Kepler Robotics — industrial humanoid robots from Shanghai
Kepler Robotics — legally Shanghai Kepler Exploration Robot Co., Ltd. (开普勒机器人) — is a Pudong, Shanghai-based startup building general-purpose humanoid robots for industrial and service work. With the Forerunner K2 — its 2024/2025 fifth-generation flagship — Kepler is positioning itself as one of China's most aggressive humanoid iterators in the current humanoid robotics and AI boom, alongside Unitree, UBTECH, and Agibot.
- 2023Founded
- Shanghai, CNHeadquarters
- Forerunner K2Latest flagship (2024)
- $20M+ disclosedFunding raised
- ChinaCountry
- PrivateStatus
About Kepler Robotics
Shanghai Kepler Exploration Robot Co., Ltd. was founded in August 2023 in Pudong, Shanghai by co-founder and CEO Hu Debo (胡德波), a telecom and robotics industry veteran. Before starting Kepler, Hu spent roughly a decade in overseas business roles at ZTE and Huawei — including postings across Europe, Russia, and Asia-Pacific — earned a master's degree from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, and later served as CEO of the European arm of Powervision Robot. He co-founded Kepler with the explicit goal of building what the company calls the "ultimate blue-collar robot" — a general-purpose humanoid engineered for repeatable industrial work rather than research demos or highlight reels.
Kepler's product trajectory has been unusually rapid. The company unveiled its first humanoid — Forerunner K1 — in November 2023, roughly four months after founding, and made its international debut at CES 2024 in Las Vegas. By October 2024 the company debuted the fifth-generation Forerunner K2 at GITEX Global in Dubai, and in 2025 it publicly confirmed a K2 deployment inside an SAIC-GM automotive plant in Shanghai — one of the first credible industrial humanoid deployments by a Chinese startup. The company subsequently showcased the platform at ICRA 2025 and a series of major China robotics expos, and set an early industry milestone with an eight-hour continuous, single-charge bipedal humanoid livestream.
Kepler's funding is only partially disclosed, but the picture is that of a rapidly capitalizing Series-stage Chinese robotics company. Reported rounds include a Pre-A in April 2025 with investors that include Zhangke Yaokun Fund, Veichi Electric, and Keli Sensing; a subsequent Pre-A+ round; and a strategic round of 100+ million CNY (approximately US$14M) led by SAIF Partners, with additional participation from Blue Bear Capital and Noblelift Intelligent Equipment. Total publicly disclosed funding sits on the order of US$20M+, with several round sizes and valuations undisclosed. Kepler has not been priced against the multi-billion-dollar valuations of Western peers such as Figure AI or Agility, and its strategy has favored fast, low-cost hardware iteration and a targeted retail price around $20,000–$30,000 per unit.
The competitive landscape Kepler is entering is crowded. Inside China, its direct peers include Unitree Robotics (H1/H2/G1), UBTECH (Walker S series), Agibot / Zhiyuan Robotics (A2/X2), Fourier, XPeng IRON, and EngineAI, while global comparisons include Figure AI, 1X, Apptronik, Boston Dynamics Atlas, and Tesla Optimus. Kepler's chosen differentiator is a hybrid mechanical architecture — combining planetary roller-screw linear actuators with rotary joints — aimed squarely at high-payload, high-endurance industrial tasks rather than the entertainment or research niches occupied by many of its rivals.
Product lineup: Forerunner K1 and Forerunner K2
Kepler has iterated the Forerunner series on an aggressive cadence, moving from a first-generation walking prototype in late 2023 to a fifth-generation industrial platform inside 18 months. Each revision has pushed hard on payload, endurance, and hand dexterity — the three specifications Kepler argues actually determine whether a humanoid can hold down a real factory job.
Forerunner K1 (2023) — the introduction
Forerunner K1 was Kepler's first ambulatory humanoid, unveiled in November 2023 and used to prove out the company's basic mechatronics and to make the CES 2024 international debut. The platform stands roughly 178 cm tall, weighs about 85 kg, and carries 40 total degrees of freedom including 12-DOF dexterous hands. It combines a multi-camera vision head, far-field microphone array, and Kepler's early NEBULA compute stack targeting roughly 100 TOPS of onboard AI acceleration.
Forerunner K2 (2024) — the industrial fifth generation
Forerunner K2, sometimes referred to as K2 "Bumblebee," is Kepler's current flagship. Publicly framed by the company as a "Gen 5.0" platform, the K2 upgrades the K1 with a redesigned 52-DOF body, 11-DOF dexterous hands, a 2.33 kWh quick-charge battery pack (roughly one-hour charge time), planetary roller-screw actuation on the highest-load joints, and a lift capacity of approximately 15 kg per arm (about 30 kg dual-arm). Kepler markets the platform as the world's first commercially available hybrid-architecture humanoid, and it is the platform now deployed in the SAIC-GM Shanghai factory pilot. A wheeled K2-W variant (~135 kg with mobile chassis) extends the same upper body onto a mobile base for logistics-style tasks.
| Model | Year | Height | Weight | Payload | Battery/Runtime | Actuators | Notable |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Forerunner K1 | 2023 | ~178 cm | ~85 kg | ~15 kg dual-arm | ~4 hr | 40 DOF, 12-DOF hands | CES 2024 debut; first-gen platform |
| Forerunner K2 | 2024 | ~178 cm | ~75–85 kg | 15 kg/arm (30 kg total) | ~8 hr / 2.33 kWh | 52 DOF, 11-DOF hands, roller-screw | "Bumblebee"; SAIC-GM Shanghai pilot |
| Forerunner K2-W | 2025 | ~172 cm | ~135 kg (w/ chassis) | 30 kg dual-arm | ~8 hr / 2.33 kWh | K2 upper body + wheeled base | Logistics/warehouse configuration |
Technology stack
Kepler's platform is a vertically engineered combination of custom actuation, multi-modal perception, onboard AI compute, and a cloud-connected learning stack. The company has publicly framed its differentiator as the hybrid actuator architecture — pairing planetary roller-screw linear drives on the highest-load joints with rotary actuators elsewhere — which it argues delivers both the torque density needed for industrial payloads and the smoothness required for whole-body coordination.
Perception
Forerunner platforms carry an infrared binocular 3D camera and a far-field 4-microphone linear array in the head, supported by stereo speakers for human-facing interaction. That primary vision stack is supplemented with force-torque and current sensing at the joints, and additional onboard sensors — Kepler has cited "more than 80 integrated sensors" in K2-class configurations — that together support obstacle avoidance, contact-rich manipulation, and hand-eye coordinated pick-and-place in unstructured environments.
AI and control model
Kepler runs its own NEBULA onboard AI system, targeting roughly 100 TOPS of local compute for perception, planning, and closed-loop control. For higher-level skill acquisition and remote training, the company pairs the onboard stack with a cloud-based learning pipeline used to package new task capabilities and roll them out to the fleet — a common architecture among Chinese humanoid vendors that lean on centralized data collection to accelerate deployment across pilots.
Actuators, power, and compute
The Forerunner K2 uses electric brushless DC (BLDC) actuators with a hybrid planetary roller-screw architecture on the highest-load joints, delivering more than 220 N·m of peak joint torque without hydraulics. Power comes from a 2.33 kWh quick-swap battery pack rated for approximately 8 hours of continuous operation and a one-hour recharge, and onboard compute is understood to include GPU-class acceleration to run NEBULA vision-and-control workloads in real time.
Power management on a K2-class humanoid is a particularly demanding subsystem. Each joint's servo controller must deliver hundreds of watts of instantaneous torque without thermally throttling, which drives the use of wide-bandgap semiconductors — SiC and GaN — in the motor-driver and gate-drive stages, paired with tightly matched precision passives on every gate-drive and current-sense channel. MLCC capacitors line every power and signal rail, and the 2.33 kWh battery pack integrates multi-cell balancing, thermal management, and multi-stage protection built around dedicated battery-management ICs whose reliability is often the practical ceiling on how long the platform can run between charges.
Applications and commercial deployments
Kepler's stated market is the blue-collar industrial workforce — repeatable, physically demanding manufacturing, logistics, and inspection tasks. The company has been unusually transparent about early pilots, and its public deployment list is one of the more substantive among Chinese humanoid startups:
- SAIC-GM automotive plant (Shanghai). Kepler publicly confirmed a Forerunner K2 deployment inside the SAIC-GM Shanghai facility in 2025, making it one of the first Chinese humanoid startups with a real, named industrial deployment at an automaker.
- Materials handling and sample processing. Kepler's own deployment descriptions cite the K2 handling materials movement, sample transfer, and other repeatable production-line tasks under evaluation at customer facilities.
- Patrol, inspection, and quality control. Kepler has publicly named patrol-and-inspection and QC tasks as active pilot categories, taking advantage of the K2's 8-hour endurance and multi-sensor head.
- Research and hazardous-environment pilots. Additional pilots span scientific research data collection and industrial environments that Kepler describes as unsafe or ergonomically prohibitive for human workers.
- International showcases. The K2 has been demonstrated at CES 2024, GITEX Global 2024, ICRA 2025, and multiple major China robotics expos including WAIC, building international visibility ahead of broader commercial rollout.
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 Kepler-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, 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-repeat production runs frequently hit allocation, EOL notices, and long lead times on the exact parts they need, and R&D and field 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 — Kepler, Unitree, UBTECH, Agibot, and their global peers — are chasing the same short list of high-torque BLDC drivers, precision IMUs, 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 Kepler Robotics?
Kepler Robotics — legally Shanghai Kepler Exploration Robot Co., Ltd. — was co-founded in August 2023 by Hu Debo (胡德波), who serves as CEO. Hu is a telecom and robotics industry veteran with prior senior roles at ZTE, Huawei's overseas operations, and Powervision Robot's European business, and holds a master's degree from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden.
What is the Forerunner K2?
The Forerunner K2, sometimes referred to as K2 "Bumblebee," is Kepler's fifth-generation general-purpose humanoid robot. It stands roughly 178 cm tall, weighs about 75–85 kg, has 52 degrees of freedom with 11-DOF dexterous hands, and lifts up to 15 kg per arm (30 kg total). A 2.33 kWh battery delivers approximately eight hours of runtime and recharges in about one hour, and the platform uses a hybrid planetary roller-screw actuation architecture on its highest-load joints.
Where are Kepler robots deployed commercially?
The most prominent announced deployment is inside an SAIC-GM automotive plant in Shanghai, where a Forerunner K2 was placed into a real industrial pilot in 2025 — one of the first Chinese humanoid startups with a named industrial deployment. Kepler has also cited pilots covering materials handling, sample processing, patrol and inspection, and quality-control tasks, and has showcased the platform at CES 2024, GITEX Global 2024, ICRA 2025, and WAIC.
How much has Kepler Robotics raised?
Kepler's funding is only partially disclosed. Publicly reported rounds include a Pre-A in April 2025 with investors including Zhangke Yaokun Fund, Veichi Electric, and Keli Sensing, a subsequent Pre-A+, and a strategic round of 100+ million CNY (approximately US$14M) led by SAIF Partners, with additional participation from Blue Bear Capital and Noblelift Intelligent Equipment. Total publicly disclosed funding is on the order of US$20M+, with several round sizes and valuations undisclosed.
Is Hybrid Electronics affiliated with Kepler Robotics?
No. Hybrid Electronics is an independent electronic-components sourcing company. We are not a distributor, reseller, or partner of Kepler Robotics. 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. Kepler Robotics®, Kepler Exploration Robot®, Forerunner™, Forerunner K1, and Forerunner K2 are trademarks of Shanghai Kepler Exploration Robot Co., Ltd. Hybrid Electronics is an independent electronic-components sourcing company and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or authorized by Shanghai Kepler Exploration Robot Co., Ltd. All information on this page is compiled from public sources for educational and reference purposes.