Zhongke Yuandongli, a national little-giant in agricultural robots, closed a nine-figure B2 round led by Chery, linking car-grade engineering to L4 autonomous farm machinery.
Canchen Tech closed a tens-of-millions yuan seed-to-angel series to build AI virtual-organ digital twins that may replace parts of animal testing, backed by a new Chinese regulatory pilot.
PaXini has raised a new 1 billion yuan strategic round, taking total funding to 3.5 billion yuan, with a trillion-yuan semiconductor giant and sovereign funds now on the cap table.
Yuanchuan Micro, founded by a 22-year Huawei veteran, has closed a nine-figure yuan Pre-A round led by IDG Capital to build LPU-class inference chips for the Agent era.
Sand.ai released and open sourced MAGI-2 Preview, a 114-billion-parameter mixture of experts video model that activates about 6 billion parameters per forward pass and ranks sixth globally on image to video.
Chinese world model startups disclosed about 30 billion yuan of funding in the first half of 2026, rising above 90 billion yuan once embodied AI is included. IDEA chair scientist Zhang Lei argues most of what is being funded does not qualify.
Xu Huazhe left Xinghaitu at its 20 billion yuan peak to found PokeBot, a home robot startup that has raised a Pre-A round above $100 million in five months.
World models take the stage at WAIC World-model fever reached WAIC 2026, where forums, booths and launches treated it as the soul of the event, because the year of embodied deployment demands a model that understands the physical world. On 19 July, Kunlun Wanwei’s forum answered the plain technical question: how does a world model … Read more
A list that caught a vacuum On 28 July, the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) updated its Covered List with two new categories: foreign-made advanced robot devices (including humanoids, quadrupeds and other mobile robots) and networked power inverters. No company is named, but the definition lands squarely on China’s most exportable robot categories. The telling … Read more
A second act, from cars to bodies On 29 July, reports said Li Auto was planning two-wheeled and bipedal robots, and its shares rose 10 percent that day. XPeng’s own share rallies have likewise tracked robot news. The pattern shows a shift in the underlying story: the three newcomers, NIO, XPeng and Li Auto (collectively … Read more