HAI ROBOTICS Patent Portfolio Analysis

One pulse, dated June 2022

A hundred million dollars, Series D, announced on 1 June 2022. That is the moment most people first attach a number to this company. It is a clean marker and a misleading one, because it sits four years downstream of the first filing and one year downstream of the year the filing rate quadrupled. The money is a consequence in this record, not a cause.

Hold the date in mind. Everything that follows is measured against it: what existed before, what arrived after, and how much of the portfolio was already in motion when the round was signed. The first filing is dated 7 September 2018. The most recent published one is dated 3 December 2025. The raise falls roughly in the middle of that span, not at its start.

Three hundred and twenty ticks on an arc

320 families. 142 of them granted, drawn solid. 178 published and still pending, drawn thin. That is a 44 percent grant rate for a portfolio whose earliest member is seven years old and whose newest members are months old. The thin ticks are not weakness. They are the part of the record that has not finished being examined yet, and they outnumber the solid ones.

193 inventors are named across the arc. Three recur more than any others: KONG ZHE on 41 families, ZHAN QINGXIN on 29, AI XIN on 26. That is a wide bench with a stable core, which is what a portfolio looks like when it is built by a growing engineering organisation rather than by a founding pair filing everything they think of.

The thin ticks outnumber the solid ones, and they are the newer half of the story.

The quadrupling happened before the money

Two families in 2018. Two in 2019. Seventeen in 2020. Then 78 in 2021, and 94 in 2022, the peak. The funding marker sits inside that peak year, in June. But the step change is the 2020 to 2021 jump, which is a full year earlier. Whatever decision produced 78 families in 2021 was taken and funded from somewhere else before the Series D closed.

After the peak: 57 in 2023, 42 in 2024, 28 in 2025. Read the last bars carefully, because the shaded window covers filings made but not yet published. Recent years always look thinner than they will turn out to be. The visible decline from 2022 is real in shape but its depth is not yet settled. The 2021 jump, by contrast, is fully published and unambiguous.

Four organisations pointing back at the arc

BEIJING GEEKPLUS TECH CO LTD cites these filings 40 times. SHENZHEN HAIROU INNOVATION TECH CO LTD, 19. BEIJING JINGDONG QIANSHI TECH CO LTD, 14. HANGZHOU HIKROBOT CO LTD, 12. Citation is not endorsement and it is not conflict. It is a record that examiners and drafters elsewhere have had to account for what this portfolio already says.

Two of those names also appear among the assignees filing in the same CPC groups over the last five years, alongside AUTOSTORE TECH AS with 398 families, DAIFUKU KK with 202 and OCADO INNOVATION LTD with 196. The groups are busy. A 320-family portfolio inside them is not dominant by volume, which makes the citation trail the more informative signal of where the useful disclosures sit.

Fifteen jurisdictions from a 2018 start

US, EP, CN, JP, KR, DE, CA, AU, TW, SG, MX, RU, ES, MY, NZ. Fifteen offices, PCT excluded. For a company whose first filing is dated September 2018, that is an unusually wide geographic footprint, and each entry carries a national fee schedule and a translation bill that recurs annually for as long as the family is kept alive.

The spread of the list matters more than its length. Alongside the large markets sit MX, MY, NZ and SG, which are choices somebody made deliberately rather than by default. You do not enter fifteen jurisdictions by accident, and you do not maintain them without a view about where the technology will need to be operated.

Fifteen national entries is a bill that arrives every year, not a filing decision made once.

What the capital confirmed rather than caused

The plain version: the portfolio was already accelerating when the Series D was announced. The 2021 cohort of 78 families was started before the money, and the 2022 peak of 94 straddles it. The capital arrived to a company that had already decided what it was going to protect, in which offices, and with which inventors. The round scaled an existing programme rather than starting one.

What remains open is the second half. 178 families are still pending, most of them filed since 2021. The post-peak years read as a decline but sit partly inside the unpublished window. The next two years of publication will show whether 2023 onward was a deliberate narrowing after the build, or simply the part of the record we cannot see yet.