu said.
The test of a genuine deployment was whether a robot could operate for sustained periods without failure, raise productivity, and generate an acceptable return on investment, Yu added.
In a benchmark quality-inspection project with Mitsubishi Electric, Lumos said traditional industry solutions had cost close to 1 million yuan but it reduced this to 200,000 yuan to 300,000 yuan, while maintaining stable operations.
Reuters could not independently verify the figures.
SINGLE- OR MULTI-TASK ROBOT
MOS robots deployed commercially generally perform one task at a time, although Lumos has demonstrated multi-task operation internally, Yu said.
He expects robots capable of reliably handling multiple industrial tasks at scale within roughly two to three years.
Lumos has accumulated about 700,000 hours of robotics data, Yu said, using information from deployed machines to train new skills and speed development. His goal for this year’s 300 targeted deliveries is for data from those robots to feed back into that system.
The company, with dual headquarters in China’s tech hubs of Suzhou and Shenzhen, plans to make an overseas push next year, initially looking at the Middle East and Europe, with Japan and South Korea also being considered.
($1=6.7434 Chinese yuan renminbi)
(Reporting by Eduardo Baptista; Editing by Kate Mayberry)
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