The round drew top-tier global capital from China, Europe, the Middle East, North America and Southeast Asia, a spread the company frames as a vote of confidence in embodied AI’s long-term value. New investors include IDG Capital, Lens Technology, the pan-European industrial group G.G.G.Group, Redstone VC, Huashan Capital and the Hefei Binhu state industrial fund, … Read more
Zhongke Yuandongli, a Beijing agricultural-robot company recognised as a national-level ‘little giant’, has completed a hundreds-of-millions-yuan B2 financing round led by Chery Intelligent Technology, a subsidiary of Chery Holdings. The proceeds will fund research and development of new-energy smart agricultural machinery and embodied-AI farming robots, scale up deliveries, and accelerate overseas expansion. Chery’s involvement is … Read more
OakCreek Tech, a Beijing startup building the software foundation for humanoid robots, has closed consecutive angel and angel-plus rounds. The angel round was led by Lingyi Ventures and Cloud Angel Fund, with Linge Ventures following; the angel-plus was strategically backed by three of China’s leading humanoid-robot body makers, Songyan Dynamics, Booster Robotics and Luming Robotics, … Read more
For most of the past decade, large buyers operated with a dependable lever: if a Chinese supplier would not meet their terms, they could pivot to a Chinese-made alternative anyway, since domestic capacity was abundant and hungry. The threat disciplined pricing on both sides, and almost always against the local supplier. ChangXin’s refusal inverts that … Read more
Yingkan Zhiyi, a Shenzhen company building bionic flapping-wing robots, has closed a tens-of-millions-yuan Series A led by Yuanhe Bohua, with Futeng Capital and Houxue Capital participating. The raise is the company’s third in roughly three months, after seed, angel and Pre-A rounds backed by MiraclePlus, Qigao Capital and Yuanhe Origin, a pace that says term … Read more
Unitree, the Hangzhou humanoid-robot maker, has set its IPO offer price at 150.80 yuan per share, valuing the company at 60.9 billion yuan (roughly 8.5 billion US dollars) and pulling in 1.9 billion yuan more than the shares on offer. Institutions pushed the price about 45 percent above the preliminary estimate, a repricing that lands … Read more
Why now, and why the office The trigger looks like a Morgan Stanley note from 30 July: AI investment has entered ‘halftime’, and the market is shifting from chasing upstream compute chips to two new fronts, AI applications and supporting resources. The real reason is simpler. Tencent, long mocked as behind in AI, is now … Read more
Lidar was once the most contested sensor in autonomous driving. Supporters argued it supplies 3D information cameras cannot, a safety redundancy high-level driver assistance cannot do without. Opponents, led by Tesla, called it expensive, bulky and transitional. Yet since 2025, as advanced driver assistance spread, lidar has not exited, it has entered mass production, and … Read more
The barrier is falling Until 2024, training a usable coding base model cost tens of millions of dollars in corpus cleaning and pretraining. Today, with Meta’s Llama 3, Kimi and DeepSeek open models, general code ability has been commoditised. A startup no longer reinvents the wheel: take a strong open base, feed cleaned code and … Read more
Why static models fail Ant Ant’s business pushes ‘not static’ to an extreme: more than 1bn users, over 8,000 services, and payment peaks versus 3am troughs that can differ more than a hundredfold. Risk models must answer shifts in black-market tactics within hours, and global deployment has to fit each country’s different financial infrastructure. In … Read more