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 sheets are arriving faster than prototypes.
Founded in March 2025 and headquartered in Shenzhen, Yingkan describes itself as the world’s first company built specifically around embodied-AI bionic flapping-wing robotics. Where a rotor drone fights the air with high-speed rotation, a flapping wing borrows the way real birds exploit it, and the physics payoff is concrete: noise below 45 decibels against 60-plus for conventional rotors, near-zero power consumption in glide, and endurance three to five times longer.
A simulation engine as the real moat
The harder asset is Vortrix, a fluid-simulation engine that combines particle-based modelling with AI to lift compute efficiency roughly 1000-fold over traditional computational fluid dynamics. Training strategies transfer to real hardware with zero additional tuning, compressing aerodynamic design cycles from months to days. Yingkan calls it the first fluid-control integrated simulation platform aimed at robotics.
The commercial roadmap is deliberately staged. Step one is a consumer product, Eagle X, which has already logged more than 3,000 flight hours and is headed to Kickstarter as an open platform with swappable wings and programmable payloads. Step two uses the long-endurance, low-noise profile to enter urban inspection and ecological monitoring, where rotor craft struggle. Step three opens the propulsion, joint modules and Vortrix engine to any team building aerial or underwater robots.
A 3-kilogram ‘White Eagle’ with about 15 degrees of freedom is in development, its wings twisting, folding and angling independently like a real bird’s. For investors scanning Asia’s robotics capital flow, the lesson is that Shenzhen is no longer only minting humanoids. It is funding the strange, defensible niches where a tight supply chain turns a bold idea into a shippable product within a season.
Read the original report (in Chinese)
*Translated and adapted from Gasgoo (https://www.gasgoo.com/apps/50640d4b55d5cba175fb84f15d679f19/robot/news/70468889-seeds-%E4%B8%89%E4%B8%AA%E6%9C%88%E4%B8%89%E8%BD%AE-%E8%BF%99%E5%AE%B6%E6%B7%B1%E5%9C%B3%E5%85%AC%E5%8F%B8%E8%A6%81%E5%81%9A-%E6%9C%BA%E5%99%A8%E9%B8%9F/).*