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Galaxea AI was established in September 2023 by four founders, three of whom are Tsinghua University alumni.

CEO Gao Jiyang graduated from the university’s Department of Electronic Engineering, earned his Ph.D. in computer vision at the University of Southern California. Previously, he worked with Waymo and Momenta, where he developed extensive expertise in autonomous driving.

Co-founder Zhao Hang, an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences at Tsinghua University and Principal Investigator of the MARS Lab, holds a degree from MIT. His research interests include multi-modal machine learning, autonomous driving, and robot learning. He also worked for Waymo and was recognized by Forbes Science Under 30 list.

Xu Huazhe, another Assistant Professor at the same institute, leads the Tsinghua Embodied AI Lab (TEA Lab). He earned his Ph.D. from Berkeley AI Research and was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford Vision and Learning Lab.

In May 2024, the company released its first robotic arm, A1, featuring a maximum linear speed of 10 m/s, an end acceleration of 40 m/s², and a load of 2 kg (peak 5 kg), designed for light industrial tasks such as sorting and assembly, with prices starting from 39,800 yuan. (The Price is now at 19800 yuan according to the WeChat account.)

In October, Galaxea AI unveiled the full-size wheel-legged bipedal humanoid robot R1 with 20 degrees of freedom, dual-arm peak load of 10 kg, a 500 TOPS computing platform, 360° LiDAR, and multimodal sensors. In January 2025, the company upgraded this model to three versions: R1 Pro, R1 Standard, and R1 Lite, tailored for research and industrial use.

Galaxea AI has rapidly secured multiple rounds of financing, totalling over 1 billion yuan. Notably, in June 2024, it received investment from Ant Group and HongShan and launched cooperation with universities. Market predictions indicate the company’s valuation surpasses 5 billion yuan by 2025.

Among the recent development, in March, the company issued a statement in response to pessimism from Allen Zhu Xiaohu of GSR Ventures, who questioned the commercial value of humanoid robots and withdrew his investment in Galaxea AI earlier.

The statement clairied that GSR Ventures participated in the angel round in November 2023 and requested to exit in May 2024, a process completed in September 2024.

Another interesting development is that a team from Sandford, led by Li Feifei, utilized a Galaxea AI robot to complete a research. The team introduced the BEHAVIOR Robot Suite (BRS), a cost-effective whole-body teleoperation interface for data collection and a novel algorithm for learning whole-body visuomotor policies.

References: Galaxea AI's official website and WeChat account; https://behavior-robot-suite.github.io/