Paris-based physical AI training data platform Physicl announced it has raised a $10 million seed round led by Inovia Capital, with participation from US Venture Partners.
In the second half of 2026, as embodied intelligence funding cooled, Maxinsights, Jingshuo Technology, and Jianzhi Robotics completed a $30 million seed round, a several tens of millions of dollars Pre-A round, and a $100 million A+ round, respectively, within ten days. None of the three companies builds complete robots; their core teams have backgrounds in autonomous driving data closed loops, and they enter data supply through a global collection network, a data platform spun off from WeRide, and a multimodal collection production line, respectively. The article points out that data volume does not equal data value, and long-term competitiveness depends on data production and cross-embodiment reuse capabilities.
NASA announced a series of Moon Base contracts and mission updates, covering commercial robotic cargo delivery, the nuclear-powered rover PROMISE, launch and orbital transfer services, and lunar surface infrastructure.
Deep Blue AI reviewed the trend of panoramic cameras being moved into the embodied data collection field, arguing that they are better suited as a spatial context layer within hybrid collection setups rather than as a replacement for fine-grained motion data. The article traces the evolution of data collection routes from real-robot teleoperation, UMI handheld grippers, and DexCap motion-capture gloves to EgoMimic first-person-view glasses, and notes that panoramic recording defers framing decisions until after collection, so the same footage can generate multiple observations.
On November 5, the 'Triple T' Zhangjiang Summit technical salon, co-hosted by an ecosystem company of Zhangjiang AI Innovation Town and Synced, was held under the theme 'The Next Data War in Embodied Intelligence,' featuring a two-person technical debate, three Open Mic sessions, and one industry panel. Huang Yongtao of Ant Lingbo Technology argued that at this stage priority should be given to accumulating real-robot data and incorporating touch as early as possible, while Liu Miao of Tsinghua University held that data selection depends on application positioning and the training stage. Ma Daolin of Qianjue Robotics demonstrated the performance of a VTLA model integrating vision, touch, language, and action in real-robot tasks such as automatic shoelace threading and carton forming.
NEURA Robotics has entered a partnership with E.ON and the enviaM Group to jointly develop Physical AI for critical energy infrastructure, for inspection, asset monitoring, and assistance with high-risk, physically demanding, or repetitive work.
Shanghai Kepler has built a closed loop from simulation training to real-machine validation for industrial humanoid robots based on NVIDIA Isaac Lab, Isaac GR00T, and Cosmos. The company develops its own planetary roller screws, linear and rotary actuators, joint modules, and robot bodies, introduces real dynamics parameters into Isaac Lab for Sim2Real iteration, and validates them in scenarios such as workshop assembly and CNC machine loading and unloading. Kepler is also working with a team from Zhejiang University's College of Artificial Intelligence to develop an embodied intelligence foundation model for long-horizon tasks.
PaXini has entered a strategic partnership with 58AIR, the AI industry service platform under 58.com, and 58AIR has officially become a PaXini inside ecosystem partner. The two parties will work with N data-collection companies to explore a "1+1+N" open collaboration model. PaXini will provide partners with high-precision tactile sensors and device integration support, aligning tactile, posture, and visual information by task timeline; 58AIR will open up real-world operation scenarios such as home repair and intra-city logistics. The two parties will also connect collaboration steps including collection interfaces, quality requirements, task design, and data security compliance.
On November 3, Zhijian Dynamics and Hangcha Group completed the deployment of the first robot sorting line for a supermarket front warehouse, connecting the full workflow from AMR merge feeding, robot autonomous planning and dexterous grasping and turning, and scan verification to order distribution. The line uses the iX robot body that Zhijian Dynamics customized for Hangcha, and relies on visual perception and VLA task planning to handle boxed, bagged, bottled, and other product forms without the need to model each SKU separately. Measured single-machine sorting efficiency reaches up to 450 items per hour, with accuracy stable above 98%, and under full load it can support 24-hour continuous fault-free operation.
Why it matters: Readers can learn about the actual deployment conditions of the supermarket front-warehouse sorting line and the single-machine efficiency and accuracy data.
Shanghai EABOT Technology (EABOT) recently completed two consecutive funding rounds totaling nearly 400 million yuan, with investors including Ge Weidong, Chentao Capital, Hony Capital, and Zero One Automotive. Founded in February 2026, the company focuses on heavy-duty industrial physical AI. It already operates more than 100 heavy trucks across 60 routes, mainly serving short-haul bulk material scenarios of 0-300 kilometers, and has conducted real-road zero-intervention testing in Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, and other regions.
The article argues that, limited by onboard compute and heat dissipation in robot bodies, embodied model inference is shifting to the cloud, and embodied AI MaaS is becoming a new direction. In July 2026, Yuanli Lingji released a general embodied MaaS service; in October, Physical Intelligence launched an invitation-only Pi API Beta; and Dream Labs launched Dream API backed by a $90 million seed round.
On November 5, Cainiao held an AI and embodied intelligence industry cooperation launch event at its Hong Kong Smart Port, announcing that it will open its global warehouse network to industry partners and build a logistics real-world training cluster covering dozens of industries and hundreds of real-world scenarios, including warehouse picking, intelligent navigation and delivery, high-altitude inspection, and auto parts management.
PAL Robotics announced the ARAL project, funded by the EU's EIC, to develop a humanoid robot capable of working in existing warehouses based on the bipedal humanoid research platform KANGAROO, with the first phase aiming to advance from TRL 4 to TRL 5.
Leikeji observed that companies providing collection, annotation, and training services for humanoid robot training data are emerging, with approaches including centralized training grounds, crowdsourced collection, and full-chain services. The report notes that bringing a single robot skill to a deliverable level may require 2,000 to 5,000 hours of training data. Mifeng Technology, under AgiBot, launched crowdsourced collection in September and had reached 40 cities by October, with participants earning 10 to 30 yuan per hour.
At the 2026 Tencent Global Digital Ecosystem Summit, Tencent Cloud showcased AI Infra deployments in embodied intelligence. Manifold Space used a cluster of 512 domestic chips to train stably, improving training performance nearly 3x in about two weeks. Machine Science built a unified data lake in Nanjing with COS, enabling cross-region direct reads of the same data between Beijing and Nanjing and saving tens of millions of yuan that would have gone to building high-performance storage in both locations. Zeroth used COS to handle PB-scale data across multiple campuses in Shanghai, North America, and Europe, with MetaInsight helping engineers quickly extract high-value segments.
Zhicheng AI announced the completion of a funding round of hundreds of millions of yuan, jointly invested by Hangzhou Capital, Fuzhe Technology, Caitong Capital, and Linglan Capital; the funds will be used for embodied intelligence and world model R&D and commercialization. The company was founded in March 2024 by Hu Luhui, former chief engineering lead at Meta. Its Chengling physical world model adopts the JEPA architecture, and version 0.1 was open-sourced under the MIT license in May 2026. The XR1 composite wheeled industrial robot has entered real production line operations at NIO's factory, while cooperation with Volkswagen remains in the scenario testing stage at the final assembly section.
Lingchu Intelligence and Hengyan Technology are jointly delivering the Li-Ning East China Smart Logistics Center project. The embodied robot, equipped with Lingchu's self-developed model, has been deployed on site and entered trial operation, taking on routine work and fulfilling commercial orders. The solution targets the bin-picking scenario in footwear and apparel warehousing, where shoeboxes are mixed in storage and item poses are random. The model can autonomously break down multi-step goals and complete recognition, pose estimation, dexterous grasping, product sorting, and pushing full boxes, without requiring large-scale modification of existing infrastructure. During the trial operation, Lingchu will work with Li-Ning's warehouse operations team on stress testing and validation of abnormal conditions, optimizing bin-picking success rates and stability during long periods of continuous operation.
Xiaomi Group received the Outstanding Contribution Award at the 2026 World Internet Conference, and its "key technologies for a general-purpose robot manipulation foundation model for large-scale deployment" received the Leading Science and Technology Award. Xiaomi also disclosed that its humanoid robot took on an 8-hour shift for the first time at a center-console side-cover sequencing workstation in a car factory and achieved autonomous anomaly correction; an embodied foundation model based on Xiaomi-Robotics-1 began trial operation at Xiaomi Youth Apartments, completing long-horizon task validation of over 30 consecutive minutes, covering 3 rooms and 50+ tasks.
Jianzhi Xinchuang (Beijing) Robotics Technology Co., Ltd. announced the completion of a $100 million Series A+ funding round in Q3, with investors including SAIC Motor, Baidu Group, Shoucheng Holdings, and other industrial parties as well as multiple financial institutions. Founded on May 29, 2025, the company positions itself as a data and evaluation infrastructure service provider for embodied intelligence and world models. Founder and CEO Chen Jianxing previously served as a senior algorithm director at Momenta.
On November 2, Jianzhi Robotics and GenRobot AI each completed a $100 million Series A+ round on the same day, and RoboScience secured a Series A2 round in the hundreds of millions of yuan. All three investments went to embodied data companies that do not build their own robot bodies. Jianzhi says it has raised over $300 million cumulatively, with effective data deliveries rising from 100,000 hours per quarter to one million hours; RoboScience says it has cut the cost per training data item to 0.05 yuan. The author argues that body, large-model, and data companies are being priced in separate tiers, but the conversion rate of one million hours of effective data and continued customer purchasing remain unclear.
Tutor Intelligence announced the completion of a $75 million Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz, bringing its total funding to $117 million. The funds will be used for frontier robotics foundation model training and the manufacturing and deployment of Sonny and Cassie.
Jianzhi Robotics announced the completion of a new $100 million funding round (approximately RMB 665 million), with industry participants including SAIC Motor, Malaysia's Eastworlds, Baidu Group, Shoucheng Holdings, and GALBOT, and financial participants including Guanghe Ventures, SUNHELM, CITIC Jinshi Investment, Zhongzheng Investment, CCB International, and Huatai Zijin.
At its 2026 Innovation Day, AgiBot's Peng Zhihui proposed the robot energy-efficiency unit Worken, defined as the number of active robots × autonomous working hours × output efficiency ratio, to measure how much work robots actually do. At the Longqi factory, 8 robots worked a cumulative 528 hours with an output efficiency ratio of 0.7, for a total of 2,956.8 Worken; at Guangzhou Metro, 120 robots worked 240 hours with an efficiency ratio of about 0.5, for a total of 14,400 Worken.
The swarm control research group at the School of Mechatronical Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology, presented platforms including the "BIT Zhixingzhe" humanoid robot and a quadruped robot dog on CCTV's program "Amazing, We Are 'Science' People." At the 2026 Beijing Yizhuang Humanoid Robot Half Marathon, "Zhixingzhe" completed the full 21-kilometer course, achieving zero falls and zero interruptions across more than ten types of complex terrain including urban roads, wetland parks, steep slopes, and near-90-degree sharp turns, and won second place for "Best Gait." The research group also independently developed Sigma, a simulation system for single-drone and swarm algorithms, which supports multi-scenario, multi-weather simulation training.
Spatial intelligence company InSpatio opened an embodied simulation data collection center in Hangzhou on October 30, planning to produce 1 million hours of simulated training data per month, with a comprehensive cost per data item of about 1/10 that of traditional real-machine teleoperation collection. Relying on its self-developed Topos spatial intelligence base, the center scans real sites and then automatically decomposes objects, fills in blind spots, and calibrates physical attributes, before generating embodied Tokens containing depth, pose, contact force, and action semantics in parallel through multiple channels in the cloud.
Alibaba Cloud is advancing supercomputing-intelligence integration through its E-HPC platform, using a unified computing network to simultaneously carry HPC, AI training and inference, and agent tasks, and has launched a four-layer E-HPC agent platform. Its RoboAgent connects the embodied intelligence chain from device-side collection, annotation, and training/inference to simulation deployment; HPDA Robotics includes the built-in APAK acceleration engine and claims that multimodal data processing cost-effectiveness can improve by 2.1 to 5 times. E-HPC has also formed three dedicated solutions for chip design, AI4S and life sciences, and embodied intelligence.
Unitree Technology's Q3 2026 report shows revenue of 1.817 billion yuan for the first three quarters, up 55.71% year on year, and net profit attributable to shareholders of 387 million yuan, up 270.54% year on year; it is the company's first financial report since going public. In the same period, AgiBot released the Genie G2 Max, a safety-certified heavy-load embodied industrial robot, with a 20 kg payload per arm, 40 kg with both arms, and a 50 kg peak, aimed at depalletizing and palletizing, material transfer, and production-line feeding. Tsinghua University, Infinigence AI, and AgiBot jointly proposed a new paradigm called Collective Experience Learning (CEL) and completed large-scale validation on a cluster of 96 real robots.
JingShuo Technology, a wholly owned subsidiary of WeRide, disclosed on October 29 a Pre-A funding round of tens of millions of US dollars, jointly invested by Joy Capital, Hong Kong Science Park, and Sirius Capital; the funds will be used to expand the R&D team and broaden the task types and scenario coverage of its datasets.
Qiyuan Robotics completed production of its 5,000th robot on October 25, taking 35 days since the September 20 launch of the Qiyuan Q1 and Qiyuan T1, with daily capacity rising from more than 10 units to more than 200. The company says it uses a general large model plus a self-developed VLA embodied model, and improves data collection efficiency with HIL-UMI post-training technology and uses the PrimeSim world model for simulation-based inference.
X Square Robot will hold the second Embodied Agent Hackathon in Silicon Valley and Shenzhen in November 2026, directly providing APIs for VLA and WAM embodied foundation models, so contestants can develop tasks combining agents and robot hardware without collecting data or fine-tuning models.
At the 2026 Tencent Global Digital Ecosystem Summit, Tencent disclosed that WorkBuddy has completed 9 billion task requests cumulatively since launching in March this year; its Enterprise Edition has been deployed in over 50 industries, covering 50% of China's Fortune 500 companies and 60% of China's Top 100 companies.
The inaugural Global Ocean Robotics Day was held on October 21, with Constructor University as one of 10 in-person hubs worldwide. The event focused on how artificial intelligence and autonomous robots are transforming ocean research and exploration. Topics covered marine AI, autonomous underwater vehicles, and ocean observation robotic systems, including mapping ocean currents using marine vehicle trajectories, simulating autonomous docking with digital twins, and underwater robot swarms. The university's Ocean Systems and Robotics research group also demonstrated several autonomous marine robots developed by the team on site.
Taiying Technology Group has built an embodied AI robot mountain-climbing training ground at the foot of Mount Tai, replicating the 3.8-kilometer, more than 3,100-step terrain from Mount Tai's Hongmen Gate to Zhongtianmen, with 11 test tracks for humanoid robots and quadruped robot dogs preparing for the first CMG World Robot Mount Tai Climbing Competition. The training ground includes special tracks such as low-recognition steps, steep, slippery, narrow steps, and S-shaped sharp-turn steps, focusing on assessing environmental perception, dynamic balance, and gait-switching capabilities. It has been selected as one of Shandong Province's first batch of key-supported regional hub training grounds.
On October 29, Boyin Hechuang, jointly incubated by Boyuan Capital and Galaxy General, officially opened its 10,000-square-meter Suzhou headquarters, covering the full chain from R&D, simulation testing, scenario validation, and small-batch trial production to customer delivery, and has entered the Bosch supplier system. The company says its BW10 series, equipped with the VLA model, achieves efficiency of about 800–1,000 items per hour in logistics sorting, and that BW10-Lite has been deployed in the in-plant logistics scenario at United Automotive Electronic Systems' Shanghai plant. Under its plan, the company aims to gradually raise annual production capacity to 4,000 units by 2027, and its German subsidiary is in the preparatory stage.
At the smart mobility session of its Global Digital Ecosystem Summit in Shenzhen, Tencent released an upgraded TAI agent solution consisting of the TAI cockpit assistant, mobility service agent, content and entertainment agent, and cross-device continuity service. It integrates Yuanbao full-duplex end-to-end voice, Yuanbao Search, and the Hunyuan large model, and uses Tencent Maps, the WeChat Mini Program ecosystem, and WeChat Pay to complete task execution and transaction loops.
The article notes that in less than two years, 106 humanoid robot data collection centers have been built nationwide in China. Some robot companies inflate reported revenue through a "sell equipment—buy back data" arrangement, and Mech-Mind founder Shao Tianlan has publicly mentioned such irregularities. Data prices have fallen from over 200 yuan per hour last year to over 100 yuan this year, and collection methods are shifting from real-robot teleoperation to bodyless collection, reducing the need for data collection centers to purchase robots. The article also cites Forbes' questioning of Figure AI's valuation bubble and a speculation that industry consolidation is expected to become concentrated between the second half of 2026 and 2027.
Leiphone observed on site at IROS 2026 that dexterous-hand demonstrations have shifted from simple grasping to complex contact, long-horizon tasks, and deformable-object manipulation. Yang Sicheng, founder of Yuansheng Intelligence, proposed that deployment must clear three thresholds: balanced system capability, long-term stable operation, and acquisition of high-quality manipulation data.
Silicon Valley-based Chinese physical AI company Maxinsights (Chinese entity Haiyu Shuwei) announced the completion of a $30 million seed round led by Peak XV, with participation from Tola Capital, South Park Commons, Ince Capital, and Alumni Ventures. All funds will go toward real-world robot training data collection.
Shao Lin, founder of RoboScience, spoke at the 2026 World Physical AI Conference and Unitree Partner Ecosystem Conference, presenting a cross-embodiment dexterous manipulation technology path from the ICRA 2025 Best Paper D(R,O) Grasp to the T(R,O) Grasp series and then to the FingerEye visuotactile framework.
WeRide disclosed that its subsidiary JingShuo Technology has completed a 70 million yuan pre-A funding round, with participation from Jiayu Capital, HKSTP (Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks), Sirius Capital and others; the investors together hold approximately 3.38%. JingShuo Technology has self-developed the integrated data-model platform WorldEngine, the world model GENESIS-Robotics and the data asset engine SkillForge, and has accumulated 500,000 hours of high-precision data, 50 million structured task segments and 200+ scenario skill packages.