A company best known for moving money is now betting heavily on machines that move like people.

A fintech giant goes physical

Ant Group, the Jack Ma-backed operator of China's dominant Alipay payments platform, has made roughly a dozen deals in humanoid robotics since early 2025 — a mix of investments, minority stakes and its own hardware venture, CNBC reported. The breadth sets Ant apart from other Chinese tech giants, most of which have stuck to software or stayed on the sidelines. Ant is both writing checks and building robots.

What Ant is building

At the center of the effort is a wholly owned subsidiary, branded RobbyAnt, set up in December 2024, according to the South China Morning Post. The unit unveiled its first humanoid, the R1 — a wheeled, two-armed machine — in Shanghai last year, and has demonstrated it performing tasks such as cooking and acting as a tour guide, with an early deployment at a Shanghai museum. The company's stated aim is to extend the services it offers in the digital world into the physical one, in areas such as health care and public services, and it has released a version of Alipay designed for robots to use.

The investment portfolio

Beyond its own robot, Ant has been steadily backing others. Its latest move was leading a 500 million yuan (about $74 million) funding round in a robotics startup known as Zeroth Robotics — Ant's 12th deal in the sector, CNBC said. Earlier bets include a stake in Unitree Robotics, which sold roughly 5,500 humanoids last year to become the top seller by volume and has filed for a large Shanghai IPO in which Ant is a shareholder. (Some startup figures, including one company's claim of 600 percent revenue growth, come from the companies themselves and are unaudited.)

Why now

The timing tracks Beijing's industrial policy. China's government has designated humanoid robots a strategic priority and has pushed for thousands of units to be deployed in factories, hospitals and other settings by the end of 2026. For Ant, the logic is to weave its payments and identity infrastructure into a future in which robots handle tasks — and transactions — in the physical economy. "Changes brought by AI in the next 20 years will go beyond everyone's imagination," Ma said in remarks cited by SCMP.

A crowded field, and a bubble warning

The rush has drawn official caution. China's economic-planning agency has warned that the sector — home to more than 150 companies, many of them startups or firms pivoting in — risks a glut and that speculative money may be outrunning the technology, Mugglehead reported. Industry figures have voiced similar doubts; Unitree's founder has said the real bottleneck is the "embodied intelligence" software that makes robots useful, which he called still far from adequate. Chinese firms ship the vast majority of the world's humanoids, but volumes remain small and profits largely unproven — leaving Ant's sweeping bet dependent on whether these machines cross from novelty to genuine workhorse.