Zerith, a Tsinghua lab project turned humanoid maker in Shenzhen

Min Yuheng’s third attempt at a company is the one that stuck. By the account Chinese outlet Zimubang published in June 2026, his first venture, a commercial cleaning robot, failed against fierce competition. His second, an ice-making machine project in which he was chief technology officer, survived, still operates in Shenzhen and has raised an A round. He left it midway. Then he went to Tsinghua.

From lab to registration

Min was born in 2000. He entered Chongqing University’s Mingyue Lake experimental class, founded by the robotics professor Li Zexiang, in 2020, and joined the Tsinghua AI & Robot Laboratory in April 2024 as a master’s student. According to Zimubang, he quickly recruited eight senior students to the effort. A bipedal humanoid, the Z1, was released in October 2024. He registered Zero Power Robotics in January 2025.

The company sells under the Zerith name and is based in Shenzhen. Its wheeled humanoid, the Zerith-H1, followed about three months after founding and is aimed at hotels and restaurants, according to a 36Kr account of its August 2025 roadshow. Zimubang describes the company’s focus as all-round household robots with cleaning abilities.

Min’s co-founders are Cheng Yi, chief technology officer, who has published robotics papers and is charged with turning research into robots that can be mass-produced; Liao Tao, a hardware specialist who holds several patents; and Li Yizhe, who presented the company at the Shenzhen roadshow as its youngest speaker that day. The algorithm team is led by doctorates from Tsinghua and USTC, and the industrial team draws on veterans of Baidu, ByteDance, iFlytek and Midea.

The Shenzhen setting

The company’s public debut was the X-Day Xili Lake Roadshow, held on 7 August 2025 at Shenzhen University Town in Nanshan district. The event was a Tsinghua alumni special: 21 alumni companies and more than 100 investment institutions. Ding Baoyu, chief investment officer at Tongchuang Weiye and head of a Tsinghua alumni finance group in Shenzhen, told the room that Tsinghua alumni had founded 53 hard-tech unicorns, more than 30 per cent of them in Shenzhen. An investor present remarked that the generation born in the 2000s was beginning to take the stage.

Zerith’s investors, per 36Kr, include Baohe Venture Capital, Tongchuang Weiye and Lihe Technology Innovation, with Shuimu Fund also named in the angel rounds.

The numbers, and their limits

The funding record is not tidy. In August 2025, 36Kr reported tens of millions of yuan at the angel stage, roughly a month after founding, followed by two further angel rounds in late July, and a total of more than 100 million yuan in about half a year. Zimubang’s later account says three rounds within six months raised hundreds of millions of yuan and brought the company to an A round, though its lead-in refers to five rounds in about a year and a half. The investor lists also differ between the two outlets, and neither gives an audited total.

The same 36Kr coverage says the company reported orders worth tens of millions of yuan and had entered mass production. That claim is the company’s own. For a startup whose founder was still a graduate student when the first robot appeared, the test now is whether hotel and restaurant deployments recur once the roadshow glow fades.