Lumos goes through more than motions in funds race

Mainland startup Lumos Robotics is eyeing a new funding round and a potential stock-market listing next year, according to its founder. Lumos believes that cost savings from factories, rather than human-like demonstrations, will determine the winners in China's robot boom. The company has raised around 1 billion yuan across seven funding rounds.

Founder Yu Chao says the new capital will mainly go toward industrial deployments, hardware development, and AI models. Japanese giant Mitsubishi Electric is Lumos' largest outside shareholder and is collaborating on robotics solutions for manufacturing. Lumos specializes in bipedal robots, but is concentrating on MOS 2, a wheeled, dual-arm machine for factory work, such as quality inspection and material handling.

The company is one of many in China's nascent embodied AI and humanoid robot sector seeking an edge through industrial performance. Yu, speaking before the World Robot Conference in Beijing, emphasized that showing reliability in industrial deployment is crucial. Lumos has deployed around 30 MOS robots in inspection and material-handling applications, with more on the way.

The company expects to deliver about 300 units this year, targeting 50 deliveries in the coming month. Yu highlighted a case where Lumos reduced costs by over 50% for a Mitsubishi Electric customer, while maintaining productivity comparable to a human worker. The company has gathered about 700,000 hours of robotics data, using it to train new skills and speed up development.

Lumos aims to expand overseas next year, initially targeting the Middle East, Europe, Japan, and South Korea.