Illustration: AI-generated · Inside China AI
Leju Robot: Huawei’s Humanoid Partner Europe Has Never Heard Of
Part of China’s Humanoid Seven — our complete guide to the seven companies that define China’s humanoid industry.
At China’s 15th National Games in Shenzhen last November, the torch was carried into the stadium by a humanoid robot running on a 5G-Advanced network — a world first. The machine was a Kuavo, built by Leju Robot, a company that began as ten robotics students from Harbin Institute of Technology and is now one of the ten most innovative humanoid start-ups on the planet, per LexisNexis’ July 2026 patent ranking. In Europe, Leju is virtually unknown. That is worth correcting.
From student club to Huawei’s humanoid partner
Leng Xiaokun started building robots in a university club in Harbin around 2012 and moved south to Shenzhen in 2016 to found Leju with nine fellow students. The company’s first product, the Aelos educational humanoid, became one of China’s earliest programmable classroom robots. The decisive turn came in 2024: Leju became Huawei Cloud’s first humanoid partner, pairing its full-size Kuavo robot with Huawei’s Pangu AI models and HarmonyOS — making Kuavo the first HarmonyOS-powered humanoid, validated on the factory floor at EV maker NIO.
Kuavo: built for real floors
The Kuavo line (named after Kuafu, the giant of Chinese myth who chased the sun) is now in its fifth generation. The current Kuavo 5 switches between bipedal and wheeled locomotion, carries up to 20 kg, and uses modular, interchangeable hands and limbs. Earlier generations proved their robustness in public: walking on sand and grass, and serving as torchbearer at the Harbin Asian Winter Games in minus 20 degrees Celsius. By early 2025, Leju had delivered more than 100 full-size robots to industrial customers including FAW Hongqi, NIO and BAIC Off-road.
Key numbers
- No. 9 worldwide in LexisNexis’ humanoid start-up patent ranking (July 2026)
- ~¥1.5 billion (~$200 million) pre-IPO round raised in October 2025; early backer Tencent invested as far back as 2017; a mainland listing is targeted
- 100+ full-size humanoids delivered to industrial customers by early 2025, with a reported automated line producing one humanoid every 30 minutes (with partner Dongfang Precision)
- First HarmonyOS humanoid, co-developed with Huawei Cloud’s Pangu AI
Why Leju matters
Leju is the clearest example of China’s humanoid depth beyond the headline names — a top-10 patent holder that rarely appears in western coverage at all. Its Huawei alliance also makes it strategically distinctive: while rivals build on NVIDIA’s stack, Kuavo runs on a fully domestic hardware-software combination. If technology decoupling deepens, Leju’s architecture is the one designed for that world.
The European angle
Leju has no visible international program yet — its focus is domestic, its deployments are with Chinese state-linked and EV customers, and its AI stack is Huawei’s. For European readers, Leju is less a near-term market entrant than a strategic indicator: it shows what a self-sufficient, Huawei-native humanoid ecosystem looks like. Anyone assessing Europe’s dependencies in robotics AI should have Leju on the map — precisely because it does not depend on the western stack at all.
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