Months-old startups do not normally raise pre-A rounds in the nine figures, but China’s embodied-AI market is not normal. PokeBot, a household robotics player, has pulled in hundreds of millions of dollars in a pre-A led by Shunwei Capital and Matrix Partners, according to Caixin Global. Its robots target chores like clothes folding and cooking.
In a demonstration, one of its robots autonomously cooked mapo tofu in nine minutes, a concrete showcase of the progress driving China’s robotics investment boom.
The round’s size is striking for a pre-A, a signal that investors are paying up early for teams chasing the home-robot market, which remains largely unproven at commercial scale.
The startup joins a crowded Chinese field blending fast model development with vertically integrated hardware, a segment that has become one of 2026’s hottest funding categories, drawing bets on everything from cooking bots to humanoid workers.
