Meituan Invests in Another Robotics Firm: Xinghaitu Closes Over $100 Million in A4 and A5 Funding Rounds

July 9, Xinghai Tu (Beijing) Artificial Intelligence Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Xinghai Tu) announced the completion of its Series A4 and A5 strategic financing rounds, with a combined total exceeding USD 100 million.

Today Capital led the Series A4 round, with Meituan Dragon Ball also participating as a lead investor. Co-investors included CICC Porsche Fund, Xianghe Capital, miHoYo, and Wuxi Venture Capital Group. The Series A5 round was co-led by Meituan Dragon Ball and Meituan Strategic Investment, with additional capital injected by the Beijing Robot Industry Fund. Yizhuang State-owned Assets Investment participated as a co-investor, while existing shareholders including IDG Capital, BV Baidu Ventures, Kineo Fund, Today Capital, and Xianghe Capital continued their follow-on investments.

Looking back, in April 2025, Xinghai Tu announced the consecutive completion of its Series A2 and A3 financing rounds. These were led by Kineo Fund, with industrial investors such as Lenovo Capital and Haier Capital participating. Existing shareholders including IDG Capital, Hillhouse Venture Capital, Baidu Ventures, and Tongge Capital made follow-on investments, with some existing shareholders fully subscribing and over-subscribing across multiple rounds.

In November 2024, Xinghai Tu announced the completion of its Pre-A round financing totaling over RMB 200 million. This round was led by Hillhouse Venture Capital (GL Ventures) and Ant Group, with participation from miHoYo, Wuxi Venture Capital Group, Tongge Capital, FunPlus, and existing shareholders. Huaxing Capital served as the exclusive financial advisor.

In July 2024, Xinghai Tu completed its business registration changes, marking another investment move by the Beijing Robot Industry Development Investment Fund in embodied AI robots.

In February 2024, Xinghai Tu completed the second closing of its angel round financing, which raised a total of tens of millions of US dollars. IDG Capital led this round, with participation from SEE Fund, BV Baidu Ventures, GSR Ventures, and Qixi Investment.

Founded in September 2023, Xinghai Tu is an AI company specializing in the development of embodied AI foundational models and embodied AI robots. It boasts two world-class embodied AI algorithm scientists, including an Assistant Professor from Tsinghua University's Institute for Interdisciplinary Information (IIIS). The company's founder and CEO, Gao Jiyang, previously worked at Waymo and Momenta. His two co-founders, Zhao Xing and Li Tianwei, are former colleagues from his time at Momenta and Waymo. In terms of customers, Xinghai Tu primarily serves four categories: large technology enterprises, startups, universities, and research institutions/national laboratories, addressing their needs across three levels: algorithm development, scenario implementation, and data collection.

In terms of products, Xinghai Tu has launched several standard platform products, including the general-purpose humanoid robot R1 Pro and the wheeled dual-arm mobile platform R1 lite. The company has also built a full-chain embodied AI development platform, EDP, which integrates data collection, data management, and real-robot testing.

Since late 2024, Xinghai Tu's wheeled dual-arm robot bodies have been delivered to over a hundred developer customers both domestically and internationally. In the research and development of embodied foundational models, Xinghai Tu focuses on the fast-slow dual-system model architecture, EFM-1 (Embodied Foundation Model-1). This system combines a 'slow thinking' visual language model (VLM) with hundreds of billions of parameters and a 'fast execution' action model (VLA) with tens of billions of parameters, achieving closed-loop decision-making from perception and understanding to precise control.

With 'standard hardware + standard data + standard tools' as its core, Xinghai Tu is providing embodied AI infrastructure for developers. This infrastructure features characteristics of being implementable, scalable, and evaluable.

Currently, developers such as Fei-Fei Li's team at Stanford University and Physical Intelligence are leveraging the Xinghai Tu platform to accelerate the validation and implementation of embodied AI technologies.

Xinghai Tu stated that the EFM series models and data will gradually be open-sourced to developers in the future. The company hopes to collaborate with global developers to build an open-source ecosystem for embodied AI, promoting the application of embodied AI technologies in households worldwide.