Gasgoo Embodied Intelligence has learned that Acorn Robot, an embodied-manipulation company, recently closed an angel round led by China Merchants Venture Capital and NIO Capital, with the Tsinghua alumni seed fund following on. Only four months after a nearly 100 million yuan seed round in March, the two rounds together have raised several hundred million yuan. The proceeds will fund robot product development for flexible industrial production, brand building and market expansion.
On the same day, Acorn Robot formally released the Natus AGE-0 Embodied Instinct Model. The company calls it the world’s first general manipulation base model built around tactile perception that replicates human operating mechanics, completely abandoning the industry’s dominant data-pretraining paradigm. The model does not depend on massive scene-annotation data, is not bound to a specific robot body, and is not limited to fixed materials or working conditions. Relying on the underlying principles of tactile sensing and contact mechanics, it gives robots an inborn operating instinct and achieves zero-shot generalisation across bodies, materials and conditions.
Acorn Robot was founded at the end of 2024, with a core team drawn from Tsinghua University and Harvard across mechanical engineering, neuroscience and artificial intelligence. Founder Jiang Yao is an associate researcher in Tsinghua’s department of mechanical engineering and proposed the “instinct-driven” technical route back in 2017. The company positions itself as the world’s first general embodied-intelligence company using “instinct-driven” as its core technical paradigm.
Today’s mainstream vision-language-action (VLA) route depends on huge demonstration datasets and compute, trapped in a paradox: models are too immature to obtain real-world data, yet cannot iterate without it. Acorn chose a different path, decoupling task planning from execution and driving action through real-time tactile feedback, with no training data or annotation needed.
Commercially, Acorn targets flexible industrial production. It has completed a proof of concept on a global top cosmetics ODM production line, moving from signing to validation in about two months and then generating revenue. The company is refining a standardised dual-arm flexible production cell and exploring a manufacturing-as-a-service model for fast-moving consumer goods, daily chemicals and food, where many SKUs, small batches and fast iteration are the norm.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original Gasgoo Embodied Intelligence report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience.