Vanbote Robotics

Vanbote Robotics (Shenzhen Vanbote Robotics Co., Ltd.; also written Vanbott / Van Bot Robot) was founded in June 2025 in Shenzhen's Nanshan AI Moli Camp, incubated into existence by the Yale University Innovation Center, around an AI + psychology + robotics thesis and a psychological-coach robot aimed at adolescents - primary and secondary school students plus university students. While most industry resource pours into the general-purpose humanoid race it takes a deliberately different lane: instead of chasing all-round general capability it puts robot capability into emotion and mental health, a vertical that has not yet been fully mined, and argues that psychological intervention should shift from after-the-fact counseling and reactive response toward everyday resilience building and proactive cultivation, using an AI-for-Science approach to quantify emotional and mental states objectively. Its technical premise is that pure text dialogue has a hard ceiling - much of the emotional signal hides in tone, expression and body movement and text struggles to capture it - so the robot body becomes the perception terminal rather than merely a carrier for a large model: hardware captures multidimensional somatic signals across speech prosody, facial expression and posture, and a self-developed 100-billion-parameter multimodal psychology foundation model, MoodLLM, combines them to judge the user's emotional state, closing the somatic-perception gap that software-only mental-health products leave open. The hardware matrix covers three forms - humanoid robot, robot dog and portable companion robot - and every bit of hardware R&D serves the single goal of emotional interaction. Commercialization follows 'hardware is the entry point, service is the endgame': devices carry interaction and data capture, while revenue is built on campus SaaS subscriptions, industry-specific solutions and model licensing, expanding from campuses into homes and communities. The team spans AI research, neuropsychology and finance-industry backgrounds, supporting model algorithms, robot hardware and commercialization at the same time: founder Fan Zheng has an overseas top-school MBA plus overseas venture and hedge-fund experience (formerly at Man Group, a serial entrepreneur), joint chief AI scientist Zhang Shiyang holds a Yale computer-science PhD with multiple papers at NeurIPS and ICML, and Zhang Xihan holds a Yale psychology PhD and a Harvard computational-biology master's. On September 22, 2026 it announced an angel round of tens of millions of RMB, funding continued MoodLLM iteration, multi-form robot body R&D and accelerating the product's move from campus into family and community settings. The company is candid that the route must still clear multiple gates - algorithmic accuracy, ethics and safety, and product experience; demand for youth mental-health support is real, and the capital arriving signals a market willing to give a differentiated path a chance to prove itself.

City

Shenzhen

Founded

2025

Ticker

Unlisted

Website

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