Embodied intelligence funding cools, Ant Group leads Juqiao Industrial's hundred-million-yuan Series A to bet on robotic electronic skin

The money for embodied intelligence is flowing to robots' "skin" | TMTPost Download the client app for exclusive early access November 01, 2026 10:57:00 From Beijing Updated November 01, 2026 11:23:46

By | Machine Frontline

In the 2026 embodied intelligence sector, the direction of financing is changing.

IT Juzi statistics show that in October 2026, the embodied intelligence sector saw 33 financing deals totaling 10.105 billion yuan, while in September the figures were 60 deals and 11.028 billion yuan, a significant downward trend.

However, although the bustling scene of capital chasing body manufacturing and large models has cooled somewhat, some investors have begun to shift their gaze upstream. Core components that determine a robot's "physical capabilities"—dexterous hands, tactile sensors, and electronic skin—have become one of the few areas still attracting capital against the trend.

(Image source: Juqiao Industry official website)

On October 29, Shandong flexible fabric tactile sensing company Juqiao Industry announced the completion of a 100-million-yuan Series A financing, led by Ant Group, with existing shareholders Lingyi Venture Capital, Weihai Gangrong, and Qingdao Hexin participating. This is Ant's second investment in the tactile sensing sector; two months earlier, it had just led the investment in Daimon Robotics, which follows the visuotactile route.

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01 The financing logic of embodied intelligence has changed

The financing logic of embodied intelligence seems to be shifting from "building a smart body" to "letting the body perceive the world."

After all, vision can be fed by internet video, and language can be fed by text, but tactile data can hardly be obtained from ready-made corpora. Physical quantities such as shear force and material texture are difficult for simulation engines to generate with high fidelity and must be collected frame by frame through real operations.

Industry data shows that in terms of price, tactile data costs about twice as much as visual data. Video data such as visual data may cost a few hundred yuan per hour, while tactile data costs several hundred yuan.

This difference is directly reflected in financing data. In the first seven months of 2026, nearly 20 financing deals occurred in the domestic humanoid robot sensor field, totaling more than 3.1 billion yuan, with about 1.56 billion yuan swallowed in July alone. To some extent, this also means that whoever can provide an efficient, low-cost, and scalable tactile data collection entry point will have seized the "data pass" of embodied intelligence at the current stage.

However, at this stage, the domestic tactile sensing sector does not have only one unified technical route. The Hall magnetic sensing solution represented by PaXini leans toward high-precision multi-dimensional force detection at dexterous fingertips; the visuotactile route represented by Daimon Robotics has higher resolution, with tactile resolution reaching tens of thousands of sensing points per square centimeter, outputting image data, and naturally adapting to end-to-end networks.

There is also the fabric route represented by Juqiao Industry. Its technical logic is to break conductive and piezoresistive structures all the way down to the fiber level, directly weaving functional fibers into a sensing network. When an external force touches it, the conductive pathways within the fibers deform, and the acquisition system reads the signals and algorithms convert them into tactile data.

These three routes are not substitutes for each other; rather, they seem to correspond to different tasks. For example, fingertips and dexterous hands require high resolution, multi-dimensional force, and rapid response, where visuotactile and Hall magnetic sensing solutions currently have advantages; the torso, robotic arms, soles, and other large curved surfaces require large-area, bendable, breathable, and cost-controllable coverage, where the fabric route seems easier to deploy.

Therefore, in the short term, it is difficult for one route to dominate everything, and the industry is more likely to move toward hybrid solutions layered by body part. For this reason, the logic of capital betting is not to gamble on which technology will ultimately win. Ant's two investments precisely correspond to this differentiation: Daimon Robotics represents the high-precision direction of visuotactile sensing, while Juqiao Industry represents the large-area coverage capability of the fabric route. This also explains why, against the backdrop of cooling embodied intelligence financing, a 100-million-yuan-level sum would still land on "a piece of cloth."

02 A "counterintuitive" technical path

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The company was founded at the end of 2023. Founder Zhang Jingqi graduated from the Department of Electronic Engineering at the University of York in the UK, previously served as CTO of a Xiaomi ecological chain company, and holds multiple related invention patents. The core team also mainly comes from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and major smart hardware companies, with deep technical accumulation as well as experience in smart hardware product definition and mass production.

The company's technical path is quite "counterintuitive." The structure of traditional piezoresistive film is to stack a flexible substrate, pressure-sensitive layer, and conductive layer layer by layer, but Juqiao Industry chose to use nylon as the fiber core and make the piezoresistive material and electrodes into independent functional fibers.

The advantage of this solution is that the sensing fabric woven from it can be cut, folded, and quickly revised, and can conform to complex curved surfaces of robots. This innovation successfully pushed fabric-form electronic skin toward true large-scale mass production. In May 2025, the company disclosed that its roll-to-roll production line had an annual capacity of 200,000 pieces and a yield rate of 95%; in July, Weihai Lingang District reported that orders had been scheduled through October, with first-year production value of nearly 10 million yuan; in September, the 1,000th set of humanoid robot fabric electronic skin rolled off the line. The company said that in less than half a year on the market, nearly 100 domestic and overseas customers had placed orders and made repeat purchases, including but not limited to Unitree, Songyan Power, and Zeroth.

However, the shortcomings of the fabric route are equally obvious: its single-point precision falls short of vision-tactile solutions, which determines that it is better suited to large-area coverage scenarios such as the torso, soles, and robotic arms, rather than high-precision fingertip manipulation. So the company is also extending toward fine interaction, launching Tactile Skin 2.0, which further expands its sensing capabilities for force direction, sliding tendency, and tangential force by adjusting the weaving structure and combining model training—but whether it can meet the high-end precision requirements of dexterous hands remains to be verified.

The deeper challenge lies in the business model. It is understood that Juqiao Industrial's current product matrix spans three tracks. Among them, robot electronic skin serves as the valuation anchor, establishing the company's position as a technical benchmark, but at this stage the business is highly dependent on a small number of leading customers such as Unitree, and the sustainability of orders remains to be seen.

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Therefore, the more accurate meaning of this hundred-million-yuan financing is not that capital has cast a "confirmation vote" for Juqiao Industrial's fabric route, but rather that, in a window period when tactile technology routes have not yet converged and the data entry point has not yet been settled, it is staking out an early position in a differentiated player with mass-production and delivery capabilities.

What it really tests is whether the company can convert its first-mover process advantages into stable delivery, standardized modules, and tactile data usable by models; if this step succeeds, the fabric route has a chance to become the infrastructure for full-body robot tactile sensing; if it fails, the capital window may also be rapidly compressed by latecomers.

03 Who can seize the commanding heights of humanoid robot perception?

The reason Juqiao's financing has attracted industry attention is that it actually reflects the changes taking place in robot skin.

In the past, robots wearing clothes or being covered with soft skin was mostly understood as an appearance and protection issue. Now, this outer covering is simultaneously carrying four functions: safety, affinity, scenario adaptability, and tactile perception.

In near-human scenarios such as shopping malls, elderly care, and homes, whether users touch hard metal or a flexible covering directly determines the experience of human-robot coexistence; in industrial scenarios, high-temperature resistance, corrosion resistance, dust resistance, and anti-static properties are hard requirements...

This has also made the track's growth particularly notable. According to industry forecasts, by 2030 China's humanoid robot electronic skin market demand will reach 1.525 million square meters, corresponding to an overall market size of about 27.4 billion yuan. Traditional textile enterprises, professional sensor companies, and materials companies are accelerating their entry, and the linkage effect across the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain is obvious.

But behind the heat, industrial development is still at an early stage. The lack of standardization is one of the most prominent pain points: robots of different brands and models have different structures, and electronic skin mostly requires customized development for each machine, with molds and patterns unable to be reused in batches, resulting in high costs and long cycles.

High-end electronic skin modules are limited by packaging processes, sensing chips, and material costs, and the price of a full set still makes cost-performance-focused complete-machine manufacturers hard-pressed to bear. In addition, under long-term high-frequency bending, complex industrial dust, and temperature-varying working conditions, flexible sensing products are prone to problems such as signal drift, decreased sensitivity, and shortened service life, and product stability and consistency need to be improved. For robot skin to truly move from optional to essential, it still has to cross the three thresholds of consistency, reliability, and cost.

In short, for a machine to enter human space, what is often perceived first is not algorithms and parameters, but whether it is hard or soft, cold or warm when it touches a person—and that is exactly where the value of touch lies.

But the sign of maturity for this track will not be a single financing or a single new product, but rather skin becoming an inconspicuous yet indispensable ordinary component. By then, the focus of discussion will no longer be which technology route is more advanced, but who can stably supply under real working conditions, control costs, and keep pace with complete-machine iteration. What capital is betting on today is precisely this certainty. As for which route will ultimately win, perhaps the answer will only come after robots truly enter daily life.

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