HAI ROBOTICS Brand Guidelines: The Shenzhen Maker of Bin-Lifting and Rack-Climbing Robots

A Shenzhen start-up that chose bins over shelves.

HAI ROBOTICS was founded in Shenzhen in 2016. A company release of December 2021 says it was started “in late 2016” by a group of robot enthusiasts, and that the idea behind it, a totes-to-person system for warehouses, had taken shape as early as 2015. Its founder and chief executive is Richie Chen. The Chinese business site 36Kr, which gives the founder’s name as Chen Yuqi, reported in March 2026 that he set the company up with several classmates in Shenzhen’s Nanshan district after a postgraduate project on warehouse automation at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and that the company is now headquartered in Bao’an District. In its Hong Kong listing filings the group appears as Shenzhen HAIROBOTICS Intelligent Technology Group, 36Kr reported in September 2026.

The name is explained on the company’s own website: “Hai” means “ocean,” which it describes as something that touches every continent and connects everyone. Its earlier press material set the name in capitals, as HAI ROBOTICS; the current website mostly writes it as Hai Robotics.

The founding idea was a different kind of warehouse robot. At the time, 36Kr explained, the common approach among Chinese start-ups was the shelf-handling robot, which drives under a rack, lifts it and carries the whole rack to a worker. HAI ROBOTICS set out instead to build a robot that lifts individual bins and cartons from tall shelving, a type it calls the autonomous case-handling robot, or ACR. 36Kr described 2016 to 2018 as a quiet period of failed prototypes and staff departures. The company says the system went through nearly two years of trials in a working warehouse before its first project went live, in the warehouse of the logistics group BEST, in August 2018.

From HaiPick to HaiPick Climb.

The product family is called HaiPick. The Robot Report described the robots in September 2021 as picking totes or cartons from shelves five to seven metres high with a telescopic lift, carrying several at once to picking stations and finding their way by QR codes on the floor; TechCrunch named the A42 as an early model in the same month. The company’s own timeline credits the A41 robot with its first commercial use, for BEST, and the A42 with a first project for SF-DHL, followed by variants including the A42D, A42N and A42T.

Over time the company recast its robots as parts of modular storage systems. Its website now presents HaiPick Systems as a simpler form of automated storage and retrieval (AS/RS), built from robots, workstations, software and largely standard racking, and sold as a small number of base systems that can be configured for each site. 36Kr described the parts as the robot itself, the HaiStation workstation and the HaiQ management platform.

The newest line climbs. Logistics Matters reported in February 2025 that the company had unveiled HaiPick Climb, in which a single robot type, the HaiClimber, moves across the floor and climbs a guide rail on the side of the rack to fetch totes, and noted that it was the second climbing-robot system of its kind after Exotec’s Skypod; a double-deep version was due later that year. The company says development began in 2022, and it later announced that more than 10,000 HaiClimber robots had been contracted for projects in 12 countries, naming customers including ANTA, Panasonic and Arvato.

The company lists its awards on its website, among them a 2023 MHI Innovation Award for an existing product and a 2024 Retail Supply Chain Excellence Award in the United States. In December 2021, Robotics 24/7 reported that the Hurun Research Institute had placed it on its global unicorn list, a list of start-ups valued at more than one billion US dollars.

How warehouse automation presents itself.

Warehouse automation is an industry that mostly sells to other businesses, and its companies present themselves through the machines they install. The images are familiar across the sector: a dense block of stacked storage bins with robots running across the top, a swarm of small mobile robots moving under or up tall racks, or long shuttle aisles feeding a line of conveyors and sorters inside a distribution centre.

Those images do a job that a product catalogue cannot. A storage grid or a robot fleet is usually built to fit one building, so the companies show finished sites, walk-through videos and case studies named after their customers. Many also describe themselves as software companies as much as machine builders, and show control-room screens and dashboards that track robots, orders and stock in real time.

Trade fairs are where the sector meets its buyers. LogiMAT in Germany, ProMat in the United States and CeMAT are among the logistics shows where makers build working demonstration systems on their stands, and where new robots and workstations are often launched. Many of the companies also sell through partners and system integrators, so the same system can appear under more than one name on a show floor.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — who founded it, who owns it, where it says its equipment is made, and what has happened to it — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word. The palettes and typefaces shown are our own interpretation, not the companies’ official colours or logos.

From a Shenzhen workshop to eight offices.

Growth has been international. By September 2021 the company had subsidiaries in Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, the United States and the Netherlands, TechCrunch reported, and partnerships with integrators including LG CNS and the French company Savoye, The Robot Report said. Today the company says it has eight offices across North America, Europe, Asia and Australia, more than 60 partners and systems in more than 40 countries and regions, serving e-commerce, apparel, healthcare, grocery, manufacturing and automotive customers. In Europe it has opened an EMEA Innovation Center at Hoofddorp in the Netherlands, where HaiPick systems run as live demonstrations, and it says a European fashion retailer has chosen it for a single site with more than 1,500 HaiPick Climb robots.

The company has also moved towards the stock market. 36Kr reported in September 2026 that it had filed a listing application with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on 13 February 2026, that the application lapsed on 13 August when the review was not completed within six months, and that it refiled on 13 September 2026 with Goldman Sachs and CITIC Securities as joint sponsors. At the time of that report it had not yet listed.

For a design guide, HAI ROBOTICS shows how a robot maker can build a brand on a single idea — lifting the bin rather than the shelf — and then widen it into a family of named systems while keeping one product word, HaiPick, at the centre. Compare Exotec, the French maker of climbing warehouse robots, and Geek+, another Chinese warehouse-robot company. For this guide we use a deep ocean blue, a harbour blue and a sea-glass green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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