On 14 August 2026, embodied-intelligence company Force Infinity announced it had closed Series A and A+ rounds totalling close to 1 billion yuan. The round was led by Dunhong Asset and a top state-owned investment platform, with Zhejiang University Sci-Tech Innovation Group, Yandu State-owned Capital and the Lishui municipal state-owned company following on, while existing shareholder CCV (CPI Ventures) continued to add capital.
The proceeds are earmarked for research on the AtomBrain embodied brain and a causal world model, an upgrade of the DataGrid training system, and scaled deployment validation of multi-form robots in real industrial settings.
The round draws attention largely because of its founder, Bai Huiyuan. She was a vice president at Alibaba for over 15 years and founded Force Infinity in August 2023. Co-founder Liu Yang leads the brain-technology effort. More than 75 per cent of the team hold a master’s or doctoral degree.
The company positions itself as “one brain, many bodies, many scenarios”, building a unified embodied brain that drives robots of different forms rather than competing on hardware specifications.
A robot that understands cause and effect
The core differentiator is the causal world model. Bai once summed up its necessity in a single line: a robot that does not understand the causality of the world is just an exquisite marionette. The approach is meant to let robots grasp physical laws and predict the outcome of actions, with the goal of suppressing the hallucinations and safety risks common in today’s machines.
The supporting Ego native data system trains models on first-person-view data, covering handheld-gripper collection and real teleoperation.
The product line spans specialised, general and humanoid robots. The flagship AstroDroid AD-01 is a wheeled humanoid combining the Hyper-VLA large model with the causal world model. The range also includes the UltraDroid multi-form general robot, the Little Atom biped and the FORCE series of specialised machines.
According to the company, its products have been validated in more than 30 cities and over 100 real-world scenarios, with cumulative commercial orders above 500 million yuan, the largest single deal a 260 million yuan agreement with a cultural-tourism group. World models have become one of the main themes of 2026 capital bets on embodied intelligence.
Chaoyong AI has reported that 2026 is being called the first year of world models, with more than 25 related funding rounds in China and a combined total above 2.2 billion yuan. Force Infinity’s near-1 billion yuan round sits at the top of that grouping. Notably, “scaled delivery validation in real scenarios” ranks after model research in the use of proceeds, a sign that competition in the brain track is moving into the delivery phase.
Whether the causal world model pays off in real settings will come down to the scale of Ego data and the speed at which the model iterates in deployment.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original OFweek Robot report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience.