A second raise in three months
On 8 September Guangdong Tianji Intelligenz System Co said it had closed a B++ strategic financing round co-led by Ant Group and Sofina Asia Private, with existing backers Gaorong Capital and Tencent following on. Haohu Capital acted as the exclusive financial adviser, and the proceeds are earmarked for research, scaled manufacturing and a global market push.
This is the company’s second raise in three months. In May, Hillhouse Ventures and Meituan’s strategic arm co-led a combined RMB 1 billion B and B+ round, with Tencent and Gaorong following. The post-money valuation reached nearly RMB 10 billion. Ant Group has been active in embodied intelligence this year, having led a separate nine-figure round into tactile-sensing firm Demos in August. Sofina, the Belgian investment house, came in with Tianji’s global expansion in its sights.
From an automation unit to a product company
Tianji was founded in 2015 in Dongguan’s Songshan Lake science park, originally the in-house automation division of A-share listed Changying Precision, from which it spun out in 2021. Changying still holds about 27 per cent. Founder and chief executive Chen Xi, born in 1987, holds a Cambridge master’s degree and took over the business in 2019, shifting it from project integration to a product model and steering it toward force-controlled embodied manipulation hardware.
The core products are force-control humanoid dual arms and joint modules. The company builds its own MEMS joint-torque sensors, pairs them with lightweight integrated joint modules and force-control algorithms. The Marvin series is rated by payload: the M20S carries 20 kg on a single arm, which Tianji calls the first product in that class anywhere, while the M6S Lite weighs 8 kg, lifts 5 kg and runs a 62.5 per cent payload-to-weight ratio. In 2025 Tianji says it delivered more than 2,000 force-control humanoid dual arms in four months, claiming to be the first brand to reach mass delivery of the product, and by the first quarter of 2026 it reported more than 10,000 arms on order covering 45 humanoid complete-machine makers.
Arms before bodies
Tianji has also released its own humanoid brand, Gento, with the wheeled Luna and Skye models now in scaled delivery. The strategy is to win the components layer first. Whether the force-control arm becomes a default fitting on humanoid bodies, rather than an add-on, will be answered by next year’s shipment numbers from the complete-machine makers. With a 10,000-unit order book already in hand and a capacity target of 50,000 units a year, Tianji is spending now to secure the mass-production window before competitors catch up.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original OFweek Robotics report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience. The full original (in Chinese) is at https://robot.ofweek.com/2026-09/ART-898890-12005-30702275.html.