Galbot — wheeled bimanual humanoids and end-to-end embodied AI
Galbot (Galaxy Universal, 银河通用) is a Beijing-based robotics and embodied-AI startup building wheeled bimanual humanoid robots and an in-house family of vision-language-action (VLA) foundation models. With the Galbot G1 already staffing more than 100 autonomous Galaxy Space Capsule convenience stores in China and the heavy-duty Galbot S1 running on CATL battery lines, Galbot is one of the most watched players of the current humanoid robotics and AI boom, alongside Figure AI, Tesla Optimus, 1X, Unitree, and Apptronik.
- 2023Founded
- Beijing, CNHeadquarters
- Galbot G1Flagship humanoid
- ~$800MTotal funding
- ChinaCountry
- UnicornStatus
About Galbot
Galbot — legally Beijing Galaxy General Robot Co., Ltd. and known in Chinese as 银河通用 (Galaxy Universal) — was founded in May 2023 in Beijing by Wang He (王鹤), an assistant professor at Peking University and director of the Embodied Intelligence Research Center at the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI). Wang earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at Tsinghua University and completed his PhD in 3D vision and robotics at Stanford before returning to Beida. He remains the company's CTO alongside co-founders Zhang Zhizheng and Yao Tengzhou, and Galbot's technical direction is tightly coupled to Wang's academic work on 3D perception, synthetic training data, and end-to-end policy learning.
The company's thesis is distinctive: rather than chase a bipedal general-purpose humanoid first, Galbot targets a wheeled bimanual form factor that trades legs for an omnidirectional base — reducing power consumption, dramatically extending runtime, and putting the focus on dexterous manipulation and a scalable embodied-AI stack. The core research bet is that most of the commercial value of a humanoid — retail replenishment, pharmacy pick-and-pack, industrial handling — can be captured today with human-scale arms on wheels, provided the AI model is genuinely general-purpose. To that end Galbot operates R&D centers in Beijing, Shenzhen, Suzhou, and Hong Kong, and runs joint laboratories with Peking University, BAAI, Xuanwu Hospital, and Beijing Zhongguancun College.
Galbot's funding trajectory has been unusually aggressive for a Chinese robotics startup. In June 2024 it closed a record CNY 700 million angel round — led by strategic and industrial investors Meituan, BAIC Industrial Investment, SenseTime Guoxiang Fund, and iFlytek Fund, with participation from IDG Capital, Qiming Venture Partners, Lanchi Ventures, Matrix Partners China, and Source Code Capital. A follow-on strategic round in November 2024 added roughly RMB 500 million. In June 2025 the company raised RMB 1.1 billion (about $150 million) led by CATL Capital, Puquan Capital, Beijing Robotics Industry Fund, CDB Sci-Tech Innovation Fund, and Granite Asia (the rebranded Asian arm of GGV Capital), making Galbot a unicorn. A $300 million-plus round in December 2025 — led by China Mobile's Chain-Leader Fund — brought cumulative capital to roughly $800 million and, according to press reports, a valuation of more than $3 billion, alongside a reported 1,000-unit G1 order from a single industrial customer worth about RMB 700 million.
Galbot's direct competitive landscape includes Figure AI, Tesla Optimus, 1X, Apptronik, Agility Robotics, and Boston Dynamics on the Western side, and Chinese peers Unitree, UBTech, Fourier Intelligence, AgiBot, and XPENG Iron at home. Where most of those companies emphasize bipedal locomotion, Galbot's differentiator is the wheeled bimanual chassis paired with an integrated VLA foundation-model family — a bet that end-to-end embodied AI, rather than more actuators, is what turns a research demo into a deployable commercial product during the current general-purpose robot and AI boom.
Product lineup: Galbot G1 and Galbot S1
Galbot pursues a dual-track hardware strategy. The G1 is the flagship wheeled bimanual humanoid used in retail, pharmacy, and light industrial applications; the S1 is a heavy-duty wheeled humanoid engineered for factory-floor material handling. Both share the same Galaxy StarBrain embodied-model family, allowing AI capability improvements to be reused across form factors.
Galbot G1 (2024) — the flagship wheeled bimanual humanoid
The G1 pairs a human-scale upper body — two 7-DoF arms with dexterous end-effectors — with a 360-degree omnidirectional wheeled base and a lifting torso. The chassis reaches roughly 1.73 m at standing height and up to ~2.4 m of vertical reach with the 650 mm torso lift extended. G1 handles up to 5 kg per arm (10 kg combined), moves at up to 1.5 m/s, and delivers up to ~8–10 hours of continuous runtime from a 48 V / 30 Ah pack. It is priced around RMB 700,000 (roughly $100,000 USD) and is available in a G1 Premium variant with an NVIDIA Jetson Thor compute upgrade for higher-throughput VLA inference.
Galbot G1 Premium (2025) — Jetson Thor compute variant
The G1 Premium keeps the same mechatronics but upgrades the on-robot compute from Jetson AGX Orin 64 GB to NVIDIA's Jetson Thor platform, giving it substantially more headroom for real-time VLA inference. G1 Premium is the platform deployed in Galbot's Beijing smart pharmacy pilots.
Galbot S1 (2026) — the heavy-duty industrial platform
The S1 targets the payload bottleneck that limits most humanoids on real production lines. Its dual arms support up to 50 kg of combined payload, and the platform adds autonomous battery-swapping, dust and vibration hardening, and an embodied logistics model tuned for industrial workflows. The S1 is currently deployed on CATL's intelligent production lines for module and battery-pack manufacturing — the first heavy-duty humanoid powered by CATL batteries in production use.
| Model | Year | Height | Weight | Payload | Battery | Actuators | Notable |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Galbot G1 | 2024 | ~1.73 m | ~85 kg | 5 kg/arm, 10 kg total | 48V 30Ah, ~8–10 hr | Wheeled base + dual 7-DoF arms | Galaxy Space Capsule stores; ~$100K price |
| Galbot G1 Premium | 2025 | ~1.73 m | ~85 kg | 5 kg/arm, 10 kg total | 48V 30Ah, ~8–10 hr | Same as G1 + Jetson Thor compute | Beijing smart pharmacy pilots |
| Galbot S1 | 2026 | Heavy-duty | Industrial | 50 kg combined | Swappable, ~8 hr | Wheeled + high-torque dual arms | CATL battery-line deployment |
Technology stack
Galbot's platform is a tightly integrated combination of a wheeled bimanual mechatronic base, multi-camera perception, on-robot NVIDIA compute, and a proprietary family of end-to-end vision-language-action (VLA) foundation models that the company groups under the Galaxy StarBrain umbrella. Wang He has publicly framed the thesis as an intelligence-first approach: dexterous manipulation and general embodied AI, not bipedal locomotion, are the near-term commercial bottleneck.
Perception
The G1 fuses a stereo head camera with two wrist depth cameras, four torso RGB cameras, six-axis wrist force sensors, a chassis 3D LiDAR, eight ultrasonic sensors, and inertial measurement units for closed-loop manipulation. Galbot's default retail configuration is pure-vision navigation — the company's NavFoM foundation model steers the robot from cameras alone in typical store environments — with LiDAR reserved for harder industrial settings.
GraspVLA, GroceryVLA, TrackVLA, NavFoM
Galbot's headline research contribution is a family of end-to-end embodied foundation models rather than a single generalist. GraspVLA — released in January 2025 and described by Galbot as the world's first end-to-end embodied grasping foundation model — is pre-trained entirely on the SynGrasp-1B synthetic dataset (roughly one billion vision-language-action frames) and reaches zero-shot generalized grasping at a reported 95%+ success rate on unseen retail packaging. GroceryVLA specializes the stack for retail: dense-shelf recognition, cross-category picking of rigid, soft, and transparent packaging, and closed-loop replanning when goods are moved or bumped mid-task. TrackVLA (June 2025) extends the family to embodied "full-self-driving" style navigation and person-following, and NavFoM supplies camera-only navigation.
Actuators, power, and compute
Galbot uses electric brushless DC (BLDC) actuators throughout the arms and torso, driven by high-current motor-driver stages, and a 48 V lithium battery pack (30 Ah on standard G1) with integrated cell balancing, thermal management, and multi-stage protection. On-robot compute is centered on NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin 64 GB for the standard G1 and Jetson Thor for G1 Premium and S1, allowing the VLA policies to run entirely on the robot without cloud connectivity for real-time tasks.
Power management is a particularly demanding subsystem for a humanoid of this class. 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 onboard 48 V battery pack integrates cell balancing, thermal management, and multi-stage protection ICs — subsystems whose reliability is often the practical ceiling on how long a wheeled humanoid platform like the G1 can run between charges.
Applications and commercial deployments
Galbot's go-to-market has been unusual for a humanoid startup: instead of a single marquee automaker pilot, the company is deploying its wheeled humanoid across retail, pharmacy, and heavy industry in parallel, and it operates its own end-customer format in the form of the Galaxy Space Capsule autonomous stores.
- Galaxy Space Capsule autonomous convenience stores. The first Space Capsule opened in Beijing's Haidian district in August 2025 as the world's first city-scale, 24-hour convenience store fully operated by humanoid robots. Backed by Meituan and a "Ten Cities, Hundred Stores" program, the format surpassed 100 stores across more than 20 Chinese cities within roughly six months, with a single 9-square-meter capsule reportedly serving ~2,000 customers and ~500 orders per day.
- Smart pharmacies (G1 Premium). More than 10 humanoid-operated smart pharmacies were live in Beijing by late 2025, with Galbot targeting expansion to 100+ locations. G1 Premium performs prescription picking and packaging using GroceryVLA adapted to pharmaceutical SKUs.
- Industrial deployments (Galbot S1). The heavy-duty S1 is in production use on CATL's battery-module and battery-pack lines — Galbot is the only embodied-AI company that CATL has invested in to date. Additional industrial pilots and partnerships involve Bosch, Toyota, BAIC Group, SAIC Group, and Zeekr.
- Additional target markets. Galbot publicly targets logistics, medical/hospital environments (joint lab with Xuanwu Hospital), education, and hospitality/reception (迎宾) as adjacent verticals for the G1 platform.
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 Galbot-class platform depends on thousands of individual electronic components: precision BLDC motor drivers, high-torque servo modules, IMUs and 6-DoF force-torque sensors, LiDAR and time-of-flight modules, GPU compute boards such as NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin and Jetson Thor carriers, battery-management ICs, wide-bandgap SiC/GaN power semiconductors, high-speed board-to-board connectors, precision 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 — Galbot, Figure AI, Tesla, 1X, Unitree, UBTech, Apptronik, AgiBot, and others — are chasing the same short list of high-torque BLDC drivers, precision IMUs, Jetson-class GPU compute 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:
Obsolete and end-of-life parts
Legacy semiconductors, sensors, connectors, and passives that are no longer in mainstream distribution — the parts that keep older platforms running during transitions to newer hardware, and the long-tail items that block a BOM from closing.
Allocated and hard-to-find active parts
High-torque BLDC motor drivers, IMUs and MEMS sensors, SiC/GaN power devices, GPU compute modules, precision resistors, and MLCC capacitors caught in allocation or long-lead times. Send us a BOM or a shortage list — we'll confirm what we can source and at what lead time.
Frequently asked questions
Who founded Galbot?
Galbot (Galaxy Universal, 银河通用) was founded in May 2023 in Beijing by Wang He (王鹤), an assistant professor at Peking University and director of the Embodied Intelligence Research Center at the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI). Wang studied electrical engineering at Tsinghua University and holds a PhD from Stanford, and remains the company's CTO alongside co-founders Zhang Zhizheng and Yao Tengzhou.
What is the Galbot G1?
The Galbot G1 is a wheeled bimanual humanoid robot standing about 1.73 m tall on a 360-degree omnidirectional base. It carries two 7-DoF arms and dexterous end-effectors, offers up to 5 kg of payload per arm (10 kg combined), and reaches roughly 2.4 m with its 650 mm torso lift. The G1 runs on Galbot's in-house GraspVLA and GroceryVLA end-to-end embodied models and is priced around RMB 700,000 (~$100,000 USD).
Where are Galbot robots deployed commercially?
Galbot G1 units staff the Galaxy Space Capsule autonomous convenience-store format, which surpassed 100 locations across more than 20 Chinese cities within about six months of its August 2025 Beijing launch. G1 Premium units are also deployed at more than 10 Beijing smart pharmacies. The heavy-duty Galbot S1 is in production use at CATL battery-module lines, with additional pilots or partnerships involving Bosch, Toyota, BAIC, SAIC, and Zeekr.
How much has Galbot raised?
Galbot has raised approximately $800 million in cumulative funding across multiple rounds — including a record CNY 700 million angel round led by Meituan and others in 2024, a RMB 1.1 billion (~$150 million) round in June 2025 led by CATL Capital that made it a unicorn, and a $300 million-plus round in December 2025 at a reported $3 billion+ valuation. Investors include Meituan, CATL, IDG Capital, GGV/Granite Asia, Sequoia China (HongShan), Bosch Boyuan, BAIC, SenseTime Guoxiang, and the Beijing Robotics Industry Fund.
Is Hybrid Electronics affiliated with Galbot?
No. Hybrid Electronics is an independent electronic-components sourcing company. We are not a distributor, reseller, or partner of Galbot. All trademarks are property of their respective owners. Hybrid supports robotics developers by sourcing obsolete, allocated, and hard-to-find semiconductors, sensors, connectors, and passives for R&D, prototype, and low-volume production builds.
Can Hybrid help with components for humanoid robotics builds?
Yes. We regularly support R&D and integrator teams with hard-to-find semiconductors, BLDC motor-driver ICs, IMUs and other MEMS sensors, connectors, SiC/GaN power devices, and precision passives for the industrial and embedded boards used in robotics platforms. Send us a BOM or a short list of shortages and we'll confirm availability and pricing.
Trademark and affiliation notice. Galbot®, Galaxy Universal, 银河通用, Galbot G1, Galbot G1 Premium, Galbot S1, Galaxy Space Capsule, GraspVLA, GroceryVLA, TrackVLA, and NavFoM are trademarks of Beijing Galaxy General Robot Co., Ltd. Hybrid Electronics is an independent electronic-components sourcing company and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or authorized by Beijing Galaxy General Robot Co., Ltd. All information on this page is compiled from public sources for educational and reference purposes.