Striding AI plans to reinvest retail with robots, $100M of investment, and a massive 7-Eleven franchisee
Most retail robot startups raise money, find a corporate pilot, and hope it becomes a deployment. Striding AI built the deployment network into its founding structure.
Charoen Pokphand Group, the Thai conglomerate that operates 7-Eleven franchises across Asia and a portfolio of retail, agriculture, and telecom businesses spanning 21 countries, is a co-founder and lead investor. The company was formally incorporated in February 2026. By June, it had closed approximately $100 million in angel funding.
($100 million in ANGEL funding?!?)
In October, it unveiled its first product system at APRCE, the Asia-Pacific retail industry's largest annual conference.
CEO Song Yao co-founded Deephi Technology, an AI chip company that Xilinx (now AMD) acquired, and co-founded Oriental Space, a commercial aerospace company. Co-founder Yu Chao is an assistant professor at Tsinghua University's Shenzhen International Graduate School, specializing in reinforcement learning and robotics.
Striding AI was incorporated in Singapore with operations in Tokyo, Beijing, and Shanghai, giving it a legal and operational structure designed for pan-Asian deployment rather than China-first, global-later.
The three-product system
Striding AI is selling a three-component system it calls its Physical AI Solution for 24/7 Retail.
The H1 is a full humanoid robot targeted at customer-facing roles: greetings, store navigation assistance, and operational support. It supports more than 20 languages and 45 facial expressions, and offers an open API for retailer customization. It is currently at demo stage, not commercial availability.
The C1 is a wheeled dual-arm carrier robot designed for operational tasks. It uses an omnidirectional narrow chassis, which lets it navigate standard store aisles without modification. Its working arm reaches from 100mm to 1,750mm height, covering floor-level picks to top-shelf replenishment. Front and rear depth cameras plus 360-degree vision handle navigation and obstacle detection, and emergency obstacle braking stops the robot within 10 centimeters of an obstruction.
The C1 is also at demo stage but is the closer-term commercial platform, designed for backroom logistics and overnight shelf restocking tasks where customer interaction is minimal and operational efficiency is the metric.
The M1 is the fleet management platform that coordinates multi-robot deployments, assigns tasks, monitors fleet status, and allows remote staff to take over individual robots when needed.
The platform runs edge autonomy, which means local navigation and task execution do not require a continuous cloud connection. Striding AI positions M1 as the software layer that makes a mixed fleet of H1 and C1 robots manageable by store staff without robotics expertise.
Why the CP Group stake matters
CP Group operates over 14,000 7-Eleven franchise stores across Thailand, Taiwan, and other Asian markets, in addition to CP Freshmart grocery stores, Lotus's hypermarkets, and food processing and telecoms businesses. Annual revenue exceeds $60 billion across the group.
The company's co-founder role in Striding AI gives it influence over product direction from day one, while simultaneously providing Striding AI access to a retail deployment environment that most robotics startups spend years trying to reach.
That structure is unusual.
Strategic investors in robotics startups typically provide a pilot contract and a check. Being a co-founder means CP Group is a stakeholder in the outcome, not just a customer evaluating a product. Whether that alignment produces faster deployment or creates product constraints tailored to one customer's operational model is the operational question the next 12 months will answer.
What Striding AI is competing against
In the retail robot market, the C1's nearest functional comparisons are Simbe Robotics' Tally (shelf scanning, not manipulation) and Badger Technologies' shelf intelligence platforms. Neither does dual-arm manipulation at commercial scale.
The H1 humanoid is competing with service robots from Keenon, Bear Robotics, and other hospitality-focused platforms that have been in active commercial deployment for several years in Asia.
Striding AI's advantage is likely going to be in vertical integration: H1 customer interaction, C1 backroom logistics, and M1 coordination in a single system from a single vendor. The retailers it is targeting do not want to manage three separate robot vendor relationships.
Whether a company incorporated in February 2026 can deliver that integrated system at production quality by the time CP Group's franchise operators are ready to deploy it is the question the $100 million is supposed to answer.
Sources
Written by
Head of Marketing at NEXT Events & Conferences, responsible for Power Transmission & Distribution Technology Expo and Desalination Technology Expo. And, now, for Humanoid Technology Expo.