Funding · Oct 8, 2026
Tsinghua AIR's first PhD Li Jianxiong founds BASAL Intelligence, raising funding led by 5Y Capital for action-native embodied models
Li Jianxiong, the first PhD from Tsinghua University's Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR), has founded BASAL Intelligence (本溯智能) and raised an undisclosed round led by 5Y Capital, with Ivy Capital, Linear Capital and WestSummit Capital participating. Tsinghua AIR associate professor Zhan Xianyuan is chief scientist. The company is developing action-native in-context embodied foundation models, aiming for robots that adapt to new settings in minutes without retraining. Its X-VLA model, trained on under 1,000 hours of pretraining data, won the IROS 2025 AgiBot Robotics Challenge overall championship.
Original sources (Chinese)
独家 | 清华 AIR 首届博士李健雄创立本溯智能：五源资本领投，押注动作原生具身模型