BYD opens its plants to PaXini robots as investment ties evolve into strategic pact

BYD has signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Shenzhen robotics startup PaXini Tech, with the deal struck on August 25 at the automaker's global headquarters. The pact shifts the two companies beyond an investor-and-portfolio-company relationship — BYD put money into PaXini in April 2025 — toward joint work on deploying robots in industrial manufacturing, with data collection and robotics named as focus areas.

Under the arrangement, BYD will grant PaXini access to demanding vehicle and component production processes, extensive factory settings, and its supply-chain resources, giving the startup's machines a real-world industrial proving ground. The operating data generated there will feed embodied AI model training, which BYD expects to sharpen the robots' generalization and decision-making abilities and pave the way for large-scale rollout.

PaXini, founded in June 2021, builds high-precision tactile sensors, dexterous hands, and the Tora line of humanoid robots, with its technology aimed at giving machines finer touch sensitivity. The company pulled in more than 1 billion yuan (about $147 million) in a March funding round at a valuation above 10 billion yuan, counts JD.com among its backers, and was reported by Bloomberg in June to be weighing a Hong Kong IPO.

The startup has already run a comparable trial with Geely, whose Qiantang manufacturing base hosts Tora-One units handling wiring-harness assembly and adhesive application; PaXini has said one unit ran fault-free for eight straight hours with a 99.8% task success rate. For BYD, the deal marks a deeper move into core perception technology for embodied AI, following an earlier robotics bet on Agibot.