Pongbot’s serving robot has thrown more than two billion balls and built a sports data moat (Source: OFweek Robotics) A Series B for the sports large model AI sports-hardware company Pongbot has announced a several-hundred-million-yuan Series B. The round was led by the Shanghai Guotou Xiandao fund, with Yuanhe Puhua and Pudong Venture following and … Read more
On 22 August, inside Beijing’s National Speed Skating Hall, the Ice Ribbon, the opening of the second World Humanoid Robot Games cut to a real tennis court. A humanoid stood at the baseline, and against serves topping 50 km/h it judged the landing, moved, turned and swung, the ball clipping the net tape and dropping … Read more
A founder from the first cohort of Tsinghua University’s Institute for AI Industry Research has launched his own embodied-AI company, and a top Chinese venture firm is leading the round. Benshu AI’s action-native embodied model concept. (Source: Leiphone) Li Jianxiong, the first doctoral graduate of Tsinghua AIR, founded Benshu AI, with 5Yuan Capital, formerly Matrix … Read more
Training a robot after it leaves the factory has long meant surrounding it with real hardware. A team at Peking University, working with QiYuan Robotics, says it has found a way to break that dependence. A QiYuan humanoid robot in demonstration. (Source: Leiphone) The result, called HIL-UMI, adds a model brain on top of the … Read more
UBTECH says its self-developed unified multimodal world model, Thinker-WM, has taken first place across three embodied world-model benchmarks, a result the company frames as a step toward robots that can predict and plan, not just react. UBTECH’s Thinker-WM unified multimodal world model. (Source: Gasgoo) On the WorldOlympiad benchmark the model scored 0.740 overall and led … Read more
Most Western buyers could not name the company, yet they have probably watched its work. Damoda, a Shenzhen-based drone-show specialist, has flown at seven CCTV Spring Festival Galas and turned up repeatedly on the national evening news. What the footage hides is a business that has quietly become one of the most watched bets in … Read more
Zhidx reports, citing Bloomberg, that DeepSeek is finalising a new funding round of at least RMB 80 billion, with Tencent and CATL among the largest committed investors. According to signed terms, the final amount could approach RMB 100 billion, laying the groundwork for an initial public offering planned for early 2027. The size already far … Read more
In the late 19th century, Standard Oil’s founders quietly bought stakes in railways to secure cheap, safe transport for their oil and a captive customer for lubricant. The same move is playing out today, with CATL buying seats at the AI table before demand explodes. Battery money meets AI On 6 October, Bloomberg reported DeepSeek’s … Read more
Wubu Infra, a Tsinghua University spin-off, has closed a C round of RMB 2.3 billion, bringing cumulative financing to RMB 4.3 billion and setting a national record for China’s AI Infra category. Foreign media report the company is preparing an IPO. Illustrative image generated for this report: heterogeneous AI compute orchestration by Wubu Infra (Source: … Read more
On the evening of 12 October, Microsoft chairman and CEO Satya Nadella outlined the company’s latest in-house chip plan: a large-scale deployment of Azure Maia 300 in 2027. Microsoft shares rose 1.14 per cent to US$541.15 that day, pushing its market value back above US$4 trillion. The Maia case Nadella’s point is that everyone is … Read more