Cowarobot

Cowarobot (酷哇科技, doing business as COOWA) is a Shanghai-based embodied-AI robotics company founded in 2015 by He Tao, an electronic-information engineering graduate of Shanghai Jiao Tong University who earned his PhD at the Tokyo Institute of Technology under robotics researcher Shigeo Hirose before returning to teach at his alma mater. Co-founder and CTO Liao Wenlong, also a Shanghai Jiao Tong University PhD, is a recognized autonomous-driving algorithm engineer. The company originally pursued general-purpose autonomous-driving technology but, after concluding in 2018 that unsolved long-tail driving scenarios made that path commercially difficult, redirected its engineering toward high-frequency urban service robotics.

Cowarobot's current product line spans three verticals built on its self-developed Coowa PhysicalAI platform and CooWAIM world-action model: autonomous street-sweeping and sanitation vehicles (including its X1, X3 and T18 series) that make up the bulk of its order backlog; wheeled and quadrupedal service robots (R0 and D0) for property management and last-mile logistics; and the Coo Bus autonomous shuttle, which has logged more than five million kilometers of operation. By mid-2026 the company had deployed more than 10,000 robots across over 50 cities and regions worldwide, expanding beyond China into Singapore and the Middle East, and had disclosed its first full-year positive EBITDA for fiscal 2025 alongside revenue exceeding ¥1 billion (about $147.7 million) and an order backlog above ¥5 billion.

The company has raised capital across at least three disclosed institutional rounds since 2018 — a ¥135 million (about $21 million) Series B led by SoftBank China Venture Capital and Genesis Partners in May 2018, a $250 million Series C in October 2021, and an undisclosed pre-IPO round of more than $600 million completed by June 2026 backed by SoftBank China Capital and Asia Investment Capital — reaching a reported valuation of roughly ¥20.3 billion (about $2.85 billion). In June 2026, Cowarobot began preparing a Hong Kong Stock Exchange listing, engaging Huatai Securities and Deutsche Bank as joint IPO sponsors, with a prospectus filing expected within two to three months.