Lena

Venture investing in AI, robotics, crypto | views are my own

[Lena @dolylupec]

Just wrapped up an unforgettable two-week robotics marathon across China, and I still can’t quite believe it’s over.

Every single day of the trip and even now looking back, I was overwhelmed with gratitude for this incredible privilege. I love this robotics/AI world, and this journey reminded me exactly why.

Gaining access to 18 of China’s top humanoid robotics companies in such a short time felt almost surreal. It was a rare and special experience.

None of it would have happened without the amazing people who made it possible. Huge thanks to @TheHumanoidHub, @XRoboHub, our interpreter Winnie and everyone else who opened doors, shared insights, and supported us along the way. You made this trip truly beautiful.

I’ve long been fascinated by China’s robotics ecosystem and always wanted to visit someday. Everyone I spoke with in the US and elsewhere kept saying “If you’re serious about this field you have to see China.”

Spending two intense weeks on the ground, visiting different cities and meeting brilliant founders and engineers was deeply inspiring. I loved every moment of it.

It all started earlier this year in SF. @TheHumanoidHub and I kept crossing paths, diving deep into robotics conversations and I knew he was planning this journey. When he turned to me and asked “Want to come?” I said yes immediately and booked my ticket the same day. Future me is still thanking past me for that decision.

The trip was wonderfully intense and ridiculously fun. I’ll never forget sharing takeout pizza in taxis while racing to the next company, passionately talking about the future of robotics the whole way. Those moments were pure joy.

There’s so much I saw, felt, and learned. Before the memories fade I’ll be sharing more of it here. And yes — we have more content coming so stay tuned😎🤖

[The Humanoid Hub @TheHumanoidHub]

That's a wrap on an amazing 17-day journey across China.

I didn't do this alone. My friend @dolylupec came along for the whole ride. She's got a background in AI and robotics investing, and I'm grateful she chronicled the tours on her account and pitched in on my channel.

@XRoboHub is one of the most resourceful people I know. He understands the humanoid space well and helped us schedule most of the important visits, then came along too.

And a shout-out to @Robo_Tuo, who encouraged me to do this trip and supported us all along.

It was my first time in China, and the trip was packed so tight with tours, we didn’t get to do much touristy stuff. Can't complain. It was a hell of a ride.

4 cities on the mainland. 18 humanoid makers. Warm, welcoming people everywhere. We had the privilege of chatting with founders, senior engineers, researchers, and marketing and strategy leads, a lot of whom said yes on very short notice. Grateful for that.

The energy is extraordinary. It's the trifecta: engineering talent, a deep supply chain, and breakneck adoption of new tech. There's intense competition, but underneath it, a real spirit of sharing and collaboration.

I've got a series of tour videos lined up, dropping over the coming days.

And something tells me this won't be my last trip. Robotics and embodied AI are just getting started. The next ten years are going to reshape how we think about physical work.

We ended on the Great Wall, a 2,000 year old marvel of engineering, after two weeks staring at the next one.

The robots are coming. I just went to meet them first.

[Lena @dolylupec]

@cdixon 🔥

[Lena @dolylupec]

@TheHumanoidHub @itsajchan @JayLiStanford @_joe_harris_ @deepakpathak @xiao_ted @ericjang11 @amanda0x @aurorafeng_01 @alrightdo This looks amazing, great to see how it actually turned out after so many months! Will def be there next year

[Lena @dolylupec]

@0xfishylosopher A bit late but congrats Jay!

[Molly O’Shea @MollySOShea]

NEW: Stripe Co-Founder John Collison (@collision) says AI agents will completely rewire internet commerce.

@stripe processed $1.9T in 2025, up 34%. Now the company is rebuilding for an internet where AI agents, not humans, increasingly transact.

“Instinct is real, Muse is real. All these things are real.”

“Computer use is the ultimate backwards compatibility layer for the real world.”

I sat down with John at @browserbase Navigate to talk agentic commerce, computer use, cybersecurity, how Stripe is rebuilding for AI & why Stripe considers 2026 the beginning of the “singularity epoch.”

John sees AI already showing up in new company creation. Stripe is seeing its highest rate of new firm creation in recent memory, while its 2026 Atlas cohort is tracking at 5x the revenue of the 2025 class.

We also cover Stripe’s recent acquisitions:
› Bridge + Privy, bringing crypto-native infrastructure & talent
› Metronome, usage-based billing for the AI era
› OpenRouter, routing across multiple AI models as inference spend & model competition explodes

Browserbase is building the infrastructure for this shift, giving AI agents cloud browsers to navigate the existing web & take actions across it.

𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
(00:00) Stripe’s $1.9T & Rebuilding for AI
(00:31) Why Agents Will Replace Web Forms
(02:20) How AI Rewires Commerce & Product Discovery
(04:40) More Cyberattacks?
(06:49) Why Stripe Says the Singularity Started in 2026
(09:29) Stripe Is Rebuilding Its APIs for AI Agents
(11:38) Why Stripe Bought Bridge, Privy, Metronome & OpenRouter
(15:12) When Stripe Builds vs. Buys
(16:55) How AI Is Changing Stripe Internally
(20:39) How John Keeps Up With AI
(23:28) The Coming 'Good Bot' vs. 'Bad Bot' Problem
(24:53) 17 Years of Lessons Building Stripe

[Lena @dolylupec]

@JasonMa2020 Boring but still looks cute

[Lena @dolylupec]

@kchonyc Big congrats!

[Lena @dolylupec]

This is the direction robotics needs to take if we want it to fulfill its potential.

It is not about humans carefully setting up a perfect environment so the robot can just perform specific tasks. It needs to handle the entire end to end workflow as if you have hired a human employee. That is true automation and the right way to use robots.

The next step I want to see is the physical agent improving on the job: tighter traversal, better task sequencing, stronger operational judgment over a shift.

Congrats to the team on the launch. Looking forward to seeing this in real environments!

[Dyna Robotics @DynaRobotics]

We are releasing Dyna-2.1, the first Physical Agent that achieves reliable super long-horizon whole-body autonomy. It combines our brand-new semi-humanoid hardware with an agentic system built around Dyna-2 to handle ultra-long real-world workflows.

Here is an uncut footage of Dyna-2.1 completing an entire hour-long laundry room workflow, just like a human does.

[Kivo @officialkivoart]

Today we’re introducing Kivo 🔥

What if you could take inspiration from Pinterest, remix it with your own content, and edit the result like you would in Figma?

See what this experience feels like at https://t.co/BKYqyw53fX.

[Lena @dolylupec]

@officialkivoart Congrats on the launch!! Let's go🔥

[Lena @dolylupec]

@ekang426 Awww happy bday princess!

[Lena @dolylupec]

@TheHumanoidHub @hackersquadio Lesgo!!🔥

[Lena @dolylupec]

@MsEggmily @UseCorgi Congrats Emily!🧡

[Andrew Kang @Rewkang]

Hyundai bought control of Boston Dynamics at a $1.1B valuation in 2021. Today Unitree opened near $66B - 35x it's last VC round of $1.9B and ~7x its IPO price.

Unitree has real revenues and major brand presence, but the company is not very well understood by most investors.

In 2025, it generated $131m in Humanoid sales. 70-80% of its Humanoid sales were for research use cases, 20-30% for education and entertainment, and very little for genuine robotic use cases. Unitree's main product was a robot body that lacked a brain.

An affordable, programmable, at least semi-reliable brainless humanoid body however, is exactly what the research market demanded. Unitree G1s are ubiquitous across robotics research groups around the world. Just as AI research is dependent on physical computing hardware, robot hardware is indispensable for research in robot learning, control systems, simulation, etc.

While there are few Unitree humanoids currently deployed for real robotic work, the rise of the company has greatly accelerated global research progress. It optimized for an axis (cheap dynamic locomotion) that allowed it to capture the research market but is different from the requirements of of the deployment market (intelligence, durability, payload, safety certification). However, a lot of the engineering capability they've built as a company can and is starting to be used to develop more deployment optimized hardware models.

This is a fundamentally different approach from most American humanoid companies which are building towards operational products for consumers and businesses in a straight shot. Companies like Figure and Apptronik invest more resources in R&D and don't yet offer it to retail because they want to go direct to the larger deployment markets. They are building towards a highly functional polished product that can eventually become a development platform like Apple (as opposed to starting as a development platform). For AI, Anthropic took the mass market product capital intensive approach and it took a lot of dollars and time before lifting off on revenue. Cohere and AI21 Labs have existed for a similar amount of time, and took a more capital-light path. AI21 had to pivot, while Cohere has continued to grow, although significantly more slowly than Anthropic. Neither approach is right or wrong and history is filled with examples of successful parallels for both. You cannot compare companies taking different approaches solely on a revenue multiple basis.

The company's commercial approach is a byproduct of the Chinese private capital markets. A market where there are not as many venture dollars as the US that are willing to fund hundreds of millions to billions for R&D before any revenue is generated. Revenue growth is required to fund the next rung of capital even for potentially massive TAMs. Actuator scaling parlayed into quadrupeds, quadrupeds into the dominant robot hardware research platform. This IPO funds their transition to the most ambitious phase yet - a company building vertically integrated intelligent robots across a wide variety of form factors.

The current market valuation is suggesting that they will accomplish this transition, although it is not final yet. The outcome for Unitree differs dramatically based on if they can successfully move up market. Companies like DJI and Toyota have previously done so, while a failure to do so could have the company looking like Raspberry Pi. A company that cemented themselves within experimentalists and niche industrial markets.

However, it may not be necessary for Unitree to build SOTA research capabilities in order to scale robot sales into real deployments. If physical intelligence commoditizes, which we believe it does, then they could have plenty of externally produced models for their customers to choose from. The companies that can produce high quality hardware at scale stand to be large benefactors from the development of physical AGI.

The focus on hardware has enabled Unitree to raise a huge war chest and have access to thousands of robots that they can use for robot learning data collection and research. While various data types can be used in pretraining for robot foundation models, robot data is required for the models to become performant. To collect a large set of robot data, you will need a lot of robots. They may have actually created a stronger path for themselves to produce performant physical AI models than companies that have focused purely on robot model development years ago.

Wang Xingxing is famous for his technical chops, but he has also been an excellent business strategist.

[Lena @dolylupec]

@RyanGittleson @OpenAI @coinbase @base Congrats Ryan!

[Google DeepMind @GoogleDeepMind]

One brain. For any robot. 🤖

We’re launching Gemini Robotics 2: our next-generation physical AI bringing full body intelligence to humanoids, advanced dexterity, multi-robot teamwork and more.

[The Humanoid Hub @TheHumanoidHub]

Xynova tour in Hangzhou.
The startup is building dexterous hands for humanoids.

Their tech lead chatted with us about the 23-DoF hand design, a hybrid-drive approach, tendon durability, and more.

Shoutout to @dolylupec for co-hosting the interview.

@Xynovaofficial_ @XRoboHub

[Tony Zhao @tonyzzhao]

Introducing ACT-2 Preview

The first robotics model to unify broad generalization with high reliability. A single fine-tuning example can teach Memo a new behavior that generalizes.

Zero shot, real unseen homes, 99% success rate.

[The Humanoid Hub @TheHumanoidHub]

Remember Figure's package-sorting demo? We saw RobotEra M7 humanoid perform a similar use case autonomously for 6 minutes without a mistake.

We toured RobotEra's headquarters in Beijing and chatted with Lucas Wang (@lucas_wang_X), VP of Product, on their direct-drive hand design and where dexterous hands go next.

By the way, this package-sorting use case is already deployed at real sorting stations in multiple locations in China.

Thanks @dolylupec for tag-teaming the interview.

Thanks @roboterax for the tour.

[Russ Tedrake @RussTedrake]

In January, I started "building something new" with an incredible team. Today I finally get to share some first details about what we've been building. We've called it Walden Robotics (https://t.co/LVSojsX8aJ).

I thought long and hard about my own reasons for starting this company. It's not only about the robots. It's also about people. I've tried to capture those thoughts in my first Walden blog post: https://t.co/Lmo1CU8tLF

It's been an incredible ride so far. Within just a few months of forming the company, we were already operating a general-purpose robot with an end-to-end policy in production in one of the most important factories in North America. It's amazing at how much I've already learned from that experience. There is a lot of work to do, but the mission has never been so clear.

Please help me welcome Walden Robotics into the world. And stay tuned for more updates!

https://t.co/vaVRt0JFY1

[Lena @dolylupec]

@RussTedrake Congrats on the launch Russ!!