Proto-Sentient Intelligence

Proto-Sentient Intelligence (灵初智能, also rendered Lingchu AI) is an embodied-AI company focused on general-purpose embodied intelligence models built on VLA (vision-language-action) architectures and reinforcement learning . BlueRun Ventures led its seed and first rounds , and in late August 2026 it closed a new round of over $100 million backed by state capital, industrial capital, and multiple funds — framed by BlueRun as dual validation from the state system and industry . From its early days it co-built an embodied-intelligence joint lab with Peking University — the team of PKU's Yang Yaodong, tied to that lab, later won an ACL 2025 Best Paper award . Its product milestones include Psi R0, released in late 2024 as the first end-to-end RL-based embodied model , and Psi R1, which BlueRun described as the first embodied model to achieve vision-language-action multimodal coordination — with its robots tackling long-horizon open-environment tasks, up to playing mahjong with humans . In April 2026 it also announced ecosystem partnerships with Tencent Cloud and Douyin, among others .