Qianxun Smart raises 1 billion in financing, valuation doubles, leading robotics companies are "drawing in" aggressively

AI Q&A · Why are Lei Jun and Ma Yun continuing to ramp up investment in the embodied intelligence track?

On April 7, the embodied intelligence company Qianxun Intelligent disclosed that it has completed a new round of 1 billion yuan financing. According to reporters from Nandu, after this round of financing, Qianxun Intelligent became the third unlisted embodied intelligence company in China with an enterprise valuation of 20 billion yuan and above.

This round of financing was co-led by Shunwei Capital, founded by Lei Jun, and Yunfeng Fund, initiated by Ma Yun. Both institutions are existing shareholders. According to Tianyancha, Shunwei Capital has previously invested in Qianxun Intelligent four times; and Yunfeng Fund, following the previous round of 2 billion yuan financing in late February, has once again increased its stake.

In late February, Qianxun Intelligent had previously announced that its valuation after financing had surpassed 10 billion yuan. This means that in just over one month, this startup established in January 2024 has doubled its valuation.

It is not uncommon for valuations of embodied intelligence companies to surge early on, but doubling at high valuation levels is a relatively new phenomenon. On April 2, Xinghai Tu disclosed its new round of nearly 2 billion yuan B+ round financing. The information the company released was that its valuation surpassed 20 billion yuan and achieved a doubling increase within two months. In early March, the “Tsinghua-related” embodied intelligence company Xingdong Yuan completed a 1 billion yuan strategic round financing, with valuation breaking 200k yuan, and achieved a doubling increase within more than three months.

Worth noting is that among the three companies that have already reached the 20 billion yuan valuation cohort—Yinhe General, Xinghai Tu, and Qianxun Intelligent—none of them, without exception, focuses on R&D of the “brain” of robots. By contrast, Unitree Technology, which represents robot body companies, currently has a valuation of about 12.7 billion yuan in the primary market.

Among the above three companies valued at 20 billion yuan, Yinhe General and Xinghai Tu have both completed shareholding restructuring, and news has emerged that they are preparing for an IPO. Therefore, investors who are paying attention to the embodied intelligence track have analyzed to reporters from Nandu that some of the recent large-scale financings by leading companies can be viewed as Pre-IPO rounds—betting that these companies can list on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, without considering fundamentals too much.

Qianxun Intelligent has not yet completed shareholding restructuring. The company’s external narrative centers on the capital’s confidence in the company’s technology. According to its own description, in building its data system, Qianxun Intelligent has already accumulated more than 200k hours of real interaction data, covering a variety of types such as internet video, teleoperation, and wearable data collection, and it is expected that by 2026 the total data volume will exceed 1 million hours. The company also revealed that in April this year, Qianxun Intelligent’s data team will expand to a scale of 1,000 people.

At the Zhongguancun Forum in late March, Gaoyang, co-founder of Qianxun Intelligent, said that in 2025, the embodied intelligence industry has solved many infrastructure problems at the data layer; and 2026 will be the year for embodied intelligence to move from GPT2 to GPT3. The focus of the work will be to train increasingly larger models with more data.

On the commercialization front, in mid-March, Qianxun Intelligent signed a strategic cooperation agreement with JD.com. Its self-developed wheeled humanoid robot entered JD MALL’s smart retail scenarios, taking on demonstration and service tasks for coffee preparation. Wheeled humanoid robot companies such as Yinhe General and Zhi Square have also entered retail scenarios such as snack sales and coffee preparation.

Reporting and writing: Nandu N Video reporter Yang Liu