In October 2025, Leju Robotics completed a 1.5 billion yuan ($207 million) funding round, one of the largest single-round investments in Chinese humanoid robotics at that time. The company had 577 KUAVO units delivered by end of 2025 and reported 178 million yuan in revenue for the year, a 12x increase from 2024. Behind that growth is a strategic technology choice that sets Leju apart from most Chinese humanoid companies: deep integration with Huawei’s HarmonyOS operating system and Pangu foundation model, making KUAVO the most tightly coupled humanoid robot in China’s Huawei sector.
The Huawei Integration
Most Chinese humanoid companies use Android or custom Linux distributions for their software stack. Leju chose HarmonyOS, Huawei’s distributed operating system designed for IoT and connected devices, as KUAVO’s operating system. The decision gives KUAVO native integration with Huawei’s device sector: HarmonyOS robots can share state with HarmonyOS industrial gateways, display panels, sensors, and factory control systems without additional middleware. In a factory fully equipped with Huawei devices, KUAVO integration costs are substantially lower than for robots running Android or Linux.
On the AI side, KUAVO integrates Huawei Pangu, a large foundation model developed by Huawei and trained on Chinese industrial and scientific data. Pangu provides KUAVO with natural language understanding for Mandarin instructions, scene comprehension for Chinese manufacturing environments, and reasoning capabilities for unstructured task planning. Leju’s choice to build on Pangu rather than train a proprietary model from scratch reduced KUAVO’s AI development timeline and uses Huawei’s ongoing model improvements automatically, every Pangu update improves KUAVO’s cognitive capabilities without Leju-specific retraining.
KUAVO Specifications
Height 178 cm, weight 65 kg. Degrees of freedom: 44 total, including 12 DOF per arm (7 arm DOF plus 5-finger hand). Walking speed 1.8 m/s. Maximum payload: 5 kg per hand, 10 kg in combined carry. Force control on all arm joints, 0.5 N resolution at wrist. Vision: stereo RGB-D cameras plus wrist cameras. Compute: Huawei Ascend AI chip for inference, Qualcomm Snapdragon for vision processing. Battery: 2 hours per charge with hot-swap support. Communication: HarmonyOS device mesh, WiFi 6, 5G optional module. Price: approximately CNY 500,000-800,000 ($69,000-$110,000) for commercial deployment, higher than most domestic competitors due to the Huawei premium components.
Revenue Scale and Growth
178 million yuan in 2025 revenue at 577 units implies an average selling price of approximately CNY 308,000 per unit ($42,500), suggesting a mix of research/developer sales at higher prices and some volume commercial sales at lower prices. The 12x year-over-year revenue growth is the fastest reported among Chinese humanoid companies for 2025. Total investment since founding: reportedly exceeding 3 billion yuan ($413 million) across all rounds including the October 2025 raise. Leju is among the best-capitalized humanoid companies in China after AgiBot and Unitree.
National Games Torchbearer
In 2025, KUAVO was selected as a torchbearer for the Chinese National Games, carrying the ceremonial torch in a public relay segment. This is the kind of state endorsement that no marketing budget can purchase. The National Games torchbearer designation placed KUAVO alongside Olympic athletes in national symbolism, an new position for an industrial robot. The visibility drove significant inbound customer inquiries from Chinese manufacturing companies and local government smart factory programs.
Competitive Position
KUAVO competes primarily with UBTECH Walker S2 and Fourier GR-3 in the premium bipedal industrial humanoid segment. The Huawei integration is the differentiator that no competitor can easily replicate, UBTECHs integration is with Siemens (Western industrial sector), Fourier focuses on healthcare and research. For Chinese factories already committed to Huawei infrastructure, KUAVO is the natural choice. For factories with mixed or non-Huawei infrastructure, the HarmonyOS dependency becomes a procurement risk rather than an advantage.
Leju funding context: Top 40 China Robot Rankings 2025. Competitive bipedal comparison: Walker S2 MES integration.
Sources
- 36Kr: Leju Robot secures 1.5B yuan funding (October 2025)
- TechNode: Leju Robotics revenue 12x growth 577 units (2025)
- Huawei Developer Alliance: KUAVO HarmonyOS integration announcement
- Leju Robotics: KUAVO product documentation (2025)
