Booster Robotics — developer-first humanoid robots from Beijing

• 2023
  Founded
• Beijing, China
  Headquarters
• Booster T1
  Flagship humanoid
• ~$139M
  Funding raised
• China
  Country
• Private
  Status

About Booster Robotics

Booster Robotics — legal name Beijing Booster Robotics Technology Co., Ltd., Chinese trading name 加速进化 ("Accelerated Evolution") — was founded in June 2023 by Cheng Hao, a Tsinghua University automation graduate who had previously founded the calendar startup Zhaoxi (acquired by ByteDance) and led the Feishu (Lark) product organization there before returning to robotics. The founding technical team was drawn from the Tsinghua Robot Control Lab and the university's Hephaestus RoboCup soccer squad — a group with roughly two decades of hands-on humanoid experience — with Tsinghua professor Zhao Mingguo serving as chief scientist. The company is headquartered in Beijing's Haidian district, with additional operations in the Daxing district.

Booster's founding thesis differs sharply from the "general-purpose factory humanoid" pitch favored by U.S. competitors such as Figure AI and Apptronik. Instead, the company set out to build the humanoid equivalent of a developer PC: an affordable, durable, openly programmable bipedal platform that university labs, competition teams, and embodied AI researchers can actually purchase, deploy, and modify. Its first-generation prototype — the BR001 engineering robot — was completed in under two months of design work, and the production Booster T1 began shipping in October 2024. By mid-2025, Booster had delivered its 100th T1; by late 2025, cumulative shipments had exceeded 700 units to more than 200 customers across 20-plus countries, with over half of deployments outside China. In August 2026 the company disclosed that bipedal humanoid shipments had surpassed 3,000 units.

Booster's public breakthrough came in July 2025 at RoboCup 2025 in Salvador, Brazil. Tsinghua's Hephaestus team, competing on Booster T1 robots, won the Humanoid AdultSize league — the first time a Chinese team had ever taken the top prize in that division. In the KidSize league, both finalist teams competed on Booster K1 hardware, with Germany's Boosted HTWK winning the final 11-0 in what became a pure software contest. Booster T1 defended the AdultSize crown at RoboCup 2026 in Incheon, South Korea, again on the Tsinghua Huoshen (Hephaestus) team. The company is now the official hardware supplier for the RoboCup Humanoid League and has partnered with the federation on the 2050 grand challenge to have a humanoid team beat the human FIFA World Cup champions.

On the financing side, Booster has moved quickly. Pre-A rounds in 2024 pulled in tens of millions of RMB from investors including IDG Capital, Legend Star, Source Code Capital, and Qualcomm Ventures. A Series A extension in late 2025 added roughly US$14 million, and in early 2026 a state- fund-led round jointly headed by the Beijing High-Precision Industry Fund, Beijing Guosheng Fund, and Huakong Fund pushed cumulative Series A financing to nearly 1 billion RMB (around US$139 million by press estimates). Alongside the well-funded field of humanoid rivals — Unitree, EngineAI, Fourier Intelligence, Kepler, UBTECH, and MagicLab in China; Figure, Apptronik, Agility, and 1X in the West — Booster occupies a distinct niche as the go-to platform for research and competitive robotics rather than a factory-floor labor play.

Technology stack

Booster describes its architecture as a full stack of hardware body + Booster OS + Booster Studio + embodied large model. In practice that translates into a tightly integrated combination of custom mechatronics, force-controlled BLDC actuation, on-board GPU compute, and a growing library of policies trained through the company's own sim-to-real reinforcement-learning pipeline. The company's stated design priority is durability first — motion-control code, actuator design, and mechanical architecture are tuned for the impacts and falls typical of RoboCup competition and university lab use.

Perception

Both T1 and K1 rely on a stereo RGBD depth camera (Intel RealSense D455 on T1) as the primary vision input, supplemented by a 9-axis IMU for body pose estimation and a circular six-microphone array for audio. Booster provides ROS 2 packages and Isaac Sim / MuJoCo digital twins so that perception pipelines developed in simulation transfer with minimal changes to the physical robot. Optional LiDAR expansions are supported on higher-end configurations.

Embodied AI and control

Booster ships Booster OS — a Linux-based real-time robotics runtime exposing mixed torque, velocity, and position control across every joint — together with Booster Studio, a developer-facing tool for building motion behaviors and evaluating policies. The company's Booster GYM 2.0 framework provides fast sim-to-real reinforcement-learning transfer for locomotion and manipulation. K1 units can integrate with third-party large language models (Doubao is publicly demonstrated), while higher-tier T1 configurations run edge LLMs directly on the on-board Jetson.

Actuators, power, and compute

Every joint on T1 and K1 is a full-force-controlled dual-encoder BLDC module, selected for the smooth torque response and controllable compliance required for bipedal balance and contact-rich manipulation. T1's knee joint peaks at 130 N·m; K1's at 60 N·m. Onboard compute stacks scale from 48 TOPS (K1 Geek, Qualcomm QCS 8550) through 117 TOPS (K1 Edu, Jetson Orin NX 8 GB) up to 200 TOPS on the Jetson AGX Orin 32 GB used in the T1 and the K1 Professional. Battery packs are swappable lithium-polymer designs — 9.5 Ah for T1 and 2 Ah or 5 Ah options for K1 — giving roughly two hours of walking on the flagship.

Power management is the practical ceiling on humanoid runtime and reliability. Each joint's servo controller must deliver hundreds of watts of instantaneous torque without thermally throttling, which drives the use of high-efficiency wide-bandgap semiconductors — SiC and GaN — in the motor-driver stages, and requires tightly matched precision passives on every gate-drive and current-sense channel. The battery packs themselves integrate cell balancing, thermal management, and multi-stage protection ICs — subsystems whose MLCC decoupling, precision current-sense resistors, and battery-management ICs are often the first place BOM shortages bite when a research team tries to scale from one robot to fifty.

The robotics supply chain — where Hybrid Electronics fits in

A modern humanoid robot is one of the most component-dense products ever built. A single Booster-class platform depends on thousands of individual electronic components: precision BLDC motor drivers, dual-encoder servo modules, IMUs and 6-DoF force-torque sensors, stereo-depth-camera front-ends, LiDAR and time-of-flight modules, GPU compute boards (NVIDIA Jetson-class), battery- management ICs, wide-bandgap SiC/GaN power semiconductors, high-speed board-to-board connectors, precision current-sense resistors, and thousands of MLCC capacitors distributed across every power and signal rail.

Building that kind of hardware puts enormous pressure on the electronic-components supply chain. Prototype pilots and low-volume production runs frequently hit allocation, EOL notices, and long lead times on the exact parts they need, and R&D and field-service teams routinely have to support older platforms that use semiconductors no longer in mainstream distribution. During the current humanoid robotics and general-purpose robot AI boom, this pressure is amplified: dozens of well-funded teams — Booster, Unitree, EngineAI, Fourier, Kepler, Figure, Apptronik, Agility, 1X — are chasing the same short list of high-torque BLDC drivers, precision IMUs, Jetson-class GPU modules, and automotive-grade power semiconductors, and franchise stock on many key parts is now measured in months of lead time rather than weeks.

Hybrid Electronics has been sourcing electronic components for industrial and embedded systems since 1995. For robotics teams — humanoid, mobile, industrial, and research — we specialize in finding the parts you need when mainstream distribution can't:

Trademark and affiliation notice. Booster Robotics®, 加速进化, Booster T1, and Booster K1 are trademarks of Beijing Booster Robotics Technology Co., Ltd. Hybrid Electronics is an independent electronic-components sourcing company and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or authorized by Beijing Booster Robotics Technology Co., Ltd. All information on this page is compiled from public sources for educational and reference purposes.