EngineAI SE01 Price 2026: Cost, the Viral-Gait Robot & Specs

The EngineAI SE-01 is the robot that made people do a double take. In early 2025 a video of it strolling down a Shenzhen street with a smooth, straight-knee, almost human walk went viral, and plenty of viewers assumed it had to be CGI. It was not. But the SE-01 is also one of the most misunderstood robots in the field: it has no official price, it is not the cheap open-source model people think it is, and it is no longer the flagship of the company that built it.

This review sorts out what the SE-01 actually costs, what is real about the famous walk, what is inside it, and whether it is the EngineAI robot you would actually want to buy.

What the SE-01 is at a glance

The SE-01 is a full-size bipedal humanoid, about 1.7 metres tall, built by the Shenzhen startup EngineAI. Its claim to fame is a natural, human-like walking gait, and its October 2024 launch pitched it as a general-purpose humanoid for industry, research, and education.

How much does the SE-01 cost?

There is no official, confirmed public price for the SE-01. EngineAI has never listed one. Its own product page shows specifications and a "contact us" button, with no cart and no number, so the SE-01 is effectively a quote-only, business-to-business product.

The figure you will see quoted, roughly $20,500 to $27,350 (about 150,000 to 200,000 yuan), comes from a co-founder describing what EngineAI is aiming for across its full-size humanoids in general. It is a target for the class, not a sticker price for the SE-01. In fact, the same reporting that carried that target noted plainly that EngineAI has not disclosed pricing for the higher-end SE-01. Treat the range as a directional signal and expect a bespoke quote, not a checkout.

The $12,000 robot is the PM-01, not the SE-01

This mix-up trips up almost every search. The cheap, roughly $12,000 EngineAI humanoid you have read about, the open-source one, is the PM-01. It is a different, smaller robot. EngineAI launched the PM-01 in December 2024 at a promotional 88,000 yuan (about $12,000) for both its commercial and education versions, aimed squarely at developers.

The SE-01 is the larger, full-size model with no public price. If a listing attaches "$12,000" or "88,000 yuan" to the SE-01, it has copied the PM-01's number by mistake.

Fake and inflated price listings

Because the SE-01 has no official price, aggregator and marketplace pages fill the vacuum with numbers that do not trace to EngineAI. One storefront shows the SE-01 at $54,000 with an "add to cart" button, implying you can buy one on the spot; there is no source for that figure and no evidence it is real stock, so treat it as an unverified third-party listing with no manufacturer authorization, not confirmed inventory. Other sites publish round estimates like $20,000. None of these are EngineAI prices. The only honest statement is that the SE-01 is unpriced and quote-only, with the co-founder's roughly $20,500 to $27,350 class target as the best directional guide.

The viral gait: what made the SE-01 famous

Most humanoids walk with bent knees and short, stomping steps, a crouch that keeps them stable but looks unmistakably robotic. The SE-01's party trick is the opposite: a longer stride with a near-straight knee and a smoother, more human cadence. EngineAI says it achieved this with an end-to-end neural network trained by a mix of reinforcement learning and imitation learning, then transferred from simulation to the real robot. Notably, EngineAI says it did this without the six-axis force sensors and roller-screw actuators that rivals rely on, using its own integrated harmonic joint modules instead.

Is the walking video actually real?

Yes. When the clip went viral, so many people cried CGI that NVIDIA senior research scientist Jim Fan weighed in, and after checking he verified it as a real robot demo, describing the controller as "a neural net trained in Isaac simulator using reinforcement learning and then sim2real." Second-angle footage and a photo of an engineer ready to catch the robot backed that up.

Two caveats matter. First, the demos were handler-assisted early-stage tests, not proof of reliable, hands-off operation, and like any launch reel they show the best takes. Second, "the world's first natural gait" is EngineAI's own framing; the walk is genuinely impressive and independently confirmed as real, but there is no independent expert consensus that it is a fundamental breakthrough rather than a very well-executed simulation-to-reality result. The capability is real. The superlatives are marketing.

Full specifications

EngineAI publishes a modest set of official figures for the SE-01. The confirmed ones are below; anything not on this list should be treated with caution (see the next section).

Reporting from the launch also put peak joint torque at around 330 newton-metres, consistent with EngineAI's own materials.

What EngineAI does not disclose

Several numbers that float around the SE-01 are aggregator inventions, not EngineAI figures. The company has not published an official payload, battery runtime, per-hand joint count, or a joint-by-joint map of the 32 degrees of freedom. If you see a specific payload in kilograms or a runtime in hours stated as fact, it is unverified. Two mix-ups are especially common: pages that list the SE-01 as 180 cm and 80 kg with 12 joints are simply wrong, and pages that show 138 cm and 40 kg have copied the smaller PM-01's specs. The reliable SE-01 figures are the ones in the table above.

Is the SE-01 open-source?

No, not the SE-01 itself. EngineAI does publish genuine open-source software on GitHub, including reinforcement-learning training tools and a ROS-based deployment stack, but those resources target the PM-01 and the newer T800, not the SE-01. The SE-01's hardware is not open. So the open-source cost advantage people associate with EngineAI belongs to the PM-01 developer robot, not to this flagship.

Who makes the SE-01: EngineAI

EngineAI is a Shenzhen humanoid startup founded in 2023 by Zhao Tongyang, who previously worked on quadruped and humanoid robots at Pengxing, a robotics venture tied to the automaker XPeng. The company has moved fast: it has raised well over $100 million, reached a reported valuation of about $1.5 billion, and filed confidentially for a Hong Kong IPO in June 2026, only about two and a half years after it was founded. It runs a 12,000-square-metre factory in Shenzhen that it says can turn out a humanoid roughly every 15 minutes. For a buyer, that backing signals staying power, though it is worth remembering EngineAI is a mid-pack player by volume in a crowded Chinese field led by Unitree.

The catch: the SE-01 is now a stepping stone

This is the part that changes the buying decision. The SE-01 earned EngineAI its reputation, but the company's attention has clearly moved on to the T800, a taller, stronger full-size humanoid it debuted at CES in January 2026 and began mass-producing in May 2026, priced from around $25,000. There is no SE-02; the T800 is the successor. So if your goal is to actually order an EngineAI full-size humanoid today, the T800 is the current product, and the SE-01 is best understood as the predecessor that proved the gait. Also worth clearing up: the front-flip and dancing clips people credit to the SE-01 are actually the PM-01, and the later "is it CGI" kick-video controversy involved the T800, not this robot.

Who should consider the SE-01, and who should not

The SE-01 makes sense for a narrow buyer: a research group or company that specifically wants EngineAI's original gait platform and is prepared to negotiate a bespoke quote for a robot that is no longer the headline product. For almost everyone else, the honest guidance is to look at the PM-01 if you want an affordable, open-source developer humanoid, or the T800 if you want EngineAI's current full-size machine with a published price and a production line behind it.

It is the wrong pick for anyone expecting a cheap, off-the-shelf, ready-to-work humanoid. The SE-01 is unpriced, quote-only, and its viral walk, while real, was shown under handler supervision rather than in reliable autonomous work. Because everything is negotiated per deal, treat the price, lead time, warranty, spare-parts and service coverage, safety certification, and developer access as unknowns to pin down in writing before committing.

The bottom line

The SE-01 is a genuinely important robot: it showed, on video that even skeptics accepted, that a humanoid could walk like a person, and it put EngineAI on the map. But as a purchase it is the most misunderstood option in the lineup. It has no official price, it is not the $12,000 open-source model (that is the PM-01), and it is no longer EngineAI's flagship (that is the T800). Admire the SE-01 for the walk. If you are buying, look at the robot next to it.

Compare on RoboZaps: SE01, PM01 and Spot. Full specifications and a quote route for each, alongside every humanoid robot we carry.