- The funding sets a record for the highest single financing round in China's embodied AI industry.
- Tars completed two angel rounds last year, bringing its total raised capital to over 4.7 billion yuan ($689 million).
Chinese embodied AI (artificial intelligence) company Tars Robotics has completed a $455 million Pre-A funding round, setting a new record for a single financing round in the country's embodied AI sector.
The round was co-led by GL Ventures, Sequoia China, and Meituan's strategic investment arm, according to a company statement on Thursday.
The startup completed two angel rounds last year, bringing its total funding to more than 4.7 billion yuan ($689 million).
In addition to financial and strategic investors, government-backed industrial investment funds from Beijing and Shanghai also jointly participated in the company's core investment for the first time.
The newly raised capital will be primarily used to continue developing its proprietary large models in the embodied AI field and to attract top global talent, the statement said.
The company's core team has a deep background in autonomous driving research and development, with CEO Chen Yilun and chairman Li Zhenyu both serving as former key executives at Huawei and Baidu.
The firm focuses on developing world models based on "latent space," and last year launched AWE 3.0, an embodied model trained on massive amounts of human first-person perspective data.
This human-centric data collection and training paradigm allows robots to reduce task jitter and improves the success rate of tasks performed from entirely new perspectives.
The company is currently dedicated to building trustworthy physical AI systems, planning to pioneer the accelerated commercialization of its core technologies in the industrial manufacturing automation sector, the statement noted.
($1 = 6.8211 yuan)
