BYD will open its vehicle and component manufacturing lines to robots built by Chinese startup PaXini Tech, giving the robotics firm access to one of the world’s largest and most complex auto production networks.
The two companies, both headquartered in Shenzhen, signed a strategic cooperation agreement on August 25 and announced it on Monday.
Under the deal, PaXini will deploy production-focused robots inside BYD factories and use the operating data generated on those lines to train and refine its embodied AI models.
BYD described the data as critical for improving generalization and decision-making — the capabilities that separate a lab demo from a machine that can work an eight-hour shift.
The expanding roster of robotics partnerships mirrors a broader convergence between carmakers and humanoid developers.
Xiaomi said in March that a self-developed humanoid had worked autonomously for three hours in the die-casting workshop of its vehicle plant.
In late June, BMW officially deployed Figure AI’s 03 humanoid robots at its Spartanburg’s assembly plant in the United States, after a two-year trial.
PaXini
The startup was founded in June 2021 by Dr. Jincheng Xu, a Waseda University PhD whose lab work focused on robotic manipulation.
Core products include high-precision tactile sensors built on Hall-effect and six-dimensional Hall-array technology, dexterous robotic hands and the Tora series of humanoid robots.
Under the agreement, PaXini will contribute tactile, multidimensional perception and multimodal data-collection technologies — the kind of fine-grained feedback required for tasks like wiring-harness assembly and adhesive application, where force and positioning must stay within narrow tolerances.
PaXini has already tested in an automotive setting.
Earlier this year, the Tora-One humanoid was deployed at Geely Auto‘s Qiantang manufacturing base for flexible assembly tasks.
PaXini claimed eight continuous hours of operation without a fault and a 99.8% task success rate.
However, those figures have not been independently verified.
The startup also operates a roughly 12,000-square-meter embodied intelligence data factory in Tianjin, opened around June 2025 — which it says supports large-scale multimodal data collection.
Financial terms and deployment timelines were not disclosed.
From Capital Ties to Factory Access
BYD made a strategic investment in PaXini in April 2025, its second robotics bet after an earlier backing of Shanghai-based AgiBot.
The new agreement upgrades that relationship from investor-and-portfolio-company to operational partners.
PaXini had about 500 employees as of its most recent PitchBook profile.
For comparison, BYD’s Zhengzhou manufacturing complex — the company’s largest contiguous vehicle production base in China — employed around 57,000 to 60,000 people as of late 2025.
Funding and Listing Plans
PaXini raised more than 1 billion yuan ($148 million) in a March funding round, reaching a valuation above 10 billion yuan ($1.48 billion).
JD.com is among the investors.
Bloomberg News reported in June that PaXini was considering an initial public offering (IPO) in Hong Kong and holding talks with several banks.
A listing would follow UBTech Robotics, which has traded there since December 2023, and AgiBot, which confirmed in July that it had begun its own Hong Kong IPO process.
BYD’s Current Robots
PaXini is not the first robotics company to enter BYD’s plants.
In late 2024, the automaker began deploying UBTech Walker S1 units across its Shenzhen and Changsha factories, handling component sorting, pallet movement, decal application and visual inspections alongside autonomous logistics vehicles.
Unitree robots also performed additional logistics and inspection work.
Forbes reported in July that the combined fleet is at around 200 machines — described as the world’s largest humanoid workforce inside a single corporate network.
BYD is also running a dedicated humanoid robotics lab in-house, opened in late 2024.
The company confirmed in June that a proprietary humanoid would debut in August.
Chinese media reports cited a target of 20,000 internal deployments for the robot, reportedly codenamed “Yao Shun Yu.”
By then, BYD denied the specific figures — the codename, the unit numbers, and the claim that prototypes were already in field tests — while confirming that development was under way.
The company unveiled the ‘Xiao Di’ humanoid robot as a functional prototype (not just a concept) at BYD’s Di Space experience centers, beginning in Zhengzhou and expanding to locations including Shenzhen and Shanghai.
The robot is designed primarily for customer-facing showroom roles such as greeting visitors, explaining vehicle models, answering questions, and basic demonstrations.
Where UBTech supplied general-purpose humanoids and the in-house lab targets a proprietary machine, PaXini fills a narrower gap: tactile perception and the embodied AI data pipeline that feeds it.
