Deep Robotics: The Robot-Dog Maker That Got Profitable — and Is Now Building Humanoids

While one Chinese company made robot dogs go viral, another quietly made them go to work. Unitree gave us the dancing, backflipping quadrupeds that fill your feed. Deep Robotics (云深处科技, Yunshenchu) did something less glamorous and, arguably, harder: it sent its robot dogs into electrical substations, tunnels and disaster zones to do a job — and in 2025 it became one of the first Chinese quadruped makers to actually turn a profit.

Now the Hangzhou company is racing toward a stock-market listing and, like everyone else, edging into humanoids. But its story is a useful corrective to the humanoid hype: the money in robotics today isn't in the viral demo, it's in the boring, dangerous, repetitive work a machine can be trusted to do at 3 a.m. in a high-voltage yard. Here's who Deep Robotics is, what it builds, and why "boring" turned out to be a winning strategy.

Who is Deep Robotics?

Deep Robotics was founded in 2017 in Hangzhou, and it wears its Chinese roots on its sleeve. The name 云深处 ("deep among the clouds") comes from a classical Tang-dynasty poem about homes hidden in far, hard-to-reach mountains — a fitting motto for robots built to go where people can't. Its product line, Jueying (绝影), is named after the legendary warhorse of the warlord Cao Cao, for speed and surefootedness. It's now counted among "Hangzhou's Six Little Dragons," the cluster of frontier-tech startups that also includes the AI lab DeepSeek.

The founder, chairman and CEO is Zhu Qiuguo (朱秋国), born in November 1982. He's not a career entrepreneur but an academic: an associate professor and PhD advisor in control science at Zhejiang University, whose own doctoral research was on bipedal humanoid robots — including the university's "Wukong" humanoid. That background matters twice over: it's why Deep Robotics' quadrupeds are engineered like industrial equipment rather than toys, and it's a clue to why the company is now circling back to the humanoids Zhu started with. The company grew directly out of Zhejiang University's robotics team, with a core of experienced engineers, and today runs on a lean staff of roughly 200, more than a third of them in R&D.

"Unitree asked how cheap a robot dog could be. Deep Robotics asked what job a robot dog could be trusted to do — and then charged accordingly."

The strategy: boring beats viral

The clearest way to understand Deep Robotics is by contrast with its famous rival. Chinese media frame the two as "two ways of living": Unitree is the Xiaomi-style price disruptor, driving robot dogs down toward consumer prices and chasing scale; Deep Robotics is the Huawei-style vertical specialist, selling fewer machines at much higher prices for demanding industrial jobs. Where a consumer quadruped might cost around the price of a scooter, a kitted-out Jueying inspection unit runs into six figures in yuan.

That specialism is concentrated in one killer application: power-grid inspection. A single Jueying dog can walk a substation autonomously, building a 3D LiDAR map and checking equipment for faults in places that are dangerous or tedious for human crews. Deep Robotics says its quadrupeds are deployed across more than 100 substations with China's State Grid and Southern Power Grid, and — per its IPO prospectus — have logged over a million cumulative inspection kilometers. Beyond the grid, Jueying dogs have patrolled the deep power corridors under the Hangzhou Asian Games Village and taken part in earthquake and fire-rescue drills, carrying gas and radiation sensors into places you'd never send a person first. All told, the company reports 600+ deployment projects across 44 countries and regions. This is exactly the "real jobs, not backflips" test we argue for in how to actually test a robot, and the working end of the robot-dog landscape we mapped out separately.

The lineup: three families of legs

Deep Robotics sells three product families. The Jueying X series is the industrial flagship: the rugged X30 weighs about 59 kg, is IP67-rated (dust- and water-proof), works from −20 °C to 55 °C, climbs 45° slopes and stairs, and runs for roughly four hours — a machine built to survive a substation, not a living room. The Jueying Lite series (from about 16,900 yuan, ~$2,400) is the smaller, cheaper line for education and research. And the Lynx (山猫) series is Deep Robotics' wheel-legged line — quadrupeds with wheels on their feet that roll fast on flat ground and walk over obstacles — which the company bills as the world's first wheel-legged robot built for industrial use. In 2025, the pricier X-series sold about 681 units at an average of roughly 287,000 yuan (~$40,000) each, while the Lite line moved far more units at a fraction of the price.

The numbers that made it a story: first profit, then IPO

Here's what actually sets Deep Robotics apart in a field drowning in hype: it makes money. Revenue climbed from 50 million yuan in 2023 to 103 million in 2024 to 337 million in 2025 — a roughly 160% compound growth rate — and 2025 brought the company's first-ever annual net profit, about 28.7 million yuan, on a healthy gross margin north of 50%. In a category where almost everyone is burning cash, a profitable robotics hardware maker is a genuine rarity.

That track record teed up a stock-market run. In May 2026, Deep Robotics' application to list on Shanghai's STAR Market was accepted, targeting a raise of about 2.5 billion yuan (~$350 million), with the largest chunk earmarked for embodied-AI software. The run-up drew heavyweight money: a Series C of more than 500 million yuan in December 2025, and a pre-IPO round backed by China's National AI Industry Investment Fund with JD.com taking a late stake. Secondary estimates put the implied valuation near 14 billion yuan (~$1.9 billion), though the company hasn't confirmed a figure. It's part of the same 2026 rush to public markets that has Noetix, Leju and Unitree all jockeying to be China's first listed robot stock — a wave we set in context in who's actually mass-producing humanoids.

The humanoid bet

Like every serious Chinese robotics firm, Deep Robotics has crossed into humanoids — and given founder Zhu Qiuguo's bipedal-robot PhD, it's more of a homecoming than a pivot. It unveiled its first humanoid, DR01, in November 2024, and in October 2025 launched the DR02, billed as the world's first "all-weather" industrial humanoid. On paper it's a serious machine: 175 cm, 75 kg, 31 degrees of freedom, IP66-rated for dust and rain, rated from −20 °C to 55 °C, with about 275 TOPS of onboard compute and a 10 kg dual-arm payload. The pitch is consistent with everything else the company does — a humanoid engineered for the same harsh industrial settings its dogs already work in.

But here's the honest part, and it's the number that keeps this profile grounded: Deep Robotics sold exactly one humanoid unit in 2025, at about 823,000 yuan (~$115,000). The DR02 is a statement of direction and a research platform, not yet a product line. That's not a knock — it's the same reality facing almost every humanoid maker, as we argued in when humanoid robots will actually be ready — but it's why, for now, Deep Robotics is best understood as a quadruped company that happens to be building a humanoid, not the other way around. The four legs pay the bills; the two legs are the option on the future.

"The humanoid gets the headlines, but the robot dog signs the checks. Deep Robotics is one of the few companies honest enough — by its own numbers — to show you the difference."

Why Deep Robotics matters

In a sector where valuations run on demo videos, Deep Robotics is a reminder that the durable business of robotics is unglamorous: a rugged machine, a specific dangerous job, a customer with a budget and a safety problem. It found that job — power inspection — years before the humanoid gold rush, and it's the reason the company can fund its humanoid ambitions out of real revenue instead of pure hype. It also fits the bigger pattern we keep documenting: the depth of China's robot industry isn't just the flashy humanoids, it's the workmanlike companies quietly wiring robots into the power grid, a story that runs alongside China's grip on the humanoid supply chain and its state-backed open-source push. Watch the IPO — and watch whether the DR02 ever sells more than one.

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