Industrial Automation

China installs more industrial robots than the rest of the world combined, and the current question is how much intelligence can be added to that base. Traditional automation vendors, machine-vision companies and a new wave of embodied-AI startups are all competing to put foundation models on production lines, in mould shops, in automotive logistics and in the winding and welding cells where labour is hardest to find. Cheap sensors and a manufacturing customer base that will trial early hardware give Chinese teams a real advantage here.

Entries under industrial automation include robots commissioned on real production lines, seed and Series A rounds for physical-AI companies aimed at specific processes such as mould manufacturing, certifications that open export markets, and the flexible robot brain architectures vendors are pitching to manufacturers. We note which deployments are pilots and which are paid.