Beijing embodied-AI startup Vbot walked out of IFA 2026 in Berlin with purchase agreements from 16 international partners for more than 5,000 quadruped robots, deepening its move from a Chinese consumer breakout into a European retail play. As of September 8, 2026 Vbot said cumulative global sales of its quadruped platform had passed 13,000 units across 15 countries — enough, on cumulative volume, to crown SuperDog the world's best-selling consumer robot dog.
Europe Signs Up For 'Bubble'
The IFA orders cover Germany, France and the United Kingdom, three of the continent's biggest consumer-electronics buyers, with the deals struck around live demonstrations of the SuperDog — nicknamed 'Bubble' in China and 'Babo' abroad — on the show floor. Vbot showed the robot autonomously following visitors, threading obstacles and hauling loads without any joystick or teach-in, positioning it as a shelf-ready product rather than a prototype. The distributor haul mirrors what fellow Chinese roboticists put on the IFA runway alongside Unitree, AgiBot and EngineAI.
Behind The 13,000-Unit Milestone
SuperDog runs on a LiDAR and ultra-wideband (UWB) navigation stack that Vbot pairs with a 12 kg payload, an expandable back panel and a small camping-wagon towing capability. The company said it can also serve as a hands-free personal camera operator when paired with an action cam. Pre-orders that opened in December 2025 booked 6,540 units and roughly RMB 100 million (about $15 million) — the base that has since fed cross-border growth and put the robot at number one in JD.com's consumer robot-dog category.
Why It Matters
Consumer robot dogs have been a long-promised product category ever since Vbot delivered its first unit to Horizon Robotics founder Yu Kai in June 2026 and closed a $73M Pre-A. Vbot's IFA wave shows the shift from staged demos to real distribution: European chains now have direct routes to a mass-market embodied device, and Vbot has an installed base big enough to feed the training data and firmware iteration cycles the category has been missing. The next test is service — returns, warranty and software updates — as SuperDog's fleet crosses the 20,000-unit line and Vbot layers in its ATOM humanoid for a broader lineup.
Reporting based on Vbot's IFA 2026 announcement distributed via GlobeNewswire.