China's Lumos Robotics Plans to Raise Money and Go Public as Factory Robots Sell Fast

A Chinese robotics company called Lumos Robotics is looking to raise more money and may one day sell shares on the stock market. The company, based in Shenzhen, China, makes robots that work in factories. Its founder says that robots which save companies money in real factories — not just robots that look cool doing flips — will be the ones that survive China's growing robot industry.

Lumos was founded in 2024 and has already raised about 1 billion yuan, which is roughly $147 million. The company's founder and CEO, Yu Chao, told reporters that any new money raised would go toward putting robots to work in factories, building better hardware, and improving the artificial intelligence that powers the machines. Lumos has gone through seven rounds of fundraising to reach this point, which shows a lot of investor interest in the company.

The biggest outside investor in Lumos is Mitsubishi Electric, a large Japanese company that makes industrial equipment. Mitsubishi and Lumos are working together to create robotic solutions for factories. Having a major international partner gives Lumos more credibility as it grows.

Lumos makes two kinds of robots. One type walks on two legs like a human, but the company is not focused on selling those right now. Instead, it is selling a robot called MOS 2, which rolls on wheels and has two arms. The MOS 2 is built to do factory jobs like checking products for defects and moving materials from place to place.

Yu said that the era of robots showing off by running and jumping is basically over. 'The most important thing now is improving reliability in actual industrial deployment,' he said. He made these comments just before the World Robot Conference opened in Beijing. His point is that a robot needs to actually work well in a real factory, not just look impressive in a video.

So far, Lumos has placed about 30 MOS robots in factories for inspection and material-handling work, with five more coming soon. More than 10 other customers are testing the robots or getting ready to use them. The company has already shipped dozens of robots inside China and plans to deliver about 50 more in the next month, aiming for around 300 total deliveries by the end of this year.

In one project with Mitsubishi Electric, Lumos was able to cut the cost of a robotic inspection solution from between 500,000 and 1 million yuan down to less than 350,000 yuan. At the same time, the robot worked about as fast as a human worker. Reuters was not able to check these numbers independently, but the claim suggests that the robots can save companies a significant amount of money.

Right now, most MOS robots that are working in factories do one job at a time. However, Lumos has shown inside the company that the robots can handle more than one task. Yu expects that within two to three years, robots will be able to reliably switch between many different factory tasks at a larger scale.

Lumos has collected about 700,000 hours of data from its robots working in the field. This data is used to teach the robots new skills and to make development faster. The 300 robots the company hopes to deliver this year are also meant to send back useful data to improve the whole system even further.

Looking ahead, Lumos plans to expand to other countries next year. The company is first looking at the Middle East and Europe, and is also considering Japan and South Korea. Yu said the company would start working toward a stock market listing next year, even though it was founded more recently than some competitors who are already pursuing that goal.