Tennis robot maker Pongbot closes Series B worth hundreds of millions of yuan for its sports AI model

Shanghai State Investment Pilot Fund led the round. Yuanhe Puhua and Pudong Venture Capital followed, and existing backer BlueRun Ventures put in more. Gaohe Capital was the sole financial advisor. No exact figure was given. Before this, Pongbot closed three Series A rounds backed by Shenqi Capital, Matrix Partners China, Jinqiu Fund, China Growth Capital and Ceyuan Ventures, among others. Pongbot started with table tennis serving machines and now runs its own sports model on tennis hardware. Its PACE tennis robot raised more than $2.7M on Kickstarter in 2024. Its Aura AI coach robot launched in May 2026 and has passed $4M in crowdfunding. The company claims more than 300,000 users, 2 billion serves and over 1 million sets of ball path data. On September 28 it was named an official Australian Open partner. For builders, the round shows Chinese state funds backing consumer robotics where the asset is proprietary motion data rather than the model itself. A narrow hardware product with a data loop can raise growth capital without frontier scale.