{
  "rows": [
    {
      "company": "ByteDance",
      "hq_country": "China",
      "website": "https://www.bytedance.com/en/",
      "status": "division",
      "what_it_builds": "ByteDance has not shown a humanoid robot of its own. Its robotics work sits in the Seed research team, a division of the ByteDance group: Seed develops the GR-3 vision-language-action model and the ByteMini bimanual mobile robot (22 DoF, two 7-DoF arms, on a mobile base), which the cited Seed page does not describe as humanoid. Separately, ByteDance's in-house logistics robots are wheeled AMRs without arms, used in its own e-commerce warehouses. The brief's 'ByteMini research humanoid' label is not supported by the sources.",
      "what_it_builds_source": "https://seed.bytedance.com/en/blog/seed-research-gr-3-released-a-generalist-robot-model-for-generalization-long-horizon-tasks-and-bi-manual-deformable-object-manipulation",
      "founded_year": "2012",
      "founded_source": "https://www.bytedance.com/en/about",
      "funding_usd": null,
      "funding_basis": "corporate division",
      "funding_source": null,
      "funding_note": "Corporate division of the ByteDance group, so funding_usd is left empty per the brief. Group-level equity rounds are not attributed to the robotics work and were not summed. Excluded: ByteDance's own outbound investment in Independent Variable Robotics (Series A++, 1 billion yuan, 12 Jan 2026, per https://eu.36kr.com/en/p/3637588346810885) is an investment made by ByteDance, not a raise into ByteDance, so it is not counted. Valuation not used: no valuation for the robotics unit is reported; group-level valuation figures are not robotics-specific. founded_year 2012 is the group's founding year (ByteDance's own about page), not the Seed unit's. Excluded unit count: LatePost reported over 1,000 robots built over about two and a half years (TechNode, 3 Jul 2025, https://technode.com/2025/07/03/bytedance-builds-more-than-1000-robots-with-long-term-goal-of-embodied-intelligence-report/), but these are wheeled AMRs without arms, not humanoids.",
      "latest_funding_date": null,
      "valuation_usd": null,
      "latest_model": "GR-3 (vision-language-action model) with the ByteMini bimanual mobile robot; no humanoid model found",
      "latest_model_year": "2025",
      "latest_model_source": "https://seed.bytedance.com/en/blog/seed-research-gr-3-released-a-generalist-robot-model-for-generalization-long-horizon-tasks-and-bi-manual-deformable-object-manipulation",
      "units_shipped": null,
      "units_shipped_source": null,
      "units_shipped_note": "No humanoid unit count is published. The only public count (over 1,000 robots in two and a half years, LatePost via TechNode, July 2025) covers wheeled logistics AMRs without arms, not humanoids, so it is excluded.",
      "as_of": "2026-11-04"
    }
  ],
  "sources": [
    "https://seed.bytedance.com/en/blog/seed-research-gr-3-released-a-generalist-robot-model-for-generalization-long-horizon-tasks-and-bi-manual-deformable-object-manipulation",
    "https://www.bytedance.com/en/about",
    "https://www.bytedance.com/en/",
    "https://technode.com/2025/07/03/bytedance-builds-more-than-1000-robots-with-long-term-goal-of-embodied-intelligence-report/",
    "https://eu.36kr.com/en/p/3637588346810885",
    "https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/tiktok-bytedance-robot-household-chores"
  ]
}