China's Zeroth Raises $74M Pre-Series A Led by Ant Group With 30,000 Robot Orders in Hand

Chinese home-robotics startup Zeroth has raised approximately $73.6 million in pre-Series A financing led by Ant Group, one of the largest early-stage rounds yet for consumer-facing embodied AI — and the twelfth humanoid investment the Alibaba affiliate has made in eighteen months.

The round

Geely Capital, 37 Interactive Entertainment, Hua Capital and existing investor Monolith joined the round. Zeroth says the funds will support six core technology areas, talent acquisition and global market expansion, with entry into North America and Europe planned for the fall of 2026 pending regulatory compliance.

Traction in the household, not the warehouse

While most humanoid startups chase factory and logistics deployments, Zeroth has found early scale in homes: the company reports more than 30,000 orders for its M1 and W1 robots across early childhood education, smart home and pet companionship use cases, alongside 600 percent year-over-year revenue growth in the first half of 2026.

The consumer beachhead strategy trades the deep pockets of industrial buyers for volume and forgiveness — a home robot that occasionally fumbles is a quirk; a warehouse robot that fumbles is a returned contract.

The investor signal

Ant Group's systematic accumulation of robotics stakes mirrors moves by Meituan and Tencent, which led smart-glasses maker Even Realities to a $1 billion valuation the same week. China's platform giants are treating embodied AI as the next distribution surface, seeding hardware startups that could one day plug into their payments, services and e-commerce rails.

For Zeroth, the capital arrives at the right moment: component costs are falling, Chinese supply chains are compressing build costs monthly, and the global consumer robot category remains unclaimed. The fall expansion into Western markets will be the first real test of whether China's home-robot playbook travels.