Dexmal founder Tang Wenbin told a robotics conference that the company is in talks with investors.
Dexmal has not disclosed exactly how much it hopes to raise. The new valuation target is a major step up from its earlier round. Dexmal's existing backers include Alibaba Group and Chinese AI lab Zhipu, also known as Z.AI.
The venture market has cooled in other areas, but investors are still putting money into robotics. The Chinese government has made robotics a priority, which has also drawn state-linked investment funds and stronger interest from private venture capital firms.
Dexmal is not alone in the race. Unitree, a rival robotics company, raised about 904 million yuan in a Shanghai listing that valued the company at 18.5 billion yuan. Dexmal is one of several Chinese robotics companies working on what developers call embodied AI, which serves as the cognitive center for machines and is essential for making humanoid robots practical in factories and homes.
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The industry is still young, but forecasts are ambitious. Some projections say humanoid robot shipments will climb from roughly 1,000 to 3,000 units in the near term to 500,000 units by 2030. That scale could make the market worth $34 billion, with a compound annual growth rate of 34%. One analyst estimate puts humanoid robots at 16% of the broader industrial robot market by that point.
A separate industry estimate valued China's humanoid robot market at 3.4 billion yuan in 2024, and that figure could reach 100 billion yuan by 2030.
Dexmal plans to produce 1,000 humanoid robots this year, ramp up to 10,000 units by 2026, and scale to 300,000 units by 2030. The company says it booked more than 300 orders last year but delivered fewer than 100 machines.
The "vast majority" of those orders are coming from industrial customers such as factories and logistics centers. Cost is one reason adoption is starting to happen. Dexmal says it has reduced the cost of a single unit to about $30,000, down from a range of $50,000 to $60,000 a year ago. The company expects costs to fall another 30% in the next 12 to 14 months as production scales up.
The biggest challenge is software, not hardware. Humanoid robots need what developers call embodied AI, which lets a machine move through messy real-world spaces and grab objects reliably.
Tang said the next two or three years will be a key window for humanoid robots to move beyond simple tasks like carrying boxes. He added that big breakthroughs could come within the next three to five years. With fundraising expected to reach unprecedented levels for Chinese humanoid startups this year, Tang predicted the industry could see consolidation within the next 12 months.
The key differentiator will be whether companies can achieve large-scale deployment of humanoids in factory settings. There are more demonstrations than deployed robots today, but the money keeps flowing.
The $3 billion target shows how much momentum humanoid robotics has gained. The industry is still early, and costs are dropping quickly, but the hardware and software need to get much better before these robots are truly common.
If humanoid robots become a normal sight in warehouses and factories first, as expected, then the companies behind them could be worth far more than today's valuations.
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