Agibot Brand Guidelines: Shanghai’s 2023 Humanoid Start-Up, Swancor & a Hong Kong IPO Plan

A Shanghai start-up of February 2023.

Agibot was founded in Shanghai in February 2023. The automotive trade site Gasgoo places its start in the city’s Lingang area, and Yicai Global reported in November 2025 that Peng Zhihui co-founded it with the former Huawei vice-president Deng Taihua and others. English Wikipedia describes both men as former Huawei engineers. It says Peng, a graduate of the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, joined Huawei in 2020 through a talent programme, and that he had built a following by posting his own inventions on Chinese social media, among them a robotic arm inspired by Iron Man and a self-driving bicycle.

The Chinese name, 智元机器人, is rendered in English as Zhiyuan Robotics, and the company also uses the AgiBot spelling. Gasgoo dates its restructuring into a joint-stock company, and a change of name, to November 2025; Caixin Global reported in July 2026 that the formal name had become AgiBot Innovation (Shanghai) Technology. By October 2026 the Chinese business site 36Kr was describing Deng as founder, chairman and chief executive, while Yicai Global had described Peng in November 2025 as president and chief technology officer.

Early backers named by English Wikipedia include HongShan, Hillhouse Investment and the carmaker BYD; Gasgoo’s 2026 list adds Tencent, JD.com and SAIC Motor. Manufacturing came quickly. Wikipedia says the company set up a manufacturing facility in Shanghai in January 2024, and Chinese Wikipedia says its first Shanghai factory began delivering robots in October 2024. In December 2024 Agibot said in a video that mass production had begun, and it marked its 1,000th robot in January 2025, a milestone Yicai Global also reported. 36Kr later reported that output passed 10,000 units in March 2026 and 15,000 in June, and that the 20,000th, a Yuanzheng A3 Ultra, was delivered on 24 September 2026 to the Chimelong Group at its Spaceship Park in Hengqin.

Yuanzheng, Lingxi and Jingling.

Agibot’s first humanoid, the RAISE A1, was launched in August 2023 for industrial work, according to English Wikipedia, which gives its height as 1.75 metres. A year later, in August 2024, the company presented five models at once: three in the Yuanzheng series (the A2, A2-Max and A2-W) and two in the Lingxi series (the X1 and X1-W). It showed its robots at the World Robot Conference in Beijing that month. The Yuanzheng A2 was a two-legged humanoid; the Lingxi X1 was announced as open source, with Agibot saying it would publish most of the design material and code for other developers. Media reports at the time compared the line-up with Tesla’s Optimus, the encyclopaedia notes.

Software and data followed the hardware. Wikipedia lists the GO-1 model, which Agibot called a generalist embodied foundation model, in March 2025, the Lingqu OS operating system in July 2025, and the G2, introduced on 16 October 2025 as an industrial-grade robot for manufacturing, logistics and guided tours. The company also built a data operation, AIDEA, and English Wikipedia, citing Reuters, describes a data-collection site supported by the Shanghai authorities where hundreds of robots are operated remotely to produce training data.

Gasgoo names the company’s core offerings as the Yuanzheng, Lingxi and Jingling series. By October 2026 36Kr counted six series, covering full-size, half-size and wheeled humanoids as well as four-legged robots, and reported that JD Logistics and Agibot had jointly launched a heavy-duty Jingling G2 Max for JD’s warehouses. Caixin Global reported that a Jingling G1 had completed a six-day, live-streamed shift on an assembly line at Longcheer Technology. In November 2025 an A2 walked about 106 kilometres from Suzhou to Shanghai over three days, an attempt Guinness World Records recognised, English Wikipedia says.

How humanoid makers present themselves.

Humanoid and legged-robot makers sell machines that most people have only seen on a screen, so video carries much of their identity. Boston Dynamics built a public following through clips of its robots: a 2017 video of the Spot quadruped opening a door for another robot reached the top of YouTube, “Parkour Atlas” followed in 2018, and in 2025 a troupe of robot dogs danced on America’s Got Talent, according to Wikipedia. When Hyundai Motor Group completed its purchase of the company in 2021, its announcement video showed Atlas dancing beside a child, The Robot Report noted.

The newer story is work. Makers now show their robots in factories and warehouses rather than in labs: Agility’s Digit handling totes for the logistics group GXO, and Boston Dynamics’ electric Atlas being trained to sequence car parts at a Hyundai plant in Georgia, as each company describes it. Press releases lean on customer names, pilot sites and hours of operation, and trade reporters such as The Robot Report and IEEE Spectrum follow those claims from launch to deployment.

Launches happen on stages built for that audience. Agility presented a redesigned Digit at ProMat, the material-handling show, in 2023, and Boston Dynamics unveiled its new Atlas at Hyundai’s media day at CES 2026, the companies say. Research conferences such as ICRA, the IEEE’s robotics and automation meeting, and the World Robot Conference in China play the same part for engineers and the trade.

Identities shift as the companies grow up. In March 2026 Agility Robotics became simply Agility, with a refreshed logo that the company said was inspired by the hardware and software it builds, The Robot Report reported. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company: who founded it, who owns it, where it builds its robots, and which claims rest only on its own word.

Two routes to the stock market.

Agibot’s path toward public markets has run through two exchanges. On 8 July 2025 Swancor Advanced Materials, a company listed on Shanghai’s STAR Market whose main business is materials for wind-turbine blades and other composites, first announced that Agibot would take control of it, Yicai Global reported. TechNode reported on 10 July that Agibot was buying a 63.62% stake through a negotiated share transfer and a tender offer, and that Agibot denied the deal was a backdoor listing, saying it had no plans for a major asset restructuring in the following 12 months.

Yicai Global reported on 26 November 2025 that Agibot had completed the takeover earlier that month, holding 58.6% of Swancor and, with parties acting in concert, 63.6% of the voting rights, and that Peng Zhihui had been elected Swancor’s chairman. Yicai Global called it the first time a Chinese embodied-intelligence start-up had taken control of a STAR Market company.

The second route is Hong Kong. Agibot confirmed to Caixin Global on 24 July 2026 that it had begun the process for an initial public offering there. In October 2026 36Kr, citing Caijing magazine, reported that Agibot had launched a new funding round, and that under the Hong Kong exchange’s rules on financing between an application and a listing the flotation could not be completed in 2026; 36Kr expected it to move into 2027, and Agibot told the magazine it had no comment.

For a design guide, Agibot shows a start-up naming whole families of robots, rather than single machines, within its first three years. Compare Unitree, the Hangzhou maker of four-legged and humanoid robots, and UBTech, the Shenzhen humanoid maker. For this guide we use a graphite, a shell white and a deep teal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Agibot’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.