Yunqi Capital | Portfolio Company Astribot Raises Tens of Millions of Dollars in Pre-A Round, Accelerating Commercial Deployment of AI Robots

AI large models are pushing the robotics industry into the embodied intelligence era, and powerful robot assistants are no longer out of reach.

Recently, Astribot, a Yunqi Capital angel-round lead project, announced the completion of a tens-of-millions-of-dollars Pre-A funding round. Yunqi Capital, the lead investor in the angel round, continued to support the company in this round. With years of deep engagement in AI and robotics, Yunqi is bullish on Astribot's outstanding hardware-software synergy and looks forward to the team continuing to lead innovation in embodied intelligence through its leading AI practice, agile hardware capabilities, and rich application scenario data.

Astribot is dedicated to developing deployable next-generation AI robots. In April this year, it unveiled its first self-developed AI robot, the Astribot S1, in its R&D lab. The company's founding team core members come from China's top robotics labs, having led multiple star project developments, with strong technical accumulation, deep expertise, and abundant resources in embodied intelligence.

This edition of "Yunqi Capital" brings you details on Astribot's new funding round.

AI robotics company Astribot announced the completion of a tens-of-millions-of-dollars Pre-A funding round, led by Matrix Partners China, with follow-on investment from industrial capital including DaoTong Investment and Qinghui Investment, and existing shareholder Yunqi Capital also participating. China Renaissance served as exclusive financial advisor. The proceeds will be used for top talent recruitment, R&D investment, and commercial deployment.

Founded in December 2022 in Shenzhen, Astribot is committed to enabling billions of people to have AI robot assistants, advancing a vision of human-machine coexistence, co-creation, and mutual benefit. The company focuses on developing "the next-generation strongest AI robot assistant," capable of learning, thinking, and working like a human, interacting intelligently and fluidly with people, using human tools and equipment, and helping people complete tedious, difficult, or dangerous tasks — continuously expanding the boundaries of application scenarios and achieving general-purpose operational capabilities across scenarios, leading the "AI + robotics" technology revolution.

First-to-market AI-oriented hardware-software integrated system architecture,

comprehensively covering various complex scenarios

In April this year, Astribot demonstrated significant progress on its self-developed AI robot, the Astribot S1. S1 is an embodied humanoid robot with comprehensive operational capabilities. Supported by multimodal large models, S1 autonomously completes complex tasks such as folding clothes, sorting items, wok-tossing stir-fry, vacuum cleaning, and sport stacking — with agility, flexibility, and smoothness rivaling that of an adult — through intelligent human-robot interaction. It can also continuously learn and evolve, constantly improving task generalization and transfer capabilities, comprehensively covering various complex scenarios.

Astribot has proposed the industry's first-to-market AI-oriented hardware-software integrated system architecture, deeply combining artificial intelligence with robotics technology, laying the foundation for embodied intelligence technology and core technical advantages.

In terms of AI capabilities, the S1 robot possesses a super-powerful "brain," with perception, cognition, and real-time decision-making capabilities in complex environments, intelligent understanding and multimodal interactive execution capabilities, achieving general-purpose operational generalization at the object, task, and environment levels.

Meanwhile, Astribot has achieved a key breakthrough in embodied intelligence data acquisition, able to cost-effectively and efficiently utilize existing real-world video data and human motion data, and efficiently collect multi-dimensional high-quality data from a first-person perspective, achieving human-like multimodal data interaction across vision, touch, hearing, and force sensing.

In terms of robot hardware capabilities, based on an innovative rigid-flexible coupled transmission mechanism design, it achieves high operational performance at low cost, giving S1 "the strongest operational performance" among robots of comparable specifications.

Technology-driven cost reduction accelerates scenario deployment,

already collaborating with numerous industry leaders

Through rigid-flexible coupled design and a "force-centric" innovative force planning algorithm, the company ensures high flexibility, high compliance, and high interaction safety in motion. With self-developed key components and clear cost advantages, the company has laid the groundwork for scenario deployment. It is currently collaborating with leading well-known enterprises and institutions in fields including scientific research, logistics and warehousing, intelligent manufacturing, laboratory automation, retail and consumer, elderly care, and personalized education.

The company expects to complete the launch of its first-generation product in the near term, and achieve commercialization within 2024. Going forward, it will continue to iterate products based on the "strongest AI robot assistant" philosophy, constantly expanding the boundaries of application scenarios.

Yunqi Capital's investment team stated: "Astribot starts from the most commercially valuable and technically demanding upper-body manipulation, building an AI-defined robot hardware-software architecture. On the software side, it has constructed a robot manipulation large model and a multi-source, multimodal data closed loop, continuously iterating AI capabilities; on the hardware side, it has self-developed innovative solutions for core components including robotic arms, dexterous hands, and tactile sensors, achieving human-equivalent motion performance while being deeply integrated into the AI model's data closed loop. We look forward to the Astribot team continuing to lead embodied intelligence industry innovation through its leading AI practice, agile hardware capabilities, and rich application scenario data fuel."