Recently, the humanoid robot industry in Shenzhen has seen a wave of positive news. On March 6, two Shenzhen-based humanoid robotics startups almost simultaneously announced the completion of new funding rounds, each raising hundreds of millions of yuan.
Alibaba and NIO Invest Heavily: LimX Dynamics Secures 500 Million Yuan in Six Months
On March 6, general robotics company LimX Dynamics announced the recent completion of its Series A+ funding round. With this, the company has raised a total of 500 million yuan in Series A funding over the past six months.
This round attracted strategic support from leading industrial and financial institutions, along with follow-on investments from existing shareholders. Strategic investors include Alibaba Group, CMG Capital, Shangqi Capital, NIO Capital, Lenovo Capital, Beyond Times, and Nice Group. Prominent financial investors include Gaopeng Capital, Oasis Capital, Mingshi Capital, FreeS Capital, and Nanshan Strategic Emerging Industries Investment.
Following this funding, LimX Dynamics will focus on original innovation and industrial development, advancing three core technologies in humanoid robotics:
1. Design and manufacturing of robotic hardware;
2. Reinforcement learning-based “cerebellum” for full-body motion control;
3. Training strategies for embodied intelligence brain models.
In robotic hardware development, LimX Dynamics specializes in quadruped, bipedal, and wheel-legged robots. In December 2023, the company debuted its self-developed humanoid robot CL-1. By August 2024, it launched the next-generation CL-2, which achieved significant improvements in degrees of freedom, flexibility, and stability, enabling complex movements such as lying down, standing up, twisting, and deep squats.
ZhiPingFang Secures Two Funding Rounds Totaling Hundreds of Millions in Two Months
On March 6, ZhiPingFang announced the completion of a new Pre-A+ funding round raising hundreds of millions of yuan, with investors including Dunhong Asset, Yunqi Capital, and SDIC Chuangying. The funds will accelerate the iteration of its end-to-end VLA model and promote the commercial deployment of embodied intelligence robots in large-scale scenarios. Notably, the company closed two funding rounds in just two months, with the previous round on January 7, 2025, led by Fortune Capital and Dunhong Asset, with participation from Cornerstone Capital.
ZhiPingFang’s self-developed AI2R Brain embodied AI model has been applied to its Alpha Bot series. The latest product, Alpha Bot 1S, combines wheeled design, foldable lifting mechanisms, and high-degree-of-freedom robotic arms, enabling precise environmental perception and versatile task execution in complex scenarios.
In June 2024, the establishment of PI (Physical Intelligence) drew widespread attention for its VLA end-to-end framework, hailed as the “ultimate solution” for embodied intelligence. Simultaneously, ZhiPingFang partnered with Peking University to launch the RoboMamba model for robotic manipulation. This model not only debuted earlier than PI’s OpenVLA but also surpassed Google’s RT series in generalization capabilities for unseen tasks.
ZhiPingFang has already partnered with global automotive giants, advanced manufacturers, and tech leaders, securing substantial commercial orders. The company reported tens of millions in confirmed revenue for 2024 and plans to accelerate the global commercialization of its cutting-edge VLA technology in 2025.
