Who Is Gu Jie? The Exoskeleton Pioneer Behind Fourier

While almost everyone in the humanoid gold rush is racing to build robots for the factory floor, Gu Jie came at the problem from the opposite end of the human body — and the opposite end of the motivation. For a decade, his company Fourier built machines whose entire purpose was to help paralyzed and stroke patients stand up and walk again. Only then did he turn that hard-won expertise toward a full humanoid. In a field full of swagger and viral stunts, the exoskeleton maker is one of its quieter, more interesting figures.

So let's get to know him: how a mechanical engineer from Shanghai spent years on rehabilitation robots before anyone was talking about humanoids, why a company named after an 18th-century French mathematician is now building GR-series robots, and whether a healthcare heritage is an advantage or a handicap in the race against Unitree and AgiBot.

First, the short answer: who is Gu Jie?

Gu Jie is the founder and CEO of Fourier, a Shanghai company that is unusual among China's humanoid contenders because it didn't start with humanoids at all. It started with rehabilitation — exoskeletons and therapy robots sold to hospitals to help people recover the ability to walk. That origin story isn't a footnote; it's the whole thesis. Where rivals like Unitree began with cheap quadrupeds and AgiBot with AI, Gu spent ten years solving the unglamorous, safety-critical problem of a machine moving a real human limb without hurting anyone. When humanoids became the prize, he already had the actuators, the force control and the clinical discipline to chase it.

From Shanghai Jiao Tong to rehab robots

Gu, born in 1981, graduated in mechanical engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2003 and went to work at National Instruments, the American test-and-measurement company, where he cut his teeth on signal processing, instrumentation and system integration. Around 2009 he turned to the problem that would define him: building robots to help people rehabilitate. In 2012 he founded his first company, Jinghe, which developed a rehabilitation robot called Flexbot; it was acquired in 2015 — the same year Gu started over with a bigger idea.

Founding Fourier (2015)

He named the new company Fourier, after the French mathematician and physicist Joseph Fourier — a fitting choice for a company obsessed with decomposing and reproducing the complex waveforms of human movement. From a base in Shanghai's Zhangjiang science park, Fourier set out to make rehabilitation robotics dramatically cheaper and more available.

Its breakout product was the Fourier X1, a lower-limb exoskeleton unveiled in 2017: a roughly 20-kilo wearable robot with motors at the hips and knees that let patients with spinal-cord injuries or strokes stand and walk under guidance. Gu's pitch was explicitly about access — building something far cheaper than foreign exoskeletons like Israel's ReWalk or Japan's Cyberdyne. A lower-cost successor, the X2, followed. It worked: today Fourier's rehabilitation technology reportedly reaches more than 2,000 hospitals and institutions across some 40 countries, with research clients including the Barrow Neurological Institute and ETH Zurich. This is the part of Fourier that already makes money — and it's the foundation everything else is built on.

Every other humanoid founder had to invent a reason their robot should exist. Gu Jie started from the reason — a person who can't walk — and worked outward. That is a fundamentally different way to arrive at a humanoid, and it shows in what he chooses to build.

The pivot to humanoids

Fourier revealed its first full humanoid, the GR-1 (1.65 m tall), at the World AI Conference in July 2023, and says it delivered more than 100 of them to companies and universities; TMTPost has described the GR-1 as China's first humanoid to reach mass production. The GR-2 arrived in September 2024 — 1.75 m, 63 kg, with 53 degrees of freedom, redesigned joints exceeding 380 N·m of peak torque, and dexterous hands with twelve degrees of freedom and tactile sensors. For a company whose roots are in moving human bodies safely, the leap to a body of its own was less of a stretch than it looks: the actuators, the force-control software and the human-centred design all carried over.

The care-bot bet

Here's where Gu's healthcare DNA gives Fourier a genuinely different strategy. In August 2025 the company unveiled the GR-3, which it calls a "care-bot" — a full-size companion humanoid (1.65 m, 71 kg, 55 degrees of freedom, with hot-swappable batteries for up to three hours) built not for the warehouse but for nursing homes and rehabilitation centres, with emotion recognition, natural dialogue and a soft, approachable design, priced above 200,000 yuan (about $27,500). Gu framed it in human terms: "GR-3 is not just a machine — it is a companion. It represents a new standard in how robots can coexist and connect with humans."

Aim a humanoid at elderly care and you're chasing one of the most real, most urgent markets in robotics — the same need that drives the companion robots used with elderly and dementia patients. It's a bet that the first place society will want a humanoid isn't the factory but beside a hospital bed. Whether a 71-kilo robot is the right answer there is an open question — but it's a far more thoughtful one than "ours does a backflip."

Open source — and the money

Fourier has also leaned into openness. In April 2025 it released the N1, a 1.3 m, 38 kg humanoid it published as an open-source platform — releasing the bill of materials, design drawings and operating software on GitHub, billed as China's first open-source humanoid, a clear bid to make Fourier a foundation others build on.

The capital has followed the story. Fourier's Series D (January 2022, RMB 400 million) was led by SoftBank's Vision Fund 2, and its Series E (January 2025, nearly $109 million) was backed by Prosperity7 Ventures, the venture arm of Saudi Aramco — the same Gulf sovereign-wealth money now flowing into frontier tech worldwide. Caixin has put Fourier's valuation at roughly $300–500 million. That's a telling number: it is a fraction of what AgiBot or Unitree command. Fourier is not the biggest name in the race — but it may have the most defensible base, with a real healthcare business under the humanoid moonshot. Gu's own framing is competitive, not deferential: he's argued that some of Fourier's technology, "such as the force control, [is] even more advanced than our peers'."

What he gets right — and the risks

Strip away the humanoid hype and the case for Gu Jie — and the worry — both come into focus:

• A real business under the moonshot. The rehabilitation arm generates actual revenue across thousands of hospitals, which buys runway most pure-play humanoid startups simply don't have.
• A credible, humane use-case. Care and rehabilitation is a market where a humanoid's value is obvious and the willingness to pay is real — and it's one Gu understands better than anyone.
• Force control and clinical discipline. A decade of moving human limbs safely is exactly the safety-critical engineering a home or care humanoid needs.
• The risk: out-scaled by the giants. Fourier ships and is valued well below Unitree and AgiBot, and the care-bot market is still unproven. If humanoids turn into a volume-and-capital game — as we argued in the coming robot shakeout — being the thoughtful, mid-sized player is a precarious place to stand.

The quick facts on Gu Jie

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