5Y News | Differential Intelligence Flight (Weifen Zhifei) Completes Two Consecutive Funding Rounds to Accelerate Embodied AI Development for Aerial Robots
When the sky is truly illuminated by autonomous intelligence, humanity's imagination of space and creativity will be redefined as well.
Differential Intelligence Flight (Hangzhou) Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter "Differential Intelligence Flight") recently completed two funding rounds — a multi-million RMB angel round and an angel+ round — within a single month. The angel round was co-led by 5Y Capital and Shoucheng Capital, while the angel+ round was led by Lightspeed China Partners, with 5Y Capital, Shoucheng Capital, Baidu Venture, and Hangzhou Xicheng Science and Innovation Corridor Seed Fund participating as follow-on investors. Additionally, seed round investor Yinxingu Capital continued to increase its stake.
The proceeds will accelerate innovation in embodied intelligence for aerial systems, swarm intelligence evolution for aerial robots, and team building. The capital market's strong recognition of and continued confidence in Differential Intelligence Flight will inject significant momentum into the company's sustained technological innovation and product commercialization in aerial robot embodied intelligence.
Xing Meng, Partner at 5Y Capital, said: "We have always paid close attention to entrepreneurs who leverage deep scientific research to move the needle on what's possible. Differential Intelligence Flight has distilled a decade of academic rigor into the brain of embodied intelligence, using the sky as a new coordinate for algorithms to engage with the physical world. The company gives every aerial robot independent agency, simplifying complexity through swarm flight algorithms, while enabling robotic arms to complete their first 'touch of the world' in the clouds. 5Y Capital is proud to support this romance where science and humanity intertwine — because when the sky is truly illuminated by autonomous intelligence, humanity's imagination of space and creativity will be redefined."
Founded in July 2024, Differential Intelligence Flight is dedicated to building the world's leading general-purpose aerial robot embodied intelligence brain and its swarm systems, driving intelligent transformation across industrial, urban, and natural environments.
The company was founded by Professor Fei Gao, a renowned scholar in robotics at Zhejiang University, who has devoted more than 10 years to aerial robot research, published over 80 high-level academic papers, and received multiple top international academic honors. He has achieved several world-first results in trajectory planning, swarm collaborative navigation, and bio-inspired visual perception, and proposed the world's first autonomous flight swarm system for unstructured environments. The R&D team has a master's and PhD ratio of 80%, with members from leading institutions including Zhejiang University, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Southern University of Science and Technology, and Sun Yat-sen University.
Today, aerial robots represent the direction of next-generation intelligent aircraft. Empowered by embodied intelligence technology, they are no longer merely flying platforms but "aerial intelligent agents" capable of autonomous decision-making, environmental interaction, mission execution, and even swarm collaboration.
With the product goal of building a general-purpose aerial autonomous robot platform, Differential Intelligence Flight has since its founding focused on flight embodied intelligence, multi-source data fusion, autonomous decision-making, and machine learning technologies, working to break through core technologies including autonomous navigation, dynamic obstacle avoidance, exploration decision-making, and swarm collaboration in GNSS-denied environments. Thanks to the founding team's more than ten years of technical accumulation, the company launched its first-generation autonomous decision-making flight platform within three months of establishment, and has achieved groundbreaking applications in complex, harsh, and unknown environments including mines, under-canopy areas, tunnels, and power facilities — completing detection and inspection tasks fully autonomously without any human intervention.
According to the company, Differential Intelligence Flight's autonomous flight platform integrates self-developed advanced technologies including multi-source sensor fusion positioning, online perception real-time obstacle avoidance, efficient exploration decision-making in unknown scenarios, and high-precision 3D reconstruction, enabling efficient, safe, and precise autonomous environmental detection and data collection by aerial robots. Compared with mainstream detection methods in the industry (such as manual handheld scanning, rail-mounted equipment inspection, and remote-controlled drone mapping), Differential Intelligence Flight's products offer clear advantages: no need for personnel to enter dangerous areas, no advance setup or preparation, and no need for professional drone pilots.
Following this funding round, Differential Intelligence Flight will continue to build industry-facing general-purpose autonomous flight platforms and distributed swarm systems, develop an open secondary development ecosystem, and explore scientific research and education scenarios, enabling autonomous flight to help multiple industries generate new quality productive forces.
Deep Technical Foundation, Multiple Scenarios Nearing Deployment
The new-generation aerial robot swarm integrates distributed intelligent perception, real-time communication, and autonomous coordination algorithms, featuring robust networked communications, high-dimensional state perception, and decision-planning capabilities. It can complete complex task division and dynamic formation reconfiguration without centralized control, with broad applications in multi-robot collaborative reconnaissance, partitioned inspection, swarm search and rescue, and other cutting-edge scenarios.
The autonomous aerobatic flight system integrates high-dynamic mapping, spatial perception, and extreme trajectory optimization capabilities, enabling aerial robots to understand environmental structure, automatically generate complex waypoint sequences and nonlinear spatial paths, and complete high-difficulty flight maneuvers that previously could only be achieved through manual remote control — unlocking unprecedented intelligent possibilities for future high-performance flight control, flight safety training, and aerial competitions.
A New Paradigm for Aerial Manipulation and Interaction
Autonomous flying robots equipped with robotic arms break through the traditional application boundary of "flying without touching," achieving a fully autonomous closed loop of "perception — decision-making — manipulation." The system integrates high-precision navigation, complex trajectory planning, and dynamic interaction control technologies, enabling aerial robots to complete grasping, transportation, assembly, button triggering, and other manipulation tasks in the air — applicable to remote operations in extreme environments such as high-altitude maintenance, post-disaster sampling, and on-orbit space servicing.
Technology Leadership, Connecting a Thousand Industries
According to comprehensive forecasts by McKinsey & Company and MarketsandMarkets, the global intelligent aerial robot market will reach hundreds of billions of dollars by 2030, with a compound annual growth rate exceeding 30%. Among this, aerial robots based on embodied intelligence (Embodied AI) technology — distinguished by their autonomous decision-making and physical interaction capabilities — will become the fastest-growing segment, accounting for over 40% of the market.
Building on deep innovation in embodied intelligence and swarm intelligence, Differential Intelligence Flight is currently evolving aerial robots from single-industry products into "aerospace intelligent terminals" serving a thousand industries.
Fei Gao, Founder and CEO of Differential Intelligence Flight, said: "Differential Intelligence Flight is a technology enterprise that emerged from the laboratory. We believe that breakthroughs from scientific research should not only enter textbooks, but also reach store shelves. The company is building an ecosystem based on a general-purpose autonomous aerial robot platform, revolutionizing application paradigms. As flight embodied intelligence technology gradually matures and application scenarios continue to expand, we look forward to Differential Intelligence Flight enabling 'flying robots to connect a thousand industries and enter millions of households.'"
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