By China Robotics Network | April 1, 2025
Spirit AI’s humanoid robot prototype demonstrating advanced capabilities
HANGZHOU – Chinese embodied intelligence leader Spirit AI (Qianxun Intelligence) has secured ¥528 million ($73 million) in Pre-A round funding, accelerating its push to commercialize humanoid robotics technology. The financing was led by Prosperity7 Ventures (P7) under Aramco Ventures, with participation from CMG Capital, GF Xinde, Jingya Capital, Oriental Fortune Capital, and HuaKong Fund .
Existing investors including Fortune Capital, Bairui Capital, Honghui Capital, and Qiancheng Capital doubled down on their bets, signaling strong confidence in the startup’s technological roadmap. The funds will accelerate development of Spirit AI’s embodied AI models, robot hardware, and talent acquisition.
Spirit AI’s international R&D team includes alumni from UC Berkeley, CMU and Chinese tech giants
Academic Pedigree Meets Commercial Execution
Founded in February 2024 by former Rokae Robotics CTO Han Fengtao, Spirit AI has assembled what industry observers call “China’s answer to Figure AI” – combining academic excellence from UC Berkeley, CMU, Tsinghua and Peking University with practical experience from ByteDance, Xiaomi and Tencent .
Chief Scientist Gao Yang, a UC Berkeley PhD mentored by Pieter Abbeel (father of diffusion models) and Trevor Darrell, leads AI development. His work on EfficientZero reinforcement learning algorithms earned praise from OpenAI co-founder John Schulman .
Technical Breakthroughs
The company recently unveiled its Visual Language Action (VLA) model Spirit v1, enabling robots to perform complex tasks like folding clothes – a first in China for flexible object manipulation. The system handles multi-step operations through natural language commands, with commercial release imminent .
Its flagship humanoid Moz1 features 26 degrees of freedom (excluding dexterous hands) with joint power density 15% higher than Tesla’s Optimus. The robot achieves industry-leading speed, precision and biomimetic force control through proprietary integrated actuators .
Market Potential
Goldman Sachs projects the global humanoid robot market will reach $154 billion by 2035. Spirit AI’s backers anticipate commercialization within 3-5 years for domestic and service applications, potentially creating China’s first viable general-purpose robotics platform .
“This team uniquely combines hardware engineering, embodied AI algorithms and commercialization experience,” said a representative from lead investor Prosperity7 Ventures, which previously backed digital payment platform Sunrate .
