MagicLab (Magic Atom): The Humanoid Startup That Stole the Show — Then Lost Its Founder

In the space of a few weeks in early 2026, one Chinese robot startup lived through both the best and the worst that can happen to a young company. Its humanoids danced in front of a billion-plus people on the country's biggest TV night, then sold out on JD.com — and then, during the run-up to a planned stock-market listing, its founder abruptly walked out the door. The company is MagicLab, known in China as Magic Atom (魔法原子), and it's one of the most interesting — and most misreported — names in the humanoid race.

Before anything else, one correction, because English coverage keeps getting it wrong: MagicLab and Magic Atom are the same company (English brand and Chinese brand), and it was incubated by Dreame, not by Ninebot. With that straight, here's who they really are, what the MagicBot robots actually do, and why their story is a useful lesson in how fast hype and turmoil move in Chinese robotics.

Who is MagicLab / Magic Atom?

MagicLab is young even by humanoid-startup standards: registered in late 2023 and publicly launched as a brand in January 2024, now headquartered in Wuxi. What makes it worth a second look is its pedigree. It was incubated by Dreame Technology (追觅) — the fast-growing maker of robot vacuums and appliances whose venture arm led MagicLab's first round — and its core engineers came out of Xiaomi's CyberDog ("铁蛋") quadruped program. In other words, this isn't a garage project; it's a spin-out seeded by a hardware heavyweight and staffed by people who had already shipped a real four-legged robot at Xiaomi. That heritage is why its lineup spans both humanoids and bionic quadrupeds, and it's the same ex–robot-dog talent flow we keep seeing across Chinese robotics, from Unitree to Deep Robotics.

One thing to note up front, because it changes how you read the name: the "MagicLab is part of Ninebot" claim that circulates on English databases is simply wrong. No Chinese source supports it; the incubator is Dreame. Getting that right matters, because the company's whole story — its funding, its culture, its quadruped instincts — flows from the Dreame-and-Xiaomi lineage, not from the scooter maker.

"MagicLab didn't come from nowhere. It came from a robot vacuum company and a robot dog — which tells you more about how China builds humanoids than any spec sheet."

The night it stole the show

MagicLab's breakout wasn't a lab demo — it was prime-time television. At China's 2026 CCTV Spring Festival Gala, the most-watched broadcast on earth, Magic Atom was named an official robot partner and put on the widest show of any of them. In the segment "Intelligently-Made Future," six MagicBot Z1 and two MagicBot Gen1 humanoids performed alongside celebrities including Jackson Yee and Jerry Yan, with a Z1 pulling off a gymnastic "Thomas 360" spin. At the Yibin sub-venue, the company staged something more telling than a dance: a MagicBot Gen1 scooped and poured noodles while a Z1 handled the "last-mile" delivery, handing a bowl to a performer — plus a group run of more than 100 panda-shaped MagicDog quadrupeds. It was billed as the Gala's first multi-robot collaboration in a real service scenario.

The commercial after-effect was immediate — but here's the honest version. That New Year's Eve, JD.com ran a "Gala same-models" flash sale, and robots from multiple brands — Magic Atom, Unitree and Noetix — sold out within minutes, with platform robot searches up 300%. So the widely-repeated "sold out on JD in seconds" line is real, but it was a shared, multi-brand moment, not a MagicLab-only stampede, and no verified per-brand sales number exists. Magic Atom was one of four robot firms on that Gala stage, distinct from Unitree's martial-arts act and Noetix's comedy skit — a field we mapped in our look at who runs the humanoid companies.

The robots: two humanoids and a panda dog

Strip away the stagecraft and MagicLab has a genuine product line, spanning a developer humanoid, an industrial one, and a quadruped.

Note the price gap this reveals. At around 178,000 yuan, the MagicBot Z1 is a developer and research machine, not a household product — closer to a small car than a gadget, and far above the $1,400 Bumi at the bottom of the market. That's normal for a walking humanoid in 2026, and it's why almost none of these robots are in ordinary homes yet, a reality we unpacked in when humanoids will actually be ready.

The twist: a founder walks out at the peak

Then came the whiplash. Just weeks after the Gala triumph, and in the middle of the company's IPO preparation, founder and president Wu Changzheng left MagicLab in early March 2026, reportedly to start his own venture. Wu was no ordinary founder — he had led the development of Xiaomi's CyberDog before starting Magic Atom, and he was the face of its rise. His exit at the peak of the company's visibility drew what Chinese media called "ice and fire" commentary, with some reports of internal friction over how much the expensive Gala appearance actually paid back.

The company didn't stall. Co-founder and CTO Chen Chunyu, a veteran of UBTech, stepped up to run it, and MagicLab kept pushing toward its listing. But it's a genuine risk worth stating plainly: a robotics startup this young, losing its founder-CEO right as it courts public markets, is running on momentum and a strong bench rather than settled leadership. It's the kind of turbulence — brilliant demo one month, boardroom drama the next — that defines just how fast and how unforgiving this industry is right now.

Money, and the road ahead

For all the drama, the money has kept coming. MagicLab raised a 150 million-yuan angel round in December 2024, led by Dreame's venture arm; a several-hundred-million-yuan strategic round in 2025; and a further 500 million-yuan round reported in March 2026, whose backers included the auto-parts and actuator maker Tuopu Group — the same Tesla Optimus supplier we profiled in our humanoid supply-chain piece. The company is in active IPO preparation, though no listing is confirmed and no official valuation has been disclosed. (One caution: headlines about "10.5 billion yuan" refer to a separate industry fund co-launched with local government, not money raised by MagicLab — don't confuse the two.)

On the product side, Magic Atom has said it plans to mass-produce around 400 humanoid robots in 2026 and to reach 1,000 deployment scenarios — ambitious, but a fraction of what leaders like Unitree, AgiBot and the top shippers are targeting. That's the honest place to leave it: MagicLab is a real, well-backed challenger with genuine hardware and a once-in-a-generation marketing moment behind it — and a leadership question mark in front of it.

"The Gala made MagicLab famous overnight. What happens after the confetti — the founder exit, the IPO, the 400-robot promise — is the part that will decide whether it's a contender or a comet."

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