Direct Drive Tech Limited (the “Company”) launched its public offering on September 21 and is seeking a Main Board listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange under Chapter 18C of the Listing Rules. Once the offering closes, the Company will become the “first direct-drive stock” in Hong Kong — and the first robotics technology company in global capital markets defined primarily by direct-drive technology. The market isn’t just watching a single listing; it may be watching an industry inflection point, as robot drive solutions shift from traditional reducers toward direct drive — a transition one young team is betting on to upend the established landscape.
According to public records, founder Zhang Di earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Beijing Institute of Technology in 2016 before moving to the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where he studied robotics systems and control engineering under Professor Li Zexiang — widely known as the “godfather of DJI.” His engineering instincts showed early: while at HKUST, he reportedly designed on his own a robot capable of standing both upright and upside down, and sold it to a research institution. Zhang has served as chairman and chief executive since March 2020, overseeing the Group’s overall management, strategic planning, and business decisions.
Zhang founded the Company in 2020 at XbotPark, a robotics incubator in Songshan Lake, Dongguan. The Songshan Lake Robotics Research Institute, controlled by Professor Li, invested at the seed round, when the post-money valuation stood at just a few million renminbi; by the final round before the IPO, the valuation had climbed substantially. Now 32, Zhang has been named to both the Forbes China 30 Under 30 and the Hurun China Under 30 lists.
Conventional robot drives pair a motor with a reducer: gears step down rotational speed and multiply torque, which suits high-load, high-impact duty. But every meshing gear introduces backlash and friction — heat, wear, and maintenance costs. Every multi-stage transmission adds response lag, energy loss, and precision drift. These are not process defects; they are structural limits baked into the gear-transmission path. And every reducer weakness maps to a direct-drive strength. As embodied intelligence begins demanding millisecond response, zero backlash, lower energy consumption, and longer service life, reducer-based solutions have hit a ceiling that iteration cannot break. This is not an upgrade; it is substitution.
Since its founding, the Company has stayed on the direct-drive path, building its moat on three core technology pillars. By coupling the motor directly to the payload, its solution eliminates reducers and every intermediate transmission component. According to the prospectus, this cuts efficiency losses from mechanical transmission while improving precision, lowering noise, and reducing component wear — and it paves the way for smaller, lighter robots. This is no localized tweak to an existing design; it is a rebuild of the power-transmission path itself. The Company has built core capabilities around direct-drive motor design, thermal management, and drive-control integration — system-level know-how spanning electromagnetic design, control algorithms, and mass production. Zero backlash, zero friction, millisecond response: capabilities conventional solutions structurally cannot deliver are, in principle, within reach through direct drive. Iterating on the old technology cannot close that gap.
The financials tell more than a revenue story — they trace how direct drive moved from technical validation to commercialization at scale. From 2023 to 2025, revenue rose from RMB17.5 million to RMB281.7 million, a 300.8% CAGR, as shipments of direct-drive actuator modules climbed from 0.2 million to 8.5 million units. Gross margin improved from 13.5% to 21.5%, reaching 20.7% in the first half of 2026, while the adjusted net loss margin narrowed from 349.1% to 15.4% — 13.7% in the first half of 2026. This is scale economics kicking in: a larger revenue base absorbing fixed costs, not R&D cuts, is what has narrowed the losses. It is not just one company’s growth curve; it is a substitution curve, a technology pathway moving from the margins toward the mainstream.
Valuation is where Chapter 18C really matters. The Specialist Technology Company regime lets the market assess high-growth hard-tech companies on R&D capabilities, patent reserves, commercialization track record, commercialization revenue, and downstream customer validation — not net profit alone. That framework fits a company trying to change an industry’s underlying technology pathway. Traditional valuation systems revolve around net profit, and they struggle to price a technology like direct drive that is redrawing a century-old industry. Chapter 18C lets the market price “technology substitution” rather than short-term profitability.
The technology pathway for global robot drives is still being written, but direct drive displacing reducers is getting harder to ignore. As the “first direct-drive stock,” the Company’s scarcity value lies in using direct drive to redraw the boundaries of the robot actuation market — giving investors a window into the rise of power hardware for physical AI. Direct-drive penetration in consumer robotics remains low, and the shift away from reducer-based solutions is still in its early days; the market has yet to fully price the trend. As direct drive finds its way into more applications, that revaluation has only just begun.