FAIRINO raises nearly $140M in Meituan-led rounds to scale industrial humanoid arms
The Suzhou cobot maker will channel the C+ and D financing into core-component capacity and its ART force-controlled arm line.
FAIRINO, the Suzhou-based collaborative robot maker, has closed consecutive Series C+ and Series D rounds totaling nearly 1 billion yuan — about $140 million — the company announced on October 19. Meituan's Long-Z investment arm led the C+ round and Meituan itself led the Series D, with Yongxin Capital, Shishan Phase II and Suzhou Chuangtou participating; existing backers including Guolian Minsheng Capital, Suzhou Industrial Investment and Tsingliu Capital increased their stakes. TechNode independently confirmed the round structure, noting the company did not disclose a separate figure for the Series D.
The money goes into two things: manufacturing capacity for self-developed core components — controllers, encoders, servo drives, harmonic reducers, servo motors and brakes — and expansion in industrial embodied AI, centered on the ART series of industrial humanoid force-controlled arms and the AIRLab embodied-intelligence tool platform.
FAIRINO's foundation is conventional cobots: the FR series spans 3 to 35 kilograms of payload across 11 models, supplemented by welding-oriented WM and commercial C variants used in CNC machine tending, palletizing, welding and grinding, assembly inspection and service applications. This year it moved up the stack with the ART series, which it describes as the world's first general-purpose industrial humanoid force-controlled arm; customized force-controlled arm services date back to 2024. Its ART7-R7 dual-arm unit is already on pre-order in Europe at 12,705 euros excluding VAT.
The order book gives the raise its logic: a 2,000-unit strategic agreement with Boyin Hechuang, another 2,000-unit deal with Jack Technology, the sewing-machinery leader, and footholds in semiconductor and electronics manufacturing — deployments at HANA Microelectronics' Thailand site and business relationships with ASML, Coilcraft, LG Electronics and Sony Semiconductor. Overseas, the company counts more than 50 sales outlets and three service centers, works through channels including igus and MISUMI, and lists NASA, HD KSOE, Panasonic and DENSO among its customers. Europe accounts for 46 percent of overseas sales, Japan 16 percent, North America 13 percent and Southeast Asia 11 percent.
The raise also says something about where capital still flows in a bifurcating market: toward companies with real industrial revenue. Force-controlled arms sit at the industrial end of embodied AI, where purchase orders — not demos — set the pace. FAIRINO is betting that the shortest path to scaled humanoids runs through factory-proven arms, not the other way around.