Leju Robotics — Kuavo humanoids and Aelos educational bipeds from Shenzhen
Leju Robotics (乐聚机器人) is a Shenzhen-headquartered humanoid robotics company spun out of the Harbin Institute of Technology in 2016. With Kuavo, its full-size bipedal humanoid robot, and the Aelos family of educational bipeds, Leju is positioned as one of the leading Chinese players of the current humanoid robotics and AI boom, alongside Unitree, UBTECH, and Fourier Intelligence.
- 2016Founded
- Shenzhen, CNHeadquarters
- Kuavo 5Latest flagship (2025)
- ~$210M pre-IPOFunding raised
- ChinaCountry
- Pre-IPOStatus
About Leju Robotics
Leju Robotics — legally Leju Intelligence (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd., and previously registered as Leju (Shenzhen) Robotics Co., Ltd. — was founded in March 2016 in Shenzhen by Leng Xiaokun, Chang Lin, and An Ziwei, joined by roughly 25 master's and doctoral students recruited from the Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT) Intelligent Robot Club. The founding team had spent 2015 building low-cost bipedal robots inside the university, and the company's earliest products carried that DNA: compact, torque-controlled bipeds designed for education and research rather than the industrial floor.
Leju's commercial arc began in August 2016 with the launch of Aelos, a 34.6 cm desktop humanoid marketed to STEM classrooms and hobbyists. Aelos units performed in the widely broadcast "Beijing 8 Minutes" segment at the closing ceremony of the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics, and the family later shipped to K-12 classrooms, science museums, and competition circuits in more than 30 countries. Alongside Aelos, the company built out an educational and research portfolio — Pando, Cube, and the medium-size Roban bipedal research platform — that gave Leju a broader base than most humanoid startups before its shift into full-size platforms.
The pivot to industrial-scale humanoids came in 2023–2024. Leju partnered with Huawei as the lead hardware reference for the OpenHarmony-based KaihongOS and the Pangu embodied-intelligence models, and unveiled its full-size Kuavo humanoid in March 2024 at the Appliance and Electronics World Expo in Shanghai. Kuavo was then showcased at the Huawei Developer Conference in June 2024 as the lead reference design for the Pangu embodied-intelligence stack, a demonstration that established Leju as Huawei's most visible humanoid partner. By January 2025 Leju had shipped its 100th full-size humanoid; by the end of 2025 the company said Kuavo had been adopted by universities, exhibition halls, automotive plants, and selected service venues.
Leju's funding history spans a decade. It closed a RMB 10 million angel round from Songhe Capital in 2016, a 2017 pre-A from Shenzhen Capital Group, and a RMB 50 million strategic investment from Tencent that same year through the Tencent AI Accelerator. A Series B of about US$36 million closed in June 2019, and in October 2025 the company announced a pre-IPO round of approximately RMB 1.5 billion (about US$210 million) led by Greenwoods Asset Management with participation from CITIC Golstone, Shenzhen Investment Holdings Capital, the Sino-US Green Fund, and others. The company converted to a joint-stock structure, rebranded as Leju Intelligence, and in 2026 became the first humanoid-robotics filing accepted by the ChiNext board of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange under the fourth-set listing standard, targeting RMB 2.6 billion at an implied IPO valuation of roughly RMB 10.4 billion. Direct competitors on the Chinese side include Unitree Robotics, UBTECH, and Fourier Intelligence; global comparables include Figure AI, Tesla Optimus, Boston Dynamics, and Apptronik.
Product lineup: Aelos, Roban, and the Kuavo generations
Leju maintains one of the widest product portfolios in Chinese humanoid robotics, spanning desktop educational bipeds through full-size industrial humanoids. The Aelos and Pando families continue to serve the education market that funded the company's first decade, while Roban targets university research and RoboCup competition, and Kuavo is the flagship general-purpose humanoid line that has driven Leju's pre-IPO valuation.
Aelos (2016–present) — the educational biped
Aelos is Leju's first commercial product: a 34.6 cm, 1.8 kg, 16-servo desktop humanoid marketed to children roughly nine to fifteen years old. Programmed through a Google Blockly-based visual environment that graduates to Python and C++, it can dance, perform yoga movements, kick a small football, and respond to voice commands. Aelos units shipped in the tens of thousands to STEM classrooms, science museums, and competitions across more than 30 countries.
Roban (2019, Roban 2 c.2023) — the research biped
Roban is Leju's medium-size (approximately 80–100 cm) research platform, running Python on a Linux stack with 22+ degrees of freedom, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi. It is used in university laboratories and by teams competing in the RoboCup Humanoid League. Roban 2 added modular access panels and improved manipulation.
Kuavo 1.0 / 3.0 (2024) — the full-size demonstration platform
Kuavo (夸父, romanized as "Kuafu") is Leju's full-size flagship humanoid. The first-generation Kuavo was unveiled in March 2024, stood approximately 1.7 m tall, delivered 360 N·m peak joint torque, walked omnidirectionally at up to 4.6 km/h, and was promoted as the first humanoid to run on the OpenHarmony-based KaihongOS. It became the reference design for Huawei's Pangu embodied AI stack at HDC 2024.
Kuavo-MY (2024) — the open-development humanoid
Kuavo-MY ("Make Yours") is a 147 cm, 45 kg, 26-DoF humanoid targeted at researchers and developers, priced around US$50,000. It is sold internationally through distribution partners including Foxtech Robot.
Kuavo 4 Pro and Kuavo 5 / 5-W (2025) — the industrial flagship
Kuavo 4 Pro succeeded Kuavo 3.0 as the main industrial-pilot platform with refreshed joints and improved reach. Kuavo 5 (2025) is the modular industrial humanoid — 168 cm, 40+ DoF, more than eight hours of runtime, and interchangeable end effectors (a five-fingered dexterous hand, parallel gripper, and claw), listed at about US$38,000 — while the wheeled Kuavo 5-W variant swaps the bipedal legs for a wheeled base on the same upper-body chassis for higher stability in repetitive tasks. Kuavo 5 MaxB manuals list a dual-compute stack pairing an Intel Core Ultra 7 255H host with an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin.
| Model | Year | Height | Weight | Payload | Battery | Actuators | Notable |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aelos | 2016 | 34.6 cm | 1.8 kg | — | — | 16 servos | K-12 STEM; 2018 Winter Olympics closing ceremony |
| Roban | 2019 | ~80–100 cm | — | — | — | 22+ DoF | Research biped; RoboCup Humanoid League |
| Kuavo 1.0 | 2024 | ~170 cm | ~65 kg | ~5 kg/hand | ~2 hr | 26 DoF, 360 N·m peak | KaihongOS + Huawei Pangu; HDC 2024 demo |
| Kuavo-MY | 2024 | 147 cm | 45 kg | — | — | 26 DoF | Open-development platform; ~US$50,000 |
| Kuavo 4 Pro | 2025 | ~170 cm | — | ~10 kg dual-arm | — | 40+ DoF | Industrial-pilot platform; extended arm reach |
| Kuavo 5 | 2025 | 168 cm | 63.5 kg | ~20 kg total | >8 hr | 40+ DoF BLDC | Modular; ~US$38,000; Intel + Jetson Orin compute |
| Kuavo 5-W | 2025 | 168 cm | — | ~20 kg total | >8 hr | 40+ DoF + wheeled base | Wheeled variant for repetitive factory work |
Technology stack
Leju's technology position is defined by two things: a self-developed high-torque actuator stack rooted in the Harbin Institute of Technology robotics program, and a deep integration with Huawei's software and AI ecosystem. The company has publicly emphasized that it develops its own torque servos, self-stabilizing biped gait algorithms, robot structural design, and core-component manufacturing — while relying on Huawei for the operating system and foundation model layer.
Perception
Kuavo carries a multi-sensor perception stack: stereo RGB-D cameras, wrist cameras, an IMU, LiDAR and time-of-flight modules, force-torque sensing at the manipulators, and joint torque sensing on every arm joint. Force resolution at the wrist is quoted at approximately 0.5 N, which is what allows Kuavo to perform contact-rich tasks such as subassembly handling and quality inspection at NIO's smart factory.
KaihongOS + Huawei Pangu foundation model
Kuavo runs the OpenHarmony-based KaihongOS, maintained by Huawei ecosystem partner Shenzhen Kaihong Digital Industry Development, and integrates with the Huawei Cloud Pangu family of embodied-intelligence models for natural-language instruction, visual understanding, and task planning. Leju has said the Huawei integration reduced software-development costs and shortened deployment time for voice and vision features in customer pilots. The compute stack pairs a Huawei Ascend AI accelerator for inference with a Qualcomm Snapdragon vision path on earlier variants, while Kuavo 5 MaxB moves to a dual-compute host of an Intel Core Ultra 7 255H and an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin.
Actuators, power, and compute
Every Kuavo joint is driven by a self-developed high-torque BLDC actuator delivering up to 360 N·m of peak torque at 150 rpm. Kuavo 5 quotes more than eight hours of continuous runtime with hot-swap batteries, walking at up to 4.6 km/h omnidirectionally, and jumping heights above 20 cm — a full-body performance envelope that puts Leju among the most dynamic humanoids in production. Each 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 battery pack integrates cell balancing, thermal management, and multi-stage protection ICs — subsystems whose reliability is often the practical ceiling on how long a humanoid platform can run between charges. Across all of these subsystems, MLCC capacitors, precision resistors, and battery-management ICs are the quiet workhorses of the BOM.
Applications and commercial deployments
Leju has positioned Kuavo across four commercial markets — automotive manufacturing, industrial subassembly, public exhibition, and education/research — and by late 2025 said the platform had been adopted by universities, exhibition halls, automotive plants, and selected service venues. Public-domain deployments include:
- NIO smart factory. Kuavo units underwent pilot testing for subassembly handling and quality inspection at NIO from mid-2024, an early example of a Chinese humanoid deployed on an EV assembly line.
- Jiangsu Hengtong Group. Hengtong hosted Kuavo scale-up application pilots at its manufacturing facilities after mid-2024.
- 15th National Games of China torch relay. On 2 November 2025 a Kuavo unit, branded "Kuafu," served as the "Zero Torchbearer" in Shenzhen, carrying a 1.6 kg torch over a 100-meter segment under remote 5G-Advanced control supplied by China Mobile — the first time a humanoid robot has taken part in a Chinese national multi-sport games torch relay.
- Universities, K-12 schools, and exhibition halls. Aelos units continue to serve K-12 classrooms and science museums in more than 30 countries, and Kuavo has been used in an AI-education program at a school in Mianyang, Sichuan under an education-tailored AI module reported as "Little Bee."
- Joint humanoid assembly plant with Dongfang Precision. In early 2026 Leju and Dongfang Precision opened a joint assembly plant in eastern China designed to produce as many as 10,000 Kuavo-class humanoids per year, with reported takt times as short as one robot every 30 minutes.
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 Kuavo-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, 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 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 — Leju, Unitree, UBTECH, Fourier, Figure, Tesla, 1X, Apptronik, Boston Dynamics, Agility, and more — are chasing the same short list of high-torque BLDC drivers, precision IMUs, GPU compute modules, and automotive-grade power semiconductors. 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 Leju Robotics?
Leju Robotics was founded in 2016 in Shenzhen by Leng Xiaokun, Chang Lin, and An Ziwei, together with a team of about 25 master's and doctoral students recruited from the Harbin Institute of Technology Intelligent Robot Club. Leng Xiaokun remains chairman and the company's legal representative.
What is Kuavo?
Kuavo (夸父) is Leju Robotics' flagship full-size bipedal humanoid. Unveiled in March 2024, it stands approximately 170 cm tall, features 360 N·m peak joint torque, walks omnidirectionally at up to 4.6 km/h, and runs on the OpenHarmony-based KaihongOS with Huawei Cloud Pangu embodied-intelligence models. Later variants include Kuavo 4 Pro, the modular Kuavo 5, and the wheeled Kuavo 5-W.
Where are Leju Robotics robots deployed commercially?
Kuavo has been piloted at the NIO smart factory for subassembly handling and quality inspection, and at Jiangsu Hengtong Group manufacturing facilities. In November 2025, a Kuavo served as the "Zero Torchbearer" at the 15th National Games of China in Shenzhen. Aelos educational bipeds have shipped to K-12 classrooms, science museums, and competitions in more than 30 countries.
How much has Leju Robotics raised?
Leju has raised across multiple rounds since 2016, including RMB 10 million angel from Songhe Capital, a 2017 pre-A from Shenzhen Capital Group, RMB 50 million strategic from Tencent in 2017, a Series B of roughly US$36 million in June 2019, and an October 2025 pre-IPO round of approximately RMB 1.5 billion (about US$210 million) led by Greenwoods Asset Management. In 2026 the company was accepted by the Shenzhen Stock Exchange's ChiNext board under the fourth-set listing standard, targeting RMB 2.6 billion at an implied IPO valuation of roughly RMB 10.4 billion.
Is Hybrid Electronics affiliated with Leju Robotics?
No. Hybrid Electronics is an independent electronic-components sourcing company. We are not a distributor, reseller, or partner of Leju 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. Leju Robotics®, 乐聚机器人, Kuavo, Kuavo-MY, Aelos, Roban, Pando, and related product names are trademarks of Leju Intelligence (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd. Hybrid Electronics is an independent electronic-components sourcing company and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or authorized by Leju Intelligence (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd. All information on this page is compiled from public sources for educational and reference purposes.