Prosperity7 Ventures, a venture capital (VC) fund of Saudi oil giant Aramco, has led a Series Pre-A funding round of 528 million yuan ($72.8 million) in China’s Spirit AI amid a frenzy of early-stage financing in embodied intelligence.
Spirit AI, founded in February 2024 by a team of professionals combining artificial intelligence (AI) strengths with expertise in robot production, raised the new investment with support from multiple domestic investors. State-owned China Merchants Group’s VC arm and conglomerate Zhuhai Huafa Group participated in the round, along with GF Xinde Investment, the equity investment unit of China’s GF Securities, said Spirit AI in a statement on Monday (March. 31).
VC firms Eminence Ventures, Oriental Fortune Capital, and T-Capital also participated. Existing shareholders including Fortune Capital, Boray Capital, HighLight Capital, and Fibonacci VC doubled down in the new round, according to the statement.
The new funding will allow Hangzhou-based Spirit AI to accelerate the iterations of its large language models (LLMs) for embodied AI products, upgrade robotic hardware, and recruit industry professionals, said the startup.
The fresh capital comes as the Chinese startup is set to officially launch its first high-precision commercial humanoid robot model, “Moz1,” and “VLA Spirit v1,” an AI model that Spirit AI claims can allow humanoid robots to perform tasks like folding laundry.
Spirit AI’s Series Pre-A round follows a string of recent early-stage fundraising by embodied intelligence startups in China. Lanchi Ventures, formerly BlueRun Ventures China, and Qiming Venture Partners led a $120-million angel round in TARS in March. In the same month, Tencent led a Series B round for Shanghai-based AgiBot, while Vita Dynamics completed a seed round of 200 million yuan ($27.6 million) from investors like Cathay Capital and Capital Today.
In February, Ant Group led a Series A round of 300 million yuan ($41.3 million) in Galaxea AI. The Chinese fintech giant also launched a wholly-owned subsidiary in Shanghai in the month to spearhead its R&D of robotic products for household care and elderly care.
The China market for embodied intelligence—which focuses on humanoid robots that can adaptively perceive and interact with environments using human-like physical forms—is projected to reach 632.8 billion yuan ($87.2 billion) by 2027, from 418.6 billion yuan ($57.7 billion) in 2023, according to a March industry report by Soochow Securities.
“Embodied intelligence is one of the main themes of tech investments in the next decade,” said Fortune Capital’s Wang Yuhao, who facilitated the firm’s investment in Spirit AI’s angel round.
“The technologies for robot locomotion are rapidly maturing. In comparison, robotic manipulation and robotic brains [that enable robots to ‘think’ like humans] will be the key for them to truly replace humans in performing various complicated tasks,” said Wang.
