The Era of High Valuations for Demos Is Over: Embodied Intelligence Is Now Priced by Productivity

After the WAIC conference, the embodied intelligence industry has entered a subtle cooling-off period. While demo videos still flood screens and financing news breaks records—with over 200 domestic financing events and 13 companies in the 100-billion valuation club—investors' questions have changed. They now ask about daily working hours, customer renewals, and when investments will yield returns. Professor Yang Xue from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, who recently became Chief Scientist at Kewei Technology, notes that the next watershed for embodied intelligence is not larger language models but the model's understanding of the physical world, validated only in real-world deployments. The high valuations of the demo era arose because capital paid for the upper limit of possibility, not the average performance required in industry. As demos become ubiquitous, valuations are shifting from possibility to productivity. The industry will follow the path of large language models: initial battles, emergence of leading groups, then differentiation and specialization. Middle-layer companies without core technical advantages or real deployment scenarios lose their pricing basis. Survivors will be those with real scenarios, data loops, and measurable unit economics, plus engineering delivery capability. Four yardsticks are emerging as standard due diligence: real deployment volume (not shipments), repurchase and renewal rates, reliability engineering (including 7x24 operation and quick fault recovery), and data loop quality, where refined corner cases are far more valuable than ordinary data. Kewei Technology is presented as an example that has been operating for 11 years in urban service robots, with 10,000+ robots in daily operation across over 50 cities, a Renew-as-a-Service model, and a data flywheel feeding its general embodied model COOWAM. The industry is likely to differentiate faster than large language models did, rewarding those who stand firmly in real-world scenarios.