DroidUp — legally Shanghai Zhuoyide Robotics — was founded in 2021 by Li Qingdu, an engineering professor (executive dean of a robotics institute at the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology) with roughly two decades of bipedal-locomotion research behind him. That academic pedigree matters, because it separates DroidUp from the wave of render-only "robot girlfriend" vaporware: its walking machines have genuine credentials. The two most-cited ones are easy to garble, so be precise. Li's lab set a Guinness walking-distance record back in 2015 — but with a small quadruped efficiency-walker, years before DroidUp existed, and it is not the recent humanoid ultra-walk record (that one belongs to a rival, AgiBot). DroidUp's own robot, Walker II, did finish third at the 2025 Beijing humanoid half-marathon — and was the only entrant that never swapped its battery, the credential that actually speaks to its engineering.
The bet: warmth and lightness
Its pitch is the opposite of the heavy industrial humanoid. DroidUp builds tendon/rope-driven machines in the ~28–32 kilogram class, using clusters of hip motors that dynamically share the work of driving the legs — cutting weight by around 40% and stretching endurance — aimed at elder care, reception, and emotional companionship. The headline-grabber is Moya, a female-presenting prototype with a claimed body-temperature silicone surface and a "92%-human" gait — the flashiest member of a wider family that also includes the athletic Walker research platform and the service-oriented Xiaobei, but the one doing all the marketing work.
Where it stands
Honest framing: DroidUp is a small (60-person), recently funded lab — two disclosed rounds of roughly ¥100M ($14M) each, the 2026 one backed by Shanghai state-linked funds — not a mass manufacturer. Moya is a pre-market prototype, quoted around $173,000 and "available later in 2026," and every striking spec traces back to a single in-house unveiling that New Atlas noted plainly has "no independent verification." The ambition is real and the founder is credible; the warmth, the body temperature and the gait figure are all maker claims from one demo. In a Chinese humanoid scene crowded with better-funded names — Unitree, UBTech, AgiBot — DroidUp's bet is that warmth, not horsepower, is the underserved niche. Treat Moya as a promise, not a product.
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