Summary: As IPOs increasingly focus on what a robotics company has already achieved, growing companies may begin to wonder: Could they first acquire a publicly traded company, then wait for their own industry to mature?
On one side is a robotics startup less than two years old, with annual revenue in the millions; on the other is a traditional home renovation company established 42 years ago, listed for nine years, now labeled *ST with negative net assets. Now, the former plans to spend 810 million yuan to become the latter’s new owner.
The underlying question is: Amid stricter IPO reviews for robot companies, why have robot firms suddenly begun entering the capital market through restructuring, mergers and acquisitions, or acquisition of controlling stakes in listed companies? Are these merely isolated capital maneuvers, or are robot companies actively exploring alternative pathways to capitalization beyond IPOs?
Two unrelated worlds collided.
It’s hard to imagine what overlap there could be between a robotics company and a home renovation firm. But on the evening of September 22, these two such companies suddenly appeared together in the same announcement.
*ST Meizhi announced that a consortium of 15 investors led by Beijing Shenpu Intelligence has been selected as the investor for the company’s out-of-court restructuring and subsequent judicial reorganization. Shenpu Intelligence plans to invest approximately RMB 810 million to subscribe for about 92.86 million shares, becoming the company’s new controlling shareholder.
Why would a robotics company suddenly take over a home renovation company on the brink of delisting?
Stranger still, this is not a small-scale industrial investment. The consortium led by Shenpu plans to invest approximately RMB 1.8 billion and is expected to hold about 54.9% of Meizhi’s shares after the restructuring.
From robots to home renovations, from AI startups to listed companies on the ST board, there is nearly a world of difference in between.
In terms of timing, Shenpu Intelligence and Meizhi seem almost like products of two different eras.
Meizhi was established in 1984 and has navigated decades of cyclical changes in the real estate, infrastructure, and construction decoration industries, listing on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange in 2017. Today, it faces a consolidated parent company net asset value of -RMB 52.4662 million as of the end of 2025, with its net profit, whichever is lower before or after excluding non-recurring items, negative for each of the last three fiscal years; its stock has already been subject to delisting risk warnings. If the company again triggers relevant delisting conditions in the 2026 fiscal year, its stock will face the risk of termination of listing.
In comparison, the entity taking over, Shenpu Intelligence, is much younger.
The company is positioned as a general-purpose embodied intelligence robot, initially targeting family-like scenarios such as hotels, healthcare and wellness, retail, and domestic services, with the ultimate goal of bringing robots into homes. Publicly available products include the service robot Xiao Pu, the HiFi UMI data production system, and the embodied intelligence model.
Founder Li Xiaofei earned both his bachelor’s and doctoral degrees from the Department of Automotive Engineering at Tsinghua University, with research focused on intelligent vehicle environmental perception and artificial intelligence algorithms. He previously spent many years founding and developing startups in the autonomous driving sector before shifting his focus to embodied intelligence. He directly holds 21.25% of Shengpu Intelligence’s equity and, through three partnership entities under his control, holds an additional 25.49%, collectively controlling approximately 46.74% of the voting rights.
The company's robots have begun testing in hotel settings. At the Beijing Lido Jingying Hotel, the robots can perform tasks such as item placement, laundry delivery, and folding clothes. Shenpu has also signed a strategic cooperation framework with China Travel Hotel, proposing to deploy robots across more than 400 of its hotels; however, based on publicly available updates, the primary implementation so far remains this hotel’s proof of concept.
In less than two years, Shenpu has completed five funding rounds, with investors including Shunwei Capital, Baidu Ventures, and Didi joining its shareholder list. In June of this year, Didi led a Pre-A round of hundreds of millions of yuan; in early September, the company completed another Pre-A+ round of hundreds of millions of yuan, approximately three months after the previous round.
However, the scale of operations remains small. According to the announcement, Shenpu Intelligent recorded revenue of RMB 10.98 million and a net loss of RMB 10.0957 million in 2025; as of September 14, 2026, revenue amounted to RMB 7 million, with a net loss of RMB 35.25 million. There is also a funding gap. As of September 14, the company’s unrestricted cash on hand stood at RMB 512 million, approximately RMB 300 million short of the required RMB 810 million. The agreement permits funding from own or self-raised sources, but the proportion of own funds must not be less than 50%.
Shenpu has not yet matured into a fully developed robotics company, so questions are emerging: why is a robotics company still burning cash and in the early stages of commercialization seeking control of a publicly listed company? Is it trying to “rescue” a home renovation firm, or is it using a company on the brink of delisting as a faster pathway to capitalizing its robotics business?
The aftershocks of Unitree's listing are still continuing.
Looking at this transaction alone, it seems somewhat absurd: a robotics startup that just learned to walk taking over a home renovation company that has been in business for 42 years.
Just before Shenpu and Meizhi met, China's robotics industry had just undergone a very unique shift in its capital markets.
On August 19, Unitree Robotics went public, with its stock price surging to 1,100 yuan per share and a market capitalization reaching 444.9 billion yuan. This figure sparked near-ferocious imagination across the robotics industry: a robotics company’s market valuation could be pushed to nearly 450 billion yuan on its first day of listing.
But the frenzy didn’t last long—since its listing, Unitree’s stock price and market capitalization have declined by more than 55%; as of the close on September 24, the stock price had fallen to RMB 488, and its market capitalization had dropped below RMB 200 billion.
This has also prompted capital markets to reconsider: Is robotics a proven business model, or merely a super-industry story still in need of time to be validated? Around the same time, news emerged that IPO reviews in the humanoid robotics sector are being tightened. On September 21, Caixin reported that some investment bankers had received internal alerts from their firms, warning that IPOs in hard tech sectors, including robotics, could be delayed if the companies lack prominent industry standing. A senior figure at a leading securities firm noted that this move is primarily aimed at reinforcing the front-line due diligence responsibilities of sponsor institutions, rather than a simple suspension.
This means that although the robot company’s IPO has not been officially shut down, the rules of the game are already changing. The question is, what should be done with robot companies that are already at the doorstep of capitalization?
Shenpu Intelligence's move offers a possibility: instead of waiting in line for an IPO, one can first become the owner of a publicly listed company, similar to a reverse takeover.
Previously, UBTECH and Qiteng Robotics also successively gained control of listed companies. Although these companies once denied plans to achieve a backdoor listing, the market has begun to automatically interpret “robotics company + control of a listed company” as a new path to capitalization. Media outlets have even used the term “hoarding shells” to describe this phenomenon.
In addition, after gaining control of the listed company, Qiteng Robotics truly began transforming the company into a robotics-focused business.
So, these seemingly unrelated transactions are beginning to point toward a common trend: as IPOs increasingly value what a robotics company has already accomplished, growing companies may start to ask—could they first acquire a publicly traded company and then wait for their own industry to mature?
This article is from the WeChat public account "Phoenix Tech," authored by Lu Chunfeng.