Robot Era is a humanoid robotics company spun out of Tsinghua University and founded in August 2023 by Chen Jianyu. The company develops general-purpose humanoid robots, including its STAR1 humanoid and Q5 service robot, and concentrates its research on full-body control and dexterous manipulation algorithms that allow robots to move and act fluidly in real environments.
A central part of Robot Era's stack is ERA-42, a multimodal vision-language-action model that lets its robots execute more than 100 distinct tasks driven by voice commands. By coupling perception, language understanding, and physical action in one model, the company aims to make its robots flexible enough to handle varied service and operational tasks rather than single hard-coded routines.
In July 2025 Robot Era raised a Series A of nearly 500 million yuan (approximately $69 million), co-led by CDH Investments and Haier Capital, with participation from Houxue Capital, Meridian Capital, Xianghe Capital, Zhejiang Fore Intelligent Technology, Crystal Stream Capital, and Tsinghua Holdings. The round added to over 900 million yuan the company had previously raised.
Robot Era reports having delivered more than 200 robots globally, positioning it among the more commercially active Chinese humanoid startups during a period of record robotics funding. As humanoid and general-purpose robots become the fastest-growing robotics sub-sector, Robot Era's combination of locomotion, manipulation, and a task-general VLA model places it in direct competition with both Chinese and Western humanoid developers.