On April 16th, Shanghai embodied intelligence startup Taishi Zhihang announced the completion of over 450 million US dollars (approximately 3.069 billion yuan) in Pre-A round financing, setting a record for the highest single round financing in the history of embodied intelligence in China.
The investment institutions involved in this round of financing cover four major dimensions:
Financial investors: Hillhouse Capital, Sequoia China Joint Venture, and well-known financial funds such as Meituan Longzhu, CICC Capital, Kailian Capital, Dongfang Fuhai, Junshan Investment, etc;
Strategic investors: Meituan Zhantou, as an important cornerstone strategic shareholder of the company, has made significant investments and continues to lead joint investments. At the same time, old shareholders such as Qiming Venture Capital, Linear Capital, Lanchi Venture Capital, Xianghe Capital, and Hongtai Fund have also made strategic investment injections;
Industrial investors: TCL Production Investment, Futeng Capital, Shoucheng Holdings, Jianfa Emerging Investment, Hengxu Capital, and Guoqi Investment participated;
State owned capital: Beijing Robot Industry Development Investment Fund and Shanghai Guotou Pioneer jointly invested in a embodied intelligence company for the first time.
Founded in February 2025, Shi Zhihang has completed a cumulative financing of 242 million US dollars (approximately 1.65 billion yuan) in less than six months, setting a record for the largest angel round financing in the history of Chinese embodied intelligence
In March 2025, the company completed an angel round of $120 million (approximately RMB 818 million) financing, led by Lanchi Venture Capital and Qiming Venture Capital;
In July 2025, the company completed a $122 million (approximately RMB 837 million) angel+round of financing, led by Meituan Zhantou, with follow-up investments from Junshan Investment, Bihong Investment, Guoqi Investment, Lingang Science and Technology Innovation Investment, and others.
In terms of hardware, Shi Zhihang has launched the wheeled industrial robot A series and the bipedal universal robot T series.
Among them, the A-series robots can achieve sub millimeter level precision in assembly operations. Taking wire harness assembly as an example, this is a typical high difficulty precision operation task in industrial scenarios, widely used in fields such as automotive manufacturing and 3C electronics. Due to the extremely high difficulty of automation, wire harness assembly is also known as the "Goldbach Conjecture" in the industrial automation industry.
In March of this year, A1 robot completed over a hundred complete assembly tasks of sub millimeter level flexible wiring harnesses within one hour, setting a new Guinness World Record. This is also the first Guinness World Record for Chinese embodied intelligence enterprises in the field of industrial precision operation.
At the software level, Shi Zhihang has designed and developed the AWE3.0 universal body model. According to Shi Zhihang, AWE3.0 is the world's first "working" universal embodied large model, with precise perception, understanding, and planning capabilities in the physical world, supporting sub millimeter level operations and long-range stable execution.
AWE 3.0 not only enables robots to achieve stable and reliable operations from a new perspective that they have never seen before, but also significantly eliminates lag, making task execution more stable, smooth, continuous, and natural, enabling robots to handle complex scenarios such as precision assembly and flexible manufacturing.
In terms of data collection, Shi Zhihang has launched the SenseHub wearable body data collection system. SenseHub insists on putting people at the center and has created a fully integrated solution from perception, computation to transmission, which can accurately capture human body motion data, tactile data, and multi perspective camera data.
Li Zhenyu, the chairman of Shi Zhihang, once served as the president of Baidu Intelligent Driving Business Group, and led the creation of Apollo Automatic Driving Open Platform and the world's largest unmanned travel service platform "Apollo Go".
Chen Yilun, CEO of Shi Zhihang, has served as Chief Engineer of DJI Machine Vision, CTO of Huawei Autonomous Driving, and Chief Scientist of Intelligent Robotics at Tsinghua University's Intelligent Industry Research Institute. He is a leading figure in China's autonomous driving industry. During his time at Huawei, Chen Yilun led the design of the ADS 1.0 algorithm full stack intelligent assisted driving system, formed a core technology team, and promoted the commercial application of the product.
Chief Scientist Ding Wenchao, formerly known as the "Genius Youth", is a young scientist in the field of embodied intelligence and a researcher at the Robotics Research Institute of Fudan University. He has led Huawei's end-to-end decision-making network for intelligent driving from scratch and created Fudan University's first humanoid robot.
Li Zhenyu stated that this round of financing will be used to accelerate the development of the universal embodied large model AWE and continue to attract top talents in the industry. The next round of financing will focus on building robots that work and produce in real life.
