Yuehua and Huang Xiaoming are both here: Robot leasing—whose business is it really?

In the spring of 2026, the most surreal story in China’s business world happened to a bunch of scrap-metal machines.

In mid-March, a robot rental platform called Qingtian Zu announced that it had completed a funding round worth hundreds of millions of yuan. In the investor list—besides hard-tech capital firms such as Dayang Electric and Muhua Kechuang—there were conspicuous entertainment-industry faces as well, like Lehua Entertainment and Mingjia Capital, which is associated with Huang Xiaoming. The company was established only three months ago, and its valuation had already surged to 3 billion yuan.

What does 3 billion yuan mean? According to data from iMedia Consulting, the total output value of the entire China robot rental market in 2025 was only 1 billion yuan.

Just a year ago, the daily rental rate for a humanoid robot could still be quoted at 20,000 yuan, with bookings scheduled a month in advance. Today, a year later, the same kind of robot has its daily rental rate dropped to 3,000 yuan—and it still has to be pushed everywhere, sometimes going half a month without anyone asking.

The collapse of prices and the frenzy of capital happened at the same time in this track, whose total market scale is no more than 10 billion yuan, forming a commercial picture full of absurdity.

So is this the prelude to the next 10-billion-yuan growth windfall, or a brief fantasy that has been prematurely ripened by traffic and capital?

The icy and fiery sides behind the hype

With any business phenomenon, the first thing to look at is price.

The price curve of robot rentals is nothing short of steep. At the 2025 CCTV Spring Festival Gala, the robot from UBTECH, dancing on stage and performing a yangge-style routine, ignited the market overnight.

Image source: the web

Last year’s early months, small-time rental operator Xiao Chen bought multiple robots at high prices. Now he still hasn’t earned back the principal. “A robot’s depreciation rate is higher than a car’s. When you buy it, it’s more than 300,000. In less than a year, the market price has already broken through the previous price floor,” he said. He started dumping the equipment at low prices on Xianyu, but even that drew no interest.

From 20,000 yuan per day to 3,000 yuan and nobody cared—within less than a year, the robot rental market completed a roller-coaster turn from frenzy to cooling.

Who is paying the bill? Who is making money?

While individual rental operators were singing the blues, capital chose another path: smashing money into a platform.

In December 2025, Yuan Intelligent Robots, together with Feikuo Technology and others, initiated the formation of Qingtian Zu. The platform is positioned as the world’s first robot rental platform, using a “shared leasing + platform-based dispatch” model.

Within three months, it completed three rounds of financing—seed, angel, and angel+—with top-tier investors such as Hillhouse Venture Capital, Fosun Chuangfu, Dayang Electric, Lehua Entertainment, Mingjia Capital, and others jumping in.

Qingtian Zu’s ambition is not to build an even flashier robot, but to build a delivery system that can actually run.

Its business model is not hard to understand: one side of the platform connects to more than 200 robot suppliers; the other side connects to customers with rental demand—corporate annual meetings, mall openings, event promotion at exhibitions, wedding toasts, and even personal birthday parties.

After a customer places an order, the system automatically matches based on distance, device inventory, and provider ratings. The service provider brings the robots to the site, and the whole process is handled end-to-end: transportation, commissioning, operation/control, and interaction.

Image source: Qingtian Zu official website

This model looks great, but the real test is whether it can turn one-off deliveries into standardized, replicable services.

Qingtian Zu CEO Li Yiyan admitted that the platform’s current profit model is a commission on order service fees, but during the promotion stage it does not charge service fees, and it does not consider profitability for now.

The Chief Strategy Officer, Wang Mingfeng, was more direct: the platform’s “999-yuan national robot experience plan” is “not meant to make money, but a demand-sensing tool,” to see whether ordinary people are actually willing to pay for robot services.

Image source: the web

This is a classic strategy of burning money to buy market share—use subsidies to acquire users, use orders to sustain service providers, use scale to dilute costs, and ultimately build a nationwide fulfillment network.

Qingtian Zu aims to cover 200+ cities within 2026, achieve a “2-hour service circle,” and recruit 1,400 city partners.

But problems also come along: when subsidies are cut back and traffic recedes, will those users attracted by “999 yuan” keep paying?

Three business traps behind the hype

If we pull robot rentals out of the surface-level excitement and restore it to an actual business, we’ll find that its underlying logic is far less beautiful than it looks.

First trap: demand is event-based, not continuous.

During the Spring Festival period, entertainment performances and commercial marketing made up 65% of Qingtian Zu’s orders. These demands naturally come with intermittency—companies don’t hold annual meetings every day, malls don’t do grand openings every week, and scenic areas don’t host temple fairs every month. After the holiday ends, order density drops off a cliff.

Image source: the web

A member of the Information and Communications Economic Expert Committee under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, Pan Heli, said directly that the current market “is not lacking industrial robots; what it lacks is embodied intelligent robots with autonomous decision-making ability.”

Most robots are currently in the small-brain development stage; they need operators and remote controls to execute actions and do not have autonomous decision-making ability. That means the work they can handle is still quite limited.

Second trap: delivery costs are high, and scale is not economical.

What robot rentals sell is never just a single piece of equipment—it’s a whole package of services that can actually be run. When a robot goes out to do an event, it requires transportation, commissioning, and engineers on-site. Safety guarantees are also needed. In the industry, it’s common to have “one technical staff member per robot,” and this labor cost won’t drop in the same proportion as rental prices.

This leads to a paradox: the more orders there are, the larger the service team becomes, and management costs, training costs, and accident costs all rise. Once prices are driven down to floor levels, many orders are already unprofitable.

Third trap: asset depreciation happens far faster than expected.

Robots are not real estate, and not gold. They’re more like consumer electronics—the technology iterates quickly and depreciation is fast. A robot worth 100,000 yuan today may only be worth 50,000 yuan after a year. If attendance isn’t high enough, even depreciation costs can’t be recovered.

Rental operator Xiao Chen算了一笔账: during the last Spring Festival period last year, a robot could indeed rent for 5,000 yuan per day. But the Spring Festival only lasts seven days. For the remaining 300+ days, most days are in a slow season with “no orders for half a month.”

Image source: the web

At the same time, multiple rental operators reported that on average across the whole year, they can stabilize at 5 to 6 orders per month, which is already considered relatively good operations.

If you assume an average of 5 orders per month at an average price of 2,500 yuan, then monthly revenue is 12,500 yuan, and annual revenue is 150,000 yuan. But that’s gross revenue—costs are not included yet.

More importantly, there’s not a single cent you can save on the cost side. For every order, engineers need to be on-site, and the labor cost amortized over a year is about 30,000 to 40,000 yuan. For inter-city orders, you need transportation and travel expenses—another 10,000 to 20,000 yuan. If a robot falls or is damaged once, joint repairs cost a few thousand yuan. Robot depreciation also can’t be escaped: a 100,000-yuan robot may have zero residual value within 3 to 5 years, meaning depreciation alone can eat up 20,000 to 30,000 yuan every year.

Add everything up—annual costs end up with a baseline of 70,000 to 80,000 yuan. If revenue is 150,000 yuan, minus 80,000 yuan costs leaves 70,000 yuan. But that 70,000 yuan still needs you to pray that there are no order interruptions throughout the year, that robots don’t get damaged, that the platform doesn’t raise its prices, and that competition doesn’t intensify.

Xiao Chen’s words are very straightforward: “I work myself to death for a year, and in the end, I’m working for the platform, for the engineers, and for the maintenance technicians.”

It’s not that this business can’t be done—it’s just that it’s nowhere near as beautiful as the books make it look. The hype is for outsiders; the profits are yours.

When these three traps stack together, robot rentals become a business where the busier you are, the less money you make. Hype is the surface. Lasting profitability is the real problem.

Who makes real money?

So in this wave of hype, who actually made money?

First, the ones who make money first are the leading original equipment manufacturers.

Companies like UBTECH and Unitree Robots distribute devices at scale through rental channels. IDC’s report shows that in 2025 global shipments of humanoid robots were about 18,000 units, and the China market accounted for 84.7%.

Image source: the web

For manufacturers, rental is not a substitute for sales—it’s a trial that lowers the user’s decision threshold. Users rent first and then buy later, which may actually stimulate long-term sales.

Second, the ones who likely make money are speculators who entered early and exited quickly.

Those rental operators who bought equipment at normal prices in early 2025 and densely rented out when prices were high really did make quick money. They caught the scarce dividend and recouped their investment before supply expanded. But the followers who came later—buying equipment at high prices and grabbing orders at low prices—became the ones being harvested.

Finally, the ones most likely to make money may be platforms that can turn delivery systems into a moat.

Qingtian Zu’s master plan is right here. It’s not betting on robot technology, but on organizational capability—whether it can match fragmented supply and demand efficiently, whether it can turn non-standard services into SOPs, and whether it can reduce reliance on manpower through systems and training. If this system runs smoothly, it can take a commission from each order and become the “Didi” of the robot era.

But the difficulty of this path is no easier than building robots.

Overall, the boom in robot rentals is more like a traffic carnival sparked by the Spring Festival Gala and boosted by capital. Its explosion speed far exceeds industry expectations, but its sustainability depends on whether two core problems can be solved:

First, can robots find more real-world scenarios beyond dancing?

For performances and events, capacity is limited. To move robot rentals from trying them out to becoming a real need, robots need to enter high-frequency scenarios such as park inspections, security patrols, retail guidance, medical rehabilitation, and eldercare services. These scenarios require far higher levels of stability and autonomy than putting on a dance routine.

Some companies are already exploring. The robots from Zhiping Square have entered auto manufacturing, semiconductor, and biotech fields, handling tasks like sorting, loading/unloading, and quality inspection. Beijing Zhongguancun Technology Rental has also launched a surgery-robot service rental方案 for the medical system. But scaling and replicating these scenarios still takes time.

Image source: the web

Editor

Second, can the industry establish unified delivery standards and a profitable business model?

The current robot rental market is highly fragmented and lacks unified deposit management, after-sales guarantees, and failure compensation standards. The “Protecting Consumer Rights with 315” investigation previously exposed that some platforms claimed coverage of 30 core cities and 300+ service providers, but in reality their fulfillment capability was severely insufficient. The vicious cycle of a price war has pushed most small and mid-sized rental operators into a predicament of losing money to buy traffic.

Qingtian Zu’s “platform + ecosystem” model is an attempt to solve these problems. But whether it can truly integrate fragmented supply, build user stickiness through content and services, and achieve a positive loop after subsidies fade remains to be tested by the market.

Conclusion: after the hype, who is a survivor?

Looking back at the rise and fall of robot rentals over the past year, it’s strikingly similar to the early stages of many emerging industries: first, technological breakthroughs ignite market enthusiasm; then, capital floods in and creates excess supply; next, price wars cause industry reshuffling; and finally, only a small number of players with core capabilities can survive.

In this process, the first to make money isn’t just robot companies—it’s also platforms and service providers that are best at taking orders, best at delivering, and best at turning robots into a business.

But after the hype fades, the ones that can truly remain will surely be those who build delivery systems into a moat, control their cost structure to the extreme, and make repeat purchase rates sustainable.

For the many small and mid-sized rental operators, if you enter now, you need to think through three questions: Are you earning rental fees, or the money from delivery services? Can you make delivery into an SOP? Do you have the ability to provide content?

If the answers to all of them are no, then robot rentals may only be a seemingly lively pseudo-boom.

After all, in any industry, the people who end up surviving are never those with the most equipment, but those with the most stable cash flow, the most standardized delivery, and the ones who can withstand volatility best.

References:

1. “Huang Xiaoming invested as well; Qingtian Zu raised over a hundred million in funding; CEO Li Yiyan: The robot industry is a stock market; to some extent it’s ‘low season not low’”—Caijing Net Technology

2. “Robots: daily rental rate drops from 30,000 to 3,000 yuan”—First Financial

3. “Established for less than 3 months, valuation breaks 3 billion; Qingtian Zu opens up the 10-billion-yuan robot rental market”—NetEase Technology