IDG Capital has led a seed financing of almost $100 million in PHYMI, a nascent embodied artificial intelligence (AI) foundation model startup launched by a former executive of self-driving unicorn DeepRoute.ai.
Yunqi Partners, FOSUN RZ Capital, Glory Ventures, alongside publicly listed Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi Global and 3D LiDAR maker Hesai Group, participated in the seed round, the startup announced in an official WeChat post on Wednesday (September 9).
Founded earlier in 2026, the startup is led by founder and CEO Liu Nianqiu, who previously spent over seven years at Shenzhen-based DeepRoute.ai as a vice president and partner. During his time at DeepRoute.ai, Liu facilitated the company’s deployment of map-free autonomous driving solutions and its technical transition towards end-to-end and Vision-Language-Action (VLA) architectures.
Earlier in his career, Liu served as a senior engineer at Intel and was a serial entrepreneur in the smart hardware sector.
PHYMI aims to bridge the gap between digital software-bound AI capabilities and the complex physical world. While large multimodal models and agentic AI have largely excelled in screen-based environments, the startup focuses on building what it calls “Physical Agents,” which are essentially embodied AI systems that combine cognitive reasoning with physical actions to perceive, navigate, and manipulate across open and dynamic real-world environments.
Following this big-ticket seed round, the startup plans to accelerate R&D for its core Physical Agent AI offerings, build real-world dynamic data systems, advance product engineering and deployment, and expand the team.
