UFACTORY

A Shenzhen lightweight robot-arm maker behind the xArm and uArm, taken over by Cheetah Mobile in 2025.

UFACTORY was founded in Shenzhen in December 2013, formally Shenzhen UFactory Technology Co., Ltd., by Shitao Deng, a maker born in 1989. It got its start with the Kickstarter-funded desktop 4-axis arm uArm in early 2014, then moved into lightweight collaborative arms: the xArm 5/6/7 (700 mm reach, 3–5 kg payload), the entry-level Lite 6, and the UFACTORY 850, all cheaper than a Franka or a UR arm, with a Python SDK and ROS support, which has made it a common arm for university labs doing imitation learning and teleoperation data collection. Reports say its products sell to more than 80 countries and regions, mainly overseas, and the business is profitable. In July 2025, Cheetah Mobile acquired 60.8% of the company for about RMB 99.5 million, bringing its total stake to roughly 80% and making it the controlling shareholder; Cheetah Mobile said its “robotics and other” revenue grew 72.5% year-on-year in the second quarter of 2026, partly from UFACTORY's consolidated revenue.

ExampleOpen-source teleoperation projects such as GELLO offer an xArm version, letting researchers record demonstration data on it and use it to train imitation-learning policies.

Also called

uFactory

Related

UFACTORY xArm · Collaborative Robot · Desktop Robot Arm · 7-DoF Robot Arm · GELLO · Open-Source Hardware (OSHW)

Sources

UArm机器人 项目信息（36氪创投平台） (Chinese)
Cheetah Mobile to Acquire Controlling Stake in UFACTORY（猎豹移动投资者关系） (Chinese)
Cheetah Mobile Announces Second Quarter 2026 Unaudited Consolidated Financial Results（PR Newswire）

As of

2026-09