The robotics frenzy continues to dominate headlines. Throughout August, robots were everywhere—from the WRC expo in Beijing drawing 557,000 visitors in five days, to robotics firm Unitree's blockbuster STAR Market debut, which saw shares surge over 600% and market value skyrocket past the 100-billion-yuan mark, sending shockwaves through the venture capital world and recalibrating expectations for robotics IPOs.
Yet the celebration was short-lived. A photo of the stoic-faced 90s-born founder Wang Xingxing at the bell-ringing ceremony went viral for all the wrong reasons. Meanwhile, a humanoid robot sports event at the "Ice Ribbon" venue featured 2,056 machines competing in running, jumping, flipping, and kicking. Within a single month, industry momentum, capital flows, and media attention converged, making robotics one of the hottest keywords of 2026.
Amid this wave of industrial and financial enthusiasm, another hidden giant has quietly pushed open the doors of the capital markets. Zhejiang Gach Technology Co., Ltd. (referred to as "Gach Technology") has officially filed its prospectus with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, with CICC acting as the sole sponsor. But what truly sets this story apart is the extraordinary woman behind it—a figure whose credentials are nothing short of remarkable.
In March 2026, she received the "Women Who Shape the Future of Robotics" award, often dubbed the "Female Oscar of the robotics field," presented by the International Federation of Robotics. Only 11 individuals worldwide are honored annually, and she is the sole Chinese recipient this year. Backed by heavyweights like ByteDance, Lenovo, and Shenzhen Capital Group, she has orchestrated a stunning 20-fold valuation surge, transforming an academic elite into a formidable force in the capital arena.
How impressive is she? Entering the robotics field in 2000, she has spent over two decades amassing more than ten world championship titles and runner-up finishes. In 2013, 2014, and 2018, she defeated Carnegie Mellon University three times—a feat many would call the "Dream Team" of robotics—an unbeatable streak others could only envy. In 2011, she developed the table-tennis-playing humanoid robots "Wu" and "Kong," achievements so significant they were cited in a report submitted to the White House by the National Science Foundation.
At 53, Xiong Rong accepted a prestigious award in March, yet few know that this chair-bound professor wasn't a naturally gifted student in her youth. Admitted to Zhejiang University in 1990, she describes herself as more of a hands-on learner than an abstract theorist. In 2000, shortly after joining the faculty, her mentor Chu Jian suggested she assemble a team to build soccer robots. Without hesitation, she posted a recruitment call on the university's BBS forum—a decision that would inadvertently forge a legendary mentor figure.
Over the next decade or so, Xiong led her students to victory after victory at the RoboCup World Championships, securing over a dozen titles and runner-up positions while defeating Carnegie Mellon University three times. In 2011, her team's "Wu" and "Kong" humanoid robots achieved a world first: millisecond-level continuous response during table tennis rallies. Having reached the pinnacle of academia, Xiong's pragmatism drove her to recognize that cutting-edge lab technology was useless if it couldn't adapt to the messy, unpredictable real world.
In 2016, Xiong, alongside her student Chen Shouxian, founded Gach Technology in Hangzhou, stepping out of the ivory tower and into the marketplace. From a 100-million-yuan valuation at its angel round in 2016, to ByteDance's Quantum Leap and Lenovo's venture arm entering in 2021, and finally a C++ round completed in January 2026, the company's valuation has climbed to 2.13 billion yuan—a 20-fold increase in just ten years.
What's even more intriguing is the "mentor-disciple code" embedded in Gach's shareholder structure. Chu Jian, Xiong's own mentor, had pushed her into soccer robots all those years ago. He later founded Supcon Technology, which went public on the STAR Market in November 2020, raising 1.755 billion yuan. In a full-circle moment, Supcon Technology later invested 20 million yuan into Gach Technology. Teacher, student, and industrial giant now coalesce on the same shareholder roster—a commercial synergy that reads like a legend in China's venture capital circles.
Xiong's influence extends far beyond her own company. In the entrepreneurial world, she's often jokingly called the "Godmother of Robotics Startups." Over more than two decades teaching at Zhejiang University, she has cultivated not only Gach's general manager Chen Shouxian but also a generation of hardcore founders who now dominate the robotics landscape—including Zhu Qiuguo, founder of Deep Robotics (one of Hangzhou's "Six Little Dragons"), and Wang Shiquan, founder of Flexiv Robotics. Her students have, in effect, propped up half of China's robotics industry.
However, this "disciples under heaven" phenomenon creates a striking paradox in the ruthless capital markets: mentor and students now compete in the same arena, carrying the torch while also fighting for market share. The industrial mobile robot (AMR) sector looks promising on paper. According to CIC data, the global smart mobile robot market is projected to soar from 14.8 billion yuan in 2021 to 176.3 billion yuan by 2030. But there's a flip side: the market is extremely fragmented, with the top ten global players holding just around 12% combined market share in 2025.
In such a hyper-competitive, highly specialized sector, whoever can crack the scale-and-commercialization code first will emerge the true winner. Gach's growth trajectory is indeed remarkable. Revenue jumped from 74.95 million yuan in 2023 to 266 million yuan in 2025, a compound annual growth rate of 88%. In the first half of 2026 alone, it generated 169 million yuan in revenue, up 25.3% year-on-year. Yet behind these impressive top-line numbers lies the perennial struggle of hard-tech companies: achieving profitable scale.
From 2023 to 2025, although gross margins climbed from 19.7% to 29.7%, the company still accumulated losses of approximately 395 million yuan over three and a half years. Moreover, the prospectus reveals a growing concern: heavy reliance on key customers. The top five customers accounted for just 21.6% of revenue in 2023, but by 2025 and the first half of 2026, that figure had surged to 55.7% and 55.2%, respectively.
Caught between a critical turnaround phase and competition from her own protégés who are rapidly expanding their market presence, Xiong recognizes that a traditional AMR mobile chassis alone cannot build an insurmountable moat. Unlike many companies fixated on individual robots, she identified early on the strategic advantage of software-driven large-scale scheduling. Gach's self-developed CLOUDIA system enables real-time coordination and path planning for over 2,500 heterogeneous robots. In sprawling semiconductor or new-energy factory floors spanning tens of thousands of square meters, keeping thousands of different robot models working in sync without collisions is the true bottleneck—a testament to hard-won engineering capability.
Clearly, Xiong's ambitions extend far beyond making mobile robots fetch-and-carry in factories. In 2023, as embodied intelligence swept the globe, she once again dove in decisively—not only leading the establishment of the Zhejiang Humanoid Robot Innovation Center but also deliberately sidestepping the attention-grabbing gimmicks of bipedal walking to pursue a far more grounded strategy. Her approach: mounting humanoid upper-body precision manipulation modules directly onto Gach's mature wheeled AMR chassis. This hybrid "wheeled base + humanoid arms" design eliminates the massive computational overhead of bipedal balance, directly deploying embodied intelligence onto factory assembly lines—even cracking into the refrigerator production line of Turkish appliance giant BEKO.
By the first half of 2026, Gach's embodied robot segment had already generated 8.5 million yuan in revenue, proving real product deployment in actual industrial environments. Once you grasp this strategic move, you understand the deeper logic behind filing the prospectus now. As of June 30, 2026, Gach held 218 million yuan in cash and cash equivalents. The IPO proceeds are earmarked precisely for core component R&D, embodied intelligence algorithm upgrades, and capacity expansion—stockpiling ammunition for the industry-wide shakeout ahead.
When Xiong first led students in building soccer robots all those years ago, she probably never imagined that two decades later, her students would be scattered across every corner of China's robotics industry, and that the company she founded with her own hands would be knocking on the door of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. From this perspective, the IPO is merely a milestone. What truly matters is how far this robotics relay race can go. After all, the capital markets can offer a robotics company a bigger table—but the final winner is determined by whether robots can genuinely serve in factories, whether they can deliver consistently, and whether customers are willing to pay, again and again. That, ultimately, is the real test awaiting Xiong Rong and Gach Technology.