Ant Group (Robbyant)

Ant Group is the Hangzhou fintech company behind Alipay. It was spun out of Alibaba in October 2014, Alibaba still holds about a third of it, and its planned USD 34.5 billion IPO was halted by Chinese regulators in November 2020. Since then it has pushed into AI and, from late 2024, into robots.

The robotics arm is Shanghai Ant Lingbo Technology, branded Robbyant, registered at the end of 2024 and formally launched in Pudong, Shanghai, in March 2025; a second entity was set up in Hangzhou in August 2025. Robbyant's CEO is Zhu Xing. Alongside hardware it publishes robot foundation models under the LingBot name that it says are meant for other manufacturers' robots as well as its own.

Its first machine, the R1, was shown at the Inclusion Conference on the Bund in Shanghai on 11 September 2025 and at IFA in Berlin the same month. It is a wheeled, two-armed humanoid of 110 kg, 1.6 to 1.75 m tall, with 34 degrees of freedom, demonstrated cooking and guiding visitors. SCMP reported the Shanghai History Museum had received units; no price, volume or wider customer list has been published. Ant is a late entrant behind Unitree and UBTech; the parent's deep pockets are the main reason to watch it.