Embodied Intelligence: Brain is the next frontier

We attended the World Robotic Conference and visited various humanoid companies during 3Q26. We identify industry consensus leaders along the supply chain: hardware – UniTree; brain (software) – X Square and Robbyant (Alibaba's investment in humanoid intelligence); dexterous hands – Tier 1 Sharpa and Wuji, with BrainCo, Linkerbot and Inspire as Tier 2; and humanoid players – Unitree, UBTech, Agibot and Deep Robotics. Lack of physical awareness hinders wider application of humanoid robots. Previously the Vision Language Action (VLA) model dominated humanoid robot training;