StarMove Secures Nearly RMB 500 Million in Series A Funding, Led by CDH and Haier; Delivers 200 Units This Year

On July 7, humanoid robot company Starship Epoch announced the completion of an approximately 500 million yuan Series A funding round. This round was jointly led by CDH VGC and Haier Capital, with participation from well-known financial institutions and industrial investors including Houxue Capital, Huaying Capital, Xianghe Capital, and Fengli Intelligent. Existing shareholders such as Clearwater Capital and Qingkong Fund continued to increase their stakes. Huaxing Capital served as the exclusive financial advisor for this round.

The funds raised will be used for the research and development of humanoid robot hardware and software technologies, as well as mass production implementation, to drive the rapid operation of the closed-loop flywheel encompassing 'model-body-scenario data'.

Public information shows that Starship Epoch was established in August 2023. Prior to this financing round, it had completed three previous rounds of funding.

In October 2023, Starship Epoch completed a seed funding round worth tens of millions of yuan, jointly invested by Century Jinyuan and Nanjing Turing Phase I Venture Capital Partnership.

In January 2024, Starship Epoch received over 100 million yuan in angel investment, led by Lenovo Capital, with Jinding Capital and Qingkong Tiansheng participating as co-investors, while existing shareholder Century Jinyuan made an additional oversubscribed investment.

In October 2024, Starship Epoch completed a Pre-A funding round of nearly 300 million yuan. This round was jointly led by Clearwater Capital, Yuancheng Capital, and Alibaba, with Ceyuan Capital participating as a co-investor. Existing shareholders including Lenovo Capital, Century Jinyuan, Jinding Capital, Zeyu Capital, and Qingkong Tiansheng continued to make follow-on investments.

According to its official website, Xingdong Era was incubated by the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences (IIIS) at Tsinghua University and is the only humanoid robot enterprise with equity held by Tsinghua University.

Chen Jianyu, founder of Xingdong Era, is a doctoral supervisor and assistant professor at Tsinghua University. He holds a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, where he studied under Professor Masayoshi Tomizuka, an academician of the US National Academy of Engineering, a pioneer in electromechanical control, and the founder of MPC algorithms. The team members of Xingdong Era come from well-known domestic and international institutions such as Tsinghua University, Peking University, Beijing Institute of Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, UC Berkeley, and the National University of Singapore, as well as Fortune Global 500 companies. Currently, over 80% of the team are R&D personnel.

In terms of technical route, Xingdong Era adheres to integrated hardware and software, aiming to create general-purpose AI agents in the physical world and deliver general productivity, ultimately bringing robots into various industries and households. The "Model-Body-Scenario Data" flywheel of Xingdong Era is one of the key components.

On the model side, Xingdong Era proposed the VLA model ERA-42, which integrates understanding and generation, unifying functions such as vision, understanding, prediction, and action into a single end-to-end model. Through voice commands, it can complete hundreds of complex operations, including sorting flexible items, scanning codes, using screwdrivers, pipettes, etc.

On the body side, Xingdong Era has launched the full-size humanoid robot Xingdong STAR1 and the wheeled chassis robot Xingdong Q5, along with a five-finger dexterous hand product called Xingdong XHAND1.

Among them, the STAR1 model achieves a maximum measured running speed of 3.6 m/s. The robot features 55 degrees of freedom across its body and is equipped with the Dexterous Hand XHAND1, enabling thousands of dexterous movements; it can lift loads up to 24 kg with one hand.

In terms of commercialization, Starry AI has also achieved significant results:

Over 200 units have been delivered this year, with additional orders in mass production delivery.

Nine out of the top ten tech giants by market capitalization globally are customers of Starry AI. Beyond enterprises, Starry AI’s products have gained recognition from numerous developers; research outcomes have been produced based on Starry AI robots by institutions including MIT, Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and ByteDance’s Robotics Lab.

Starry AI is also expanding into overseas markets. Since launching its international strategy earlier this year, revenue from overseas markets has accounted for more than 50% of total revenue.

Starry AI has entered into a strategic cooperation with Beijing Automation Technology (BAC), accumulating technical capabilities and strengths for deployment in complex industrial logistics scenarios such as material handling, sorting, and barcode scanning. Additionally, Starry AI has partnered with Haier Smart Home, Lenovo, and Century Jinyuan to focus on retail services.

Backed by substantial funding, a world-class team, and core technologies, Starry AI is rapidly advancing toward a new stage of humanoid robot R&D and mass production.