Pudu Robotics — commercial service robots and the D9 humanoid

• 2016
  Founded
• Shenzhen, CN
  Headquarters
• PUDU D9
  Latest flagship (2024)
• $300M+
  Funding raised
• China
  Country
• Private
  Status

About Pudu Robotics

Pudu Technology Inc., doing business as Pudu Robotics, was founded in Shenzhen in 2016 by Zhang Tao — who also goes by the English name Felix Zhang. A Hong Kong University of Science and Technology graduate with a background in mechanical engineering, computer vision, and artificial intelligence, Zhang is a serial entrepreneur who previously co-founded the Chinese tech-media outlet Leiphone and worked at home companion robotics company EZ Robotics before founding Pudu. He remains founder and CEO, and is credited with more than 350 robotics-related patents.

Pudu's early identity was defined by the BellaBot — the cat-faced, four-tray restaurant delivery robot that became a viral fixture of hot-pot chains and casual-dining venues across Asia and, later, North America and Europe. From that single wedge — restaurant food-running — Pudu expanded into hotel delivery, hospital and senior-living logistics, office building courier work, retail signage, and, most recently, commercial cleaning. By the end of 2024 the company had shipped more than 80,000 robots into over 60 countries and regions, making it, by unit volume, one of the largest commercial service-robot manufacturers in the world.

Pudu's funding trajectory mirrors that expansion. The company closed a $15M Series B in July 2020 with Meituan as sole investor, followed by a $15M Series B+ led by Sequoia Capital China (now HongShan) a month later. In 2021 it raised roughly $78 million in a Series C1 and then nearly $77 million more in a Series C2, bringing its combined Series C to about $155 million with backing from Meituan, Sequoia China, Tencent, Shenzhen Investment Holdings, and Greater Bay Area Homeland Development Fund. Additional Series C extensions followed in 2023. In April 2026, Pudu closed a Series D of nearly $150 million at a reported valuation above $1.5 billion, pushing cumulative funding past $300 million.

The company's ambition has broadened from service-robot leadership into embodied intelligence. In 2024, Pudu's internal X-Lab research group shipped three consecutive humanoid platforms: the semi-humanoid D7, the DH11 11-DoF dexterous hand, and — in December 2024 — the full-sized bipedal D9. Pudu is positioning itself alongside Unitree, UBTECH, Fourier, and XPeng as a Chinese humanoid contender, while competing with Bear Robotics and Keenon Robotics for the underlying service-robot market that funds it all.

Technology stack

Pudu's engineering stack is unusual among current humanoid entrants because it is built on ten years of shipping mass-market service robots. The perception, navigation, actuator, and battery-management subsystems used in the D9 humanoid inherit heavily from BellaBot, FlashBot, and CC1 hardware — a level of production maturity most humanoid startups do not yet have.

Perception and navigation

Pudu's flagship platforms use the in-house PUDU SLAM stack, which fuses visual SLAM and laser SLAM (LiDAR) for marker-less deployment in complex commercial venues. BellaBot Pro combines three RGBD cameras, a LiDAR, and two front-view cameras with a fish-eye tray-detection system, while FlashBot layers in RGBD cameras and a customized LiDAR for 3D low-and-overhanging obstacle avoidance. The D9 extends the same philosophy into a full-sized humanoid with a 3D semantic mapping system for stairs and slopes.

Embodied intelligence and control

Pudu X-Lab frames the D9 program as a push toward commercially viable embodied intelligence — AI systems capable of grounding language and vision instructions into whole-body motion in real commercial environments, rather than lab demonstrations. The D9 exposes 42 degrees of freedom under closed-loop control, with a maximum joint torque of 352 Nm, and integrates the DH11 dexterous hand's 11 DoF for two-handed manipulation. Bipedal walking reaches 2 m/s, comparable to a brisk human pace.

Actuators, power, and compute

Across its catalog Pudu uses electric brushless DC (BLDC) actuators — including proprietary servo in-wheel motors on the wheeled fleet and high-torque BLDC joint modules on the D9. Onboard compute stacks combine an application processor, vision accelerators, and (on the humanoid) GPU-class edge silicon for the perception and VLA control stack. Batteries are lithium-ion packs with hot-swap options on BellaBot Pro for 24/7 duty and multi-hour runtimes across the commercial fleet.

Power management is the practical ceiling on how these platforms scale. Every joint's servo controller must deliver hundreds of watts of instantaneous torque without thermally throttling, which is why the current generation of humanoid drive stages leans heavily on wide-bandgap semiconductors (SiC and GaN), tight arrays of precision MLCC capacitors on every gate-drive and current-sense rail, and low-tolerance precision resistors for closed-loop current sensing. On top of that, the battery pack's battery-management ICs — cell balancing, coulomb counting, thermal supervision, and multi-stage protection — determine how long a robot can run between charges and how safely it can be swapped in commercial settings.

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 Pudu-class platform — whether a BellaBot delivery robot or the D9 humanoid — 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, RGBD cameras, 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-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 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:

Trademark and affiliation notice. Pudu Robotics®, PUDU®, BellaBot, BellaBot Pro, KettyBot, PuduBot, FlashBot, SwiftBot, HolaBot, PUDU CC1, PUDU MT1, PUDU D7, PUDU DH11, and PUDU D9 are trademarks of Pudu Technology Inc. (深圳市普渡科技有限公司). Hybrid Electronics is an independent electronic-components sourcing company and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or authorized by Pudu Technology Inc. All information on this page is compiled from public sources for educational and reference purposes.