Meta’s humanoid robot has a Chinese body. The five-foot-tall prototype, called Max, was built with Shanghai-based Fourier over roughly three months and shown to employees at an internal robotics summit in late August. A second version was underway by September.
The prototype weighs 48 kilograms, runs on Nvidia’s Jetson Thor and carries five-fingered hands with a face that produces expressions. Meta robotics product vice president Li-Chen Miller spent nearly two months inside Fourier’s Shanghai factory while the two teams worked. Meta says the effort is for research and experimentation, not for sale.
Fourier’s path explains why it won the work. Founder Gu Jie started the company in 2015 building rehabilitation robots, exoskeletons and hospital training systems, which supplied years of practice in motion control, force feedback and human-machine interaction. Humanoid development began in 2019, a prototype walked untethered by 2022, and the GR-1, GR-2, open-source N1 and the 55-degree-of-freedom GR-3 followed.
Meta reportedly wanted a machine that hears voices from five metres, reads gestures from three, holds eye contact and signals states like listening or uncertainty. Fourier’s care-robot background fit that brief more closely than industrial rivals.
Capital had already arrived. SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led a RMB 400M Series D in 2022, with Aramco-backed Prosperity7 Ventures joining. Series E reached nearly RMB 800M, and Runyang Technology put in RMB 300M at an RMB 8B pre-money mark. Omdia counted 300 humanoid shipments in 2025, sixth worldwide.
The open question is whether speed in prototyping converts into commercial scale.
