Spirit AI has dozens of Moz1 robots working CATL and JD lines

Spirit AI, founded in Hangzhou in 2024, has tens of its Moz1 wheeled humanoid robots running production work at the battery manufacturer CATL and at the retailer JD.com, which is also an investor. The company put the deployment on record on 18 September 2026. It carries a valuation of 20 billion yuan, about $2.9 billion, on more than $670 million raised, and runs a core team of roughly 300 alongside about a thousand contractors whose job is collecting training data.

Moz1 is wheeled rather than legged, which is the pattern across the Chinese factory deployments: the floor is flat, and wheels spend their power budget on the arms instead of on balance. Spirit AI’s own account of the CATL installation describes the robots working on battery-pack lines.

Co-founder and chief scientist Gao Yang, who also teaches robotics at Tsinghua University, puts the current success rate at about 90% — but for simple tasks in structured settings, not for the factory work, and he says fine-motor control and unfamiliar scenarios remain unsolved. His estimate that robot control models reach a GPT-3-scale threshold by mid-2027 is a forecast, and the company has published no independent benchmark behind it.