Qiming Venture Partners portfolio companies StepFun and Yuanli Lingji forge strategic partnership

Recently, StepFun and Yuanli Lingji, two portfolio companies of Qiming Venture Partners, formally signed a strategic cooperation agreement. The two parties announced that they will leverage their respective strengths to carry out deep collaboration around multimodal large model technology, intelligent terminal agents, and Embodied Artificial Intelligence scenarios, with the vision of "Reasoning in the real world" to build "RoboAgent" and jointly advance the application of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) in the physical world.

According to the cooperation agreement, the two parties will carry out deep collaboration around embodied large model algorithm R&D, multimodal data closed loops, and robotic scenario applications, jointly tackling the key technical challenges for RoboAgent's deployment in the physical world. Going forward, both sides plan to jointly establish a laboratory to accelerate technology iteration and commercial validation, and explore long-term collaboration in open-source ecosystems, vertical industries, and other areas.

At the signing ceremony, Daxin Jiang, founder and CEO of StepFun, spoke highly of the cooperation with Yuanli Lingji, stating: " Although Yuanli Lingji was founded not long ago, its core team consists of serial entrepreneurs in AI who have been working in artificial intelligence algorithms and hardware for more than a decade. They have tremendous potential in Embodied Artificial Intelligence, and their development direction and philosophy are very aligned with StepFun's. We look forward to achieving deep integration of multimodal large models and Embodied Artificial Intelligence through this cooperation, endowing robots with cognitive and action capabilities closer to those of humans."

Fan Haoqiang, co-founder of Yuanli Lingji, said: " We have always believed that the ultimate scenario for AGI must be acting upon the real physical world. In the future, robots will certainly possess intelligence and enter millions of households, becoming a new form of productivity. And large models are the 'Force' that gives robots intelligence. StepFun is a leading company in China's large model field, with industry-leading multimodal large model R&D capabilities and an open ecosystem vision. We hope that through our joint efforts, we can bring more innovation and breakthroughs to RoboAgent."

Founded in April 2023, StepFun is one of China's large model startups with the most comprehensive foundation model portfolio. To date, StepFun has released the Step series general-purpose large model matrix, covering comprehensive capabilities from language to multimodal to reasoning, with its multimodal models ranking among the industry's best. As of now, StepFun has released 18 self-developed foundation models, 12 of which are multimodal large models. On the industrial application front, StepFun is deeply deploying intelligent terminal agents, focusing on key scenarios including Embodied Artificial Intelligence, automotive, mobile phones, and IoT, and has initiated a series of ecosystem partnerships.

Founded in March 2025, Yuanli Lingji is one of the few Embodied Artificial Intelligence companies in the industry capable of achieving deep integration of large model technology with robotic scenarios. It is committed to making robots an important component of productivity through collaborative innovation driven by algorithms, co-designed hardware, and scenario closed loops, thereby realizing the deployment of AGI in the physical world. At the end of 2024, before Yuanli Lingji was formally established, its R&D team achieved strong results in cross-task testing on RLBench, a benchmark testing platform for robot learning, based on its self-developed VLA model. It became the first Embodied Artificial Intelligence company in China to achieve an average success rate exceeding 90% across more than 100 tasks, while also achieving real-machine replication on its self-developed robotic arm and dexterous hand.

Behind this cooperation lies the two parties' deep consensus on the industrial trend of Embodied Artificial Intelligence. StepFun's multimodal large model technology will form a perfect complement with Yuanli Lingji's end-to-end algorithms and hardware closed-loop capabilities, enabling robots to not only possess more powerful perception, reasoning, and generation capabilities, but also cross-scenario, cross-configuration, and cross-task generalization capabilities and error-correction capabilities. Going forward, both parties will work together to accelerate technology iteration and commercial validation, continuously exploring more universal and practical solutions for specific scenarios.

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Founded in 2006, Qiming Venture Partners currently manages 11 USD funds and 7 RMB funds, with total assets under management reaching $9.5 billion. Since its inception, it has focused on investing in outstanding early and growth-stage companies in the Technology and Consumer (T&C) and Healthcare sectors.

To date, Qiming Venture Partners has invested in over 580 high-growth innovative companies, of which more than 210 have gone public on the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing Limited, Shanghai Stock Exchange, and Shenzhen Stock Exchange, or exited through mergers and acquisitions, and over 80 have become recognized unicorns or super-unicorns.

Many of Qiming Venture Partners' portfolio companies have grown into the most influential companies in their respective fields, including Xiaomi (01810.HK), Meituan (03690.HK), Bilibili (NASDAQ:BILI, 09626.HK), Zhihu (NYSE:ZH, 02390.HK), Roborock (688169.SH), UBTECH (09880.HK), WeRide (NASDAQ:WRD), Gan & Lee Pharmaceuticals (603087.SH), Tigermed (300347.SZ, 03347.HK), Zai Lab (NASDAQ:ZLAB, 09688.HK), CanSino Biologics (688185.SH, 06185.HK), Schrödinger (NASDAQ:SDGR), MicroPort EP MedTech (688617.SH), Sanyou Medical (688085.SH), Amoy Diagnostics (300685.SZ), Berry Genomics (000710.SZ), Sinocelltech (688520.SH), Yuanxin Technology, ClinChoice, Belief BioMed, Biren Technology, and others.