Embodied AI

Embodied AI, or 具身智能, is the phrase Chinese investors, ministries and founders use for the whole stack that lets machines act in the physical world: vision-language-action models, world models, simulation, teleoperation data and the robots that run on them. It became a national priority in 2025 and is now the most crowded early-stage category in Chinese AI, with angel and Series A rounds closing weekly across Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hangzhou and Chengdu. Big platforms such as Ant Group, Xiaomi and BYD have set up their own robotics units alongside the startups.

This is our largest topic. Entries here cover model releases such as Ant Lingbo's LingBot-VLA, X Square Robot's TwinDEX and TARS's AWE series, funding rounds for robot brain and data companies, university spin-offs from Tsinghua, Westlake and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the first commercial deployments in pharmacies, warehouses and factories. Most of it has not been reported in English anywhere else.