On 4 September Simple AI announced a several-hundred-million-yuan Pre-A+ round, with investors including Kexi Capital, the intellectual-property fund under Shanghai Science and Technology, Jinpu Investment, Bozhou Industrial Investment, Shangcheng Capital, Qianrong Capital and returning shareholder Linear Capital.
Beijing Simple AI was founded in 2024 as a general embodied-intelligence robot company, positioned as an AI-native embodied-intelligence system provider. It starts from home-like commercial spaces such as hotels and elder care and gradually brings robots into the home. The company runs on four modules: scenario, data, body and model, where scenarios generate data, data improves the model, the model upgrades robot ability, and robots enter more real scenarios.
In 2025 its seed and seed-plus rounds together reached RMB 200 million. In April 2026 an angel round raised several hundred million, and in June a Didi-led Pre-A round added several hundred million more, four rounds in a single year. The investor list spans Shunwei Capital, BV Baidu Ventures, Plum Ventures and Keli Sensing.
Simple AI recently released HiFi-UMI, a high-fidelity bodyless data-production engine that links portable collection devices, trajectory reconstruction, data governance, model training and real-world deployment, achieving microsecond-level synchronisation and millimetre-level positioning so bodyless data flows straight to real machines. The engine has processed more than 20,000 hours and 4.32 million operation segments across more than 480 scenarios.
Between 19 and 23 August its new service robot Xiaopu autonomously completed long-horizon chores such as laundry delivery in hotel and home settings, plus delicate high-interference tasks like stacking flexible paper cups. Founder and CEO Li Xiaofei graduated from Tsinghua’s automotive department and studied under CAS academician Li Keqiang, and was previously cofounder and senior vice president at autonomous-driving firm Zhixingzhe. Chief scientist Wang Jiawei is a USTC and Microsoft Research Asia joint PhD who worked at Microsoft Research Asia, DeepSeek and ByteDance’s Seed team.
Hotel and home environments have constant foot traffic and soft, deformable objects like clothing and cups, with no fixed rhythm to the actions, so every step needs real-time judgement. Simple AI chose hotels first because guest-facing service is limited and task boundaries are clearer than at home. How far the hotel-to-home path goes depends on how many skills HiFi-UMI’s data delivers on real machines.
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.
Translated and adapted from OFweek Robot (https://robot.ofweek.com/2026-09/ART-8321203-12005-30701854.html).