(Yicai) Sept. 12 -- Ant Group-backed Hello, one of China's largest bike-sharing firms also known as Hellobike, has unveiled its first robotaxi, Hello Robot 1 (HR1), with plans to deploy more than 50,000 units globally by 2027.

The Shanghai-based company introduced the level-four autonomous vehicle yesterday at the 2025 Inclusion Conference on the Bund. L4 driverless vehicles are capable of operating without human intervention within designated areas.

Hello aims to begin mass production of HR1 next year as it accelerates its push into the artificial intelligence and autonomous driving sectors. A pilot program is already underway in Zhuzhou, Hunan province, and the company plans to expand to over 10 cities with a fleet of 10,000 vehicles once production ramps up.

On the same day, Hello signed strategic cooperation agreements with several key partners, including Venucia, a Dongfeng Motor-backed brand; Alibaba Cloud; autonomous driving firm Horizon Robotics; and lidar manufacturer Hesai Technology. The collaborations aim to advance the commercialization of robotaxi technologies. Specifically, the partnership with Alibaba Cloud reportedly focuses on building a computing cluster to train its autonomous driving models.

Beyond autonomous navigation, Hello is developing an AI agent for drivers that integrates the functions of a smart cockpit, vehicle manual, and travel assistant. It will use multimodal recognition to process diverse inputs and employ retrieval-augmented generation so its large language model can reference a fixed document set when responding to user queries.

Editor: Emmi Laine