Delivery automation has absorbed Meituan for years, and the Chinese group is now funding the arms that handle the physical work.
FAIRINO, a collaborative robot manufacturer, took a Series D led by Meituan, which had already led the company’s Series C+ through its Long-Z investment arm. Combined, the two rounds brought in close to RMB 1B, TechNode reported. Suzhou Capital Group and Yongxin Capital took part, prior backers raised their commitments, and the Series D figure on its own was never disclosed.
Core component manufacturing absorbs the proceeds, covering the ART force-controlled industrial arm line and the AIRLab embodied-intelligence platform, along with research spending and expansion of overseas sales.
What makes a cobot different
Built to share a floor with workers, collaborative arms skip the safety caging that conventional industrial robots require, which lowers installation cost and lets a line be redeployed easily for short production runs. Light-touch assembly and polishing become possible because force control lets an arm sense how hard it presses.
The embodied-intelligence side is the fresher wager. Learned policies paired with arms, in place of hand-coded motion paths, now draw a growing slice of Chinese robotics capital, spanning humanoid developers and teams building general-purpose manipulation models.
For Meituan the logic looks like supply chain. Its logistics and food operations carry endless repetitive handling, and the company has backed robotics across both hardware and software for some time.
Crowding is FAIRINO’s problem, the same one every domestic cobot vendor faces: standing apart on payload, precision and software while industrial buyers keep squeezing price.
