This publication has already established that roughly half of the RMB 9.31bn the three listed-queue humanoid companies are raising is earmarked for a brain none of them has deployed. Lejuu’s ChiNext prospectus, read in full this week, answers the question that left open. The trajectories that brain needs are not being bought at the going rate, and they are not being built on the company’s own balance sheet either. They are being built inside a network of joint ventures capitalised by local state investment vehicles, in which Lejuu holds a stake in every case and control in none. Manufacturing is moving in the opposite direction, out of the company. What is being assembled here is not a humanoid maker that also sells data. It is a data producer with a robot division attached, and the conversion is being financed by municipal capital rather than by the robots.
The dataset project is the smaller half of the brain budget. Of a RMB 2.6bn raise, the use-of-proceeds table puts RMB 939.67mn into an embodied-intelligence R&D centre and RMB 616.25mn into a high-quality large-scale dataset construction project. That is 36.14% and 23.70%, or 59.84% together, against 8.22% for the manufacturing base and 24.62% for working capital. The company is raising money principally to build a model and to feed it, and only marginally to make more robots.
Six ventures, eight months, and never a controlling stake. Lejuu’s associate company schedule lists six joint ventures entered between June 2025 and January 2026 whose stated business is operating humanoid data collection centres. Beijing Shuju, with the company at 37.76% against Shijingshan district development at 39.31%. Wujiang Zhixun, 49% against Wujiang Big Data and a Suzhou Bay industrial investor. Hefei Shuju, 39% against Hefei Guoxian Holdings at 41%. Qingdao Zhixun, 49% against Qingdao Hi-Tech Industrial Development at 47%. Shandong Zhixun, 49% against Shandong Hongmeng at 51%. Ningbo Juci, 49% against Cixi Municipal Industrial Investment.
The pattern is exact and it is not accidental. In all six the counterparty is local state capital, and in all six Lejuu sits below 50%. These are associates rather than subsidiaries, which places the collection capacity, and the capital expenditure that builds it, outside the consolidated accounts of a company that has lost money for three consecutive years.
One of them carries a floor for the state, and that is the tell. The schedule’s Wujiang entry records a written undertaking from Lejuu’s Suzhou subsidiary to the two state shareholders: if the venture has not turned a positive net profit by the end of the 2027 financial year, the subsidiary will cooperate in acquiring their stakes.
Read what that does. The local government’s money enters as equity and carries a contingent exit at the company’s expense. Equity with a floor under it is not equity in the sense the balance sheet implies. It is closer to a loan whose repayment is triggered by the venture failing to perform. The state is being invited to fund the trajectory pipeline on terms that limit its downside, and the residual risk sits with the listing candidate. Whether the other five carry comparable terms is not disclosed, which is itself the question.
Manufacturing goes the other way. The related-party section records that from March 2026 Lejuu outsources whole-machine assembly of its humanoids to Dongfang Yuanqi, a venture in which it holds 20% and its shareholder Dongfang Jinggong holds 75%. The risk factors cover the input side, where concentration is already extreme: a single supplier, Wuxi Quanzhibo, accounted for 17.20% of total procurement in 2025 and 82.82% of all joint-module purchases, and Lejuu holds 5.73% of it.
So the physical machine is being pushed outward at both ends, to a contract assembler above and a near-single module supplier below, while the data apparatus is being pulled inward and duplicated across six provinces. A company allocates scarce attention to the thing it believes is scarce. This one has told us which.
What the robot business is doing while this happens. Revenue reached RMB 258.19mn in 2025, with the full-size Kuavo line at RMB 177.78mn, 68.86% of the total, up roughly twelvefold. Underneath that, gross margin fell across the three reporting years from 50.45% to 44.30% to 40.78%, the loss attributable to shareholders widened each year to RMB 69.78mn, and operating cash flow was negative in all three, at RMB 27.52mn, RMB 29.41mn and RMB 28.25mn. Revenue is compounding while margin and cash move the wrong way, which is what selling more units into a price-competitive market looks like. The robot business is not going to fund the data build. That is why the data build has two other funders.
The control group. Deep Robotics earned RMB 337.49mn in 2025 and posted its first profit, RMB 28.68mn, with genuine industrial deployments in power inspection, emergency response and policing. Humanoids were 0.24% of revenue. It has no network of data collection ventures, and its own prospectus still earmarks RMB 1,169.26mn, 46.72% of its raise, for embodied algorithms and models. The company that best solved the problem of getting robots into paying industrial work is no closer to the trajectories, because inspection routes do not produce manipulation data. Solving deployment does not solve the input. That is why Lejuu’s answer is structural rather than commercial.
What this is and is not. It is not a scheme. The scarcity is real, the local governments genuinely want the industry, and moving capital-intensive collection capacity off the books of a loss-making company is a rational thing for its board to do. It also means the layer’s data supply is being built with fiscal money on terms the market cannot see, by a company whose own product margin is falling, and priced by an exchange that has not yet asked about any of it.
What to watch. The Shenzhen inquiry response, on three points. Whether the exchange forces disclosure of the Wujiang undertaking’s accounting treatment and quantification, and whether comparable terms exist in the other five ventures. Whether it asks for the unit economics of the RMB 616mn project, meaning cost per collected hour and throughput, which is the number this publication has been unable to source anywhere. And whether the collection ventures will purchase robots from Lejuu in 2026. On that last point the historical record is clean: related-party sales were RMB 737,200 in 2025, 0.29% of revenue, so nothing circular has happened yet, and most of these ventures were formed in the second half of 2025 or later. The question is entirely about the year now running, and the exchange is the only party positioned to ask it.
Every figure in this issue is drawn from the filed prospectuses of Lejuu (ChiNext, 19 May 2026) and Deep Robotics (STAR Market, 18 May 2026), both read in full this week. Anything sourced otherwise is marked in the text.
Inside China’s Machine. China is building the machine that builds physical intelligence. Silicon, models, robots, factories. We read it one layer at a time and turn each into capital judgment.
This is investment research, not investment advice.