Chinese robotics startup Lumos Robotics is considering another fundraising round and plans to begin preparations for a possible stock-market listing next year, as it seeks to strengthen its position in China’s rapidly developing robot industry.
Founder and CEO Yu Chao said the company intends to use any fresh capital primarily for industrial deployments, hardware development, and AI models, including computing infrastructure.
Lumos has raised about 1 billion yuan ($147 million) through seven funding rounds, according to the company. Japanese industrial group Mitsubishi Electric is its largest outside shareholder and is working with Lumos on robotics solutions for manufacturing.
The company develops bipedal robots but has placed its commercial focus on MOS 2, a wheeled, dual-arm machine designed for factory applications, including quality inspection and material handling.
Lumos is among a growing number of companies in China’s nascent embodied AI and humanoid robot sector seeking to differentiate themselves by demonstrating practical industrial value rather than focusing solely on human-like robot capabilities.
“The stage of running and jumping has basically passed,” Yu said, speaking ahead of the World Robot Conference opening in Beijing. “The most important thing now is improving reliability in actual industrial deployment.”
Lumos has deployed around 30 MOS robots in inspection and material-handling applications, with roughly five more deployments due shortly, Yu said. More than 10 other customers are at various stages of deployment or proof-of-concept testing.
The Shenzhen-based company has shipped dozens of MOS robots domestically and expects to deliver about 50 more over the next month or so, according to Yu. It is targeting around 300 deliveries this year.
For Yu, the success of an industrial robot depends on more than its ability to perform visually impressive movements. He said a genuine deployment should demonstrate that a robot can operate for sustained periods without failure, improve productivity, and generate an acceptable return on investment.
Lumos has already used this approach in its work with Mitsubishi Electric. In one inspection project, the company reduced the cost of a solution to below 350,000 yuan, compared with roughly 500,000 yuan to 1 million yuan previously, while achieving a cycle time comparable with a human worker, Yu said.
The company has also accumulated about 700,000 hours of robotics data, which it uses to train new skills and shorten development cycles, according to Yu. His goal for this year’s 300 targeted deliveries is for data generated by those robots to feed back into the system.
The strategy comes as Chinese robotics companies increasingly compete to establish commercial applications for embodied AI and humanoid technologies. For Lumos, the focus is on demonstrating measurable industrial performance and cost savings through deployments.
Beyond China, Lumos plans to make a larger overseas push next year. The company will initially look at the Middle East and Europe, while Japan and South Korea are also under consideration.
With a possible new fundraising round under consideration and preparations for a potential stock-market listing expected to begin next year, Lumos is positioning its next phase around industrial deployment, robotics hardware, and AI capabilities. Its targeted 300 deliveries this year and planned international expansion will provide further opportunities to test whether its approach can translate factory-level performance into broader commercial growth.
