Hace seis meses, los amigos Jakub Idzik y Radoslaw Grzelaczyk tuvieron una idea peculiar: comprar un robot humanoide de origen chino y nombrarlo Edward Warchocki. Lo que comenzó como un experimento personal se convirtió en un fenómeno de internet, con miles de seguidores observando las peripecias del aparato de 40 kilogramos que se ha ganado el apodo de influencer digital.

The Next Big Influencer Is This 4-Foot-Tall Robot From China

Six months ago, Idzik and his friend Radosław Grzelaczyk had the idea of buying a humanoid robot from China. They named it “Edward Warchocki” after Grzelaczyk’s dog Eddie and the Polish word for growling, “warczeć,” but also because it sounds like a passable name for a Pole. The first few days they took Edward out, it couldn’t speak, and people were clearly scared of it. Then Idzik, a software developer, wired Edward to a large language model that made it capable of having live conversations in Polish.

“When he started to talk, people loved him. Without talking, it’s just a 40-kilogram machine,” Idzik says.

Unitree will go public on the Chinese stock market in about two weeks. Its financial disclosure tells how popular the company’s products are: Unlike most robot companies whose products are still being tested in labs, more than half of Unitree’s 2025 revenue came from delivering humanoid robots to real customers. It shipped 5,511 humanoids in 2025 at an average price of less than $25,000 each. And 43 percent of all sales came from outside China. The company also became profitable for the first time last year.

Para América Latina, la llegada de robots humanoides asequibles podría transformar industrias como la hospitalidad y los servicios. La posibilidad de desplegar estas máquinas a una fracción del costo de alternativas estadounidenses abre oportunidades para pequeñas y medianas empresas de la región que actualmente no pueden permitirse este tipo de tecnología.