Sudo Technology

A Shanghai embodied-AI company betting on simulation-only training, launching the Sudo R1 robot system in 2026.

Sudo Technology was founded in Shanghai in May 2025. Co-founder and CEO Zheng Han is a serial entrepreneur who helped start the smart-hardware company ZEPP; chief technology advisor Hao Su was a core contributor to ImageNet, ShapeNet, and PointNet, formerly an associate professor at UC San Diego, and became a professor at Fudan University in 2026; much of the core team comes from Hillbot, which Su also helped found. The company follows a sim-to-real path, training mainly through simulation and reinforcement learning while trying to avoid real-robot teleoperated data. In April 2026 it released its first fully self-developed hardware-and-software robot system, #Sudo R1, described as using an integrated “3D world model plus reinforcement learning” design, with a company-reported 98% zero-shot first-attempt grasp success rate. That same month it reportedly closed a $500 million Pre-A round at a roughly $2 billion valuation.

ExampleIn the #Sudo R1 launch demo, the company said no real-robot data was used in training at all — the model went straight from training to grasping unfamiliar objects on a real robot.

Also called

Sudo

Related

Sim-to-Real Transfer · Reinforcement Learning · Zero-shot · Real-Robot-Data Camp vs. Sim-Data Camp · Hillbot · 3D Vision

Sources

20亿美金苏度科技具身首秀：0真机数据，zero-shot，98%首次抓取成功率（量子位 / 腾讯新闻，2026-04-20） (Chinese)
上海，跑出一家百亿独角兽！（东方财富财富号，2026-04-23） (Chinese)

As of

2026-04