China’s state broadcaster has handed two of the country’s most closely watched embodied‑AI start‑ups a rare form of national recognition: stage time on the 2026 Spring Festival Gala. On January 25 the broadcaster named Beijing‑based Galbot the gala’s designated embodied large‑model robot, following a January 23 announcement that Magic Atom will be an intelligent robot strategic partner for the same show. The twin endorsements turn what have been technical showcases into mainstream spectacles.
Galbot (Beijing Galaxy General Robot Co., Ltd.), founded in May 2023, pitches itself as a pragmatic developer of multi‑modal, embodied large models for commercial, industrial and medical use. The company emphasises a hybrid “wheel‑foot” design that swaps between legged locomotion for rough terrain and wheeled motion for efficient, high‑speed transit on flat ground — a deliberate engineering choice to blunt two well‑known weaknesses of purely bipedal machines: high energy consumption and short endurance.
The start‑up says it has built R&D teams across Beijing, Shenzhen and Suzhou and shipped its core Galbot G1 humanoid into industrial pilots and orders at the thousand‑unit scale for firms including BAIC and CATL. Galbot also reports deployments in retail and partnerships with multiple hospitals. In December 2025 it closed a new financing round of more than $300 million, lifting its valuation to around $3 billion and attracting a mix of domestic strategic investors and international backers from Singapore and the Middle East.
Magic Atom is a newer entrant, founded in January 2024 out of a robotics ecosystem connected to Dreametech and staffed by engineers who worked on Xiaomi’s “Tiedan” robot dog. Its product suite ranges from a full‑size humanoid (MagicBot Gen1) to a compact humanoid (MagicBot Z1) and a four‑legged MagicDog, alongside dexterous robotic hands. Magic Atom markets dramatic demos — continuous fall‑and‑recover routines, jumps and expressive behaviour recognition for the Z1, and robust outdoor operation for MagicDog in temperatures between −20°C and 55°C — and has attracted angel and strategic investment in 2024–25.
The Spring Festival Gala is China’s most watched television event and a prized promotional platform. Placement on the show offers immediate public visibility and a stamp of cultural legitimacy that commercial displays or trade shows cannot match. For emerging robotics firms, the gala is as much a branding prize as it is a sales channel: it normalises the technology for a mass audience and accelerates corporate narratives about progress in domestic “hard tech.”
Beyond marketing optics, the appearances speak to a broader industry shift. For years, embodied AI — the intersection of robotics hardware and large, multimodal control models — has been a research frontier rather than a commercial market in China. Announcements from Galbot and Magic Atom point to faster transitions from lab prototypes to operational systems, enabled by integrated teams that combine academic pedigree, industrial robotics experience and in‑house component development such as motors and reducers.
Still, major challenges remain. Long‑duration power, reliable locomotion in unconstrained environments, safety certification for public spaces and unit economics at scale are unresolved engineering and business problems. The gala moment will raise expectations; delivering consistent, useful services across thousands of units and industries will be the real test of whether these companies move beyond spectacle to sustained commercial impact.
For investors and policymakers the immediate takeaway is practical: China’s embodied AI ecosystem is aggregating talent, capital and industrial partners quickly, and it is seeking public legitimacy on a national stage. For international observers, the episode underscores Beijing’s willingness to showcase indigenous technological progress and to shepherd homegrown robotics into social as well as industrial roles.