Tonka at the reception marking the 77th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China

On Wednesday, 16 September 2026, our humanoid robot Tonka was a guest at the reception marking the 77th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. The reception was hosted by the Embassy of the PRC in Croatia at The Westin Zagreb, with remarks delivered by H.E. Ambassador Mr. Qi Qianjin and the Deputy Speaker of the Croatian Parliament, Academician Željko Reiner.

Tonka welcomed guests on arrival, spoke with them in Croatian, English and Chinese, and performed a short dance routine. Her main task of the evening, however, was interpretation: the Ambassador delivered his remarks in English, and Tonka rendered them into Croatian.

This was an event of a different kind for us. Tonka has worked trade fairs, conferences, schools and city halls. A diplomatic reception has rules of its own: protocol, several languages in the same room, and no second take. Preparing a robot for an evening like that is less a question of hardware than of the AI persona behind it: what the robot knows, how it addresses people, and where it stops and hands over to a human colleague.

An invitation to an event like this means a great deal to a young company. It showed that in a demanding setting a humanoid robot can do more than serve as a showpiece, it can carry a concrete task, in this case interpreting in front of an international audience. That is the core of our HRaaS model: a robot for hire together with an AI persona prepared for a specific client and event. The experience from Zagreb goes straight into our next projects in Slovenia and Croatia.

China and Croatia established diplomatic relations in 1992 and a comprehensive cooperative partnership in 2005. Cooperation today spans trade and investment, infrastructure, the green transition, tourism and technology. This month also saw the launch of the first scheduled air route connecting Zagreb and Beijing.