The scene is one of stark financial distress: a technician owed nearly 300,000 yuan in back wages cannot collect even with a court judgment in hand; twenty to thirty recent graduates were forced out as a group after their internships ended.
This is not a plot from an absurdist comedy but the real-life drama unfolding at Xiantu Intelligent, a leading company in the autonomous street sweeping sector.
Recently, several employees who are owed wages by Xiantu Intelligent revealed that since wage arrears erupted last year, this once capital-favored unicorn has rapidly crumbled within a year. A large number of staff have unpaid salaries, the team shrank by approximately 120 people in three months, and core leaders from departments including delivery, testing, sensors, and even human resources have resigned in succession, accompanied by frequent changes to the organizational structure and business registration information.
Notably, the HR department at Xiantu Intelligent holds relevant information. When contacted, an HR representative stated helplessly, "I have also resigned and am also owed wages."
What happened to this star company, which once held the world's first test license for an autonomous sweeper and signed a major 3-billion-yuan order?
Mass Exodus and Unenforceable Judgments
"I am owed 30,000 yuan. The twenty to thirty fresh graduates who joined with me all left after being owed wages. I feel like we were just cheap labor," said Li Ming (a pseudonym), a former delivery operations employee at Xiantu Intelligent, capturing the frustration of many affected staff.
According to Li Ming, the wage arrears storm that began last year spread from the delivery department to nearly all business lines except frontline sales, affecting nearly half the company's employees. The hardest hit were on-site delivery personnel, who not only failed to receive their wages but also had to pay out of pocket for expenses like rent and utilities.
"We are on-site, paying rent and utilities ourselves for later reimbursement by the company. But after the company stopped paying salaries, reimbursements became extremely slow," Li Ming stated bluntly, noting this led to the near-total departure of the delivery team. He reported that in the three months following the wage crisis, the company's headcount plummeted from over 300 to about 180, a reduction of roughly 120 people.
The R&D department was similarly devastated. Wang Lin (a pseudonym), a former R&D employee who left late last year, revealed that by his departure, the front-end department was essentially empty, with only a few people left in the algorithm and client teams. Leaders from testing, sensors, navigation, and delivery departments had also resigned.
Wang Lin mentioned that the HR department advised employees to seek legal recourse. However, around April of this year, after winning their court cases, they discovered the company had no assets left for the court to enforce the judgments against.
It is understood that due to the high number of lawsuits, courts typically execute judgments in batches once the cumulative amount reaches 1-2 million yuan. But in March-April this year, with no executable assets, Xiantu Intelligent was only willing to offer 10,000-20,000 yuan as a "collective consolation payment" for a batch of claimants.
Questionable Product Viability
Accompanying the mass staff exodus was a series of bewildering corporate restructuring maneuvers by Xiantu Intelligent.
According to Wang Lin, in March 2025, the original Shanghai Xiantu Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd. changed its name to Jiaxing Xiantu Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd., relocating its registration from Shanghai to Jiaxing, Zhejiang, ostensibly to secure local government investment. At that time, all Shanghai employees were required to sign new labor contracts with the newly established Jiaxing Xiantu Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd., after which the original Shanghai entity was dissolved.
Following this, a series of legal representative changes occurred across Xiantu-affiliated companies, with many individuals connected to the actual controller exiting en masse. Concurrently, the company's office space shrank drastically: from an entire floor in Shanghai's Ali Center to a small partitioned space one-third the original size. The hardware R&D facility in Shanghai's Songjiang district was shut down, forcing all personnel to consolidate. Organizationally, major regions like Central, South, and North China were split and redefined, with regional managers collectively reassigned, leading to dramatic management changes.
When contacted, Xiantu Intelligent's General Manager Li Wei only responded, "I'll call you back later," but did not return the call by the time of publication. When a former employee's contact for an Xiantu Intelligent HR number was called, the person who answered said helplessly, "I have also resigned and am also owed wages."
In discussions, multiple employees consistently pointed to insufficient product capability and flawed business models as the underlying causes for the widespread wage arrears.
First, Xiantu Intelligent's biggest issue was that the pricing of its autonomous sweepers was completely detached from commercial logic. Former employees revealed that in 2025, the price of a Xiantu sweeper plus service remained at 400,000 to 600,000 yuan, while the average monthly salary for a sanitation worker in China is only about 4,000 yuan, making a 10-year human labor cost roughly 480,000 yuan. "The machine is more expensive than a person. Who would buy it?" remarked an industry insider, stating, "There's simply no commercial substitution rationale."
More critically, the technology's maturity was extremely low. According to the aforementioned employees, Xiantu's so-called autonomous driving capability was actually "very limited." The vehicle could sweep 30 km per day in a straight line but could only operate autonomously on specific pre-defined routes. It required manual driving from the parking lot to the road, and basic operations like water refilling and garbage dumping were entirely manual. Software failures necessitated on-site reboots. Only the actual sweeping segment on the route was unmanned.
Because it could not achieve a truly unmanned closed loop, clients, for compliance reasons, required one technician per vehicle, with their salaries fully borne by Xiantu. "This meant every delivery project was loss-making," a former Xiantu employee stated frankly.
Beyond this, long payment cycles and complex procedures with client groups further strained the company's cash flow. Chaotic sales management, high intermediary fees, and pre-sales personnel making unrealistic promises without regard for post-sale delivery feasibility also exacerbated the erosion of the company's credibility.
Business data shows that the current main entity, Jiaxing Xiantu Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd., is involved in 15 judicial cases, with 18.75% related to service contract disputes.
The Vicious Cycle
Public information shows Xiantu Intelligent was a leader in the autonomous sweeper field, holding the world's first test license for an autonomous sweeper and China's first on-road permit for unmanned sanitation equipment, with operations expanded to over 30 cities globally.
In January 2025, Xiantu announced a strategic partnership with a service group. Leveraging their respective technical and industrial resources, they planned deep cooperation over five years in autonomous driving market development, integrated smart sanitation solutions, and commercial operations, with a projected cooperation scale of 3 billion yuan.
Yet, just months after this announcement, the company plunged into widespread wage arrears.
Since its founding in 2018, Xiantu Intelligent completed seven funding rounds, long reliant on financing to survive. Founder Huang Chao once stated regarding choosing the sanitation track, "The traditional sanitation industry faces difficulties like 'hard recruitment, high costs, and significant risks.' Applying AI and autonomous driving technology to relatively harsh scenarios can truly replace labor or compensate for shortages." In hindsight, Huang Chao not only failed to solve labor shortages in sanitation but also, by withholding employee wages, wasted a significant amount of labor.
In stark contrast to Xiantu's plight, within the broader autonomous vehicle industry, some companies focusing on commercial cleaning robots have been profitable for years. "Commercial cleaning robots target market clients like malls and office buildings, with stable repayments. They are now systematically expanding overseas, with inquiries multiplying this year," a cleaning robot industry source noted, adding that their company "stopped doing sanitation long ago," having "abandoned that market many years back."
Meanwhile, some companies focused on autonomous delivery vehicles have validated their business models: costs dropped from 400,000 yuan in 2021 to 70,000-80,000 yuan for the bare vehicle in 2025, with a comprehensive five-year cost of about 130,000 yuan, averaging under 100 yuan per day. With mature algorithms serving small business clients in logistics and retail, order volumes are rising. Meanwhile, the former leader in autonomous sweepers, Xiantu Intelligent, is trapped in a vicious cycle of "low volume - high costs - difficulty achieving profitability."
The predicament of Xiantu Intelligent serves as a stark warning to all tech firms: capital market enthusiasm is temporary. No matter how compelling the story, without rooting products in market demand to build competitiveness and achieve sustainable profitability, the end result is ruthless elimination by the market.
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