Insider Brief
- China’s Spirit AI has raised nearly 2 billion yuan ($290 million) across two rapid funding rounds to scale its embodied AI foundation models and expand real-world data pipelines, with the latest financing valuing the company at about 10 billion yuan ($1.4 billion), according to Gasgoo and Caixin Global.
- The round drew a mix of financial, strategic and state-backed investors, while Spirit AI continues building an industrial ecosystem that includes partners such as CATL, JD.com, Huawei, Xiaomi and TCL to accelerate deployment and data access.
- Founded in 2024, the company is commercializing its vision-language-action stack through humanoid systems already deployed in battery manufacturing and retail environments, while advancing its open-source Spirit v1.5 model for zero-shot robotic task generalization.
China’s Spirit AI has raised nearly 2 billion yuan ($290M USD) across two rapid funding rounds, capital the company plans to use to scale its embodied AI foundation models and expand real-world data pipelines, according to Gasgoo.
The latest financing drew a broad mix of financial, strategic and state-backed investors, including Yunfeng Capital, Chaos Investment, HongShan, Synstellation Capital and TCL Capital. State-linked funds from Chongqing and Hangzhou also participated, alongside strategic investors such as 360 Capital and HouXue Capital. Existing backers including ShunWei Capital, Prosperity7 and Fortune Capital added fresh funding.
Caixin Global reports the latest funding brings Spirit AI’s valuation to 10 billion yuan ($1.4B USD).
According to Gasgoo, Spirit AI said the investment will support continued development of its general-purpose robotics intelligence stack and deepen collaboration across its industrial partner network. The company has assembled a shareholder base spanning manufacturing, logistics and consumer electronics players such as CATL, JD.com, Huawei, Xiaomi and TCL, providing access to deployment environments and operational data.
Founded in February 2024, Spirit AI is building vision-language-action models for embodied robotics. Its in-house model supports Moz1, a force-controlled humanoid robot with 26 degrees of freedom designed for high payload efficiency.
The company has begun early commercialization. Its humanoid system has been deployed at CATL’s Zhongzhou battery facility for assembly work, while Moz robots have been introduced in JD.com retail settings for customer interaction and product demonstration, Gasgoo reports.
Spirit AI earlier open-sourced its Spirit v1.5 model, which the company said is designed for strong zero-shot task generalization across complex manipulation tasks.
