Embodied intelligence startup Tashi Intelligent Navigation announced a $120 million angel funding round, continuing to push the boundaries of physical-world intelligence.

Embodied intelligence has a formidable new entrant. On March 26, TARS, an embodied intelligence startup, announced the completion of a $120 million angel round, kicking off its entrepreneurial journey in the field. The round was co-led by BlueRun Ventures and Qiming Venture Partners, with Linear Capital, Hengxu Capital, Hongtai APlus, Lenovo Capital and Incubator Group, Xiang He Capital, and Hillhouse following on. TARS has set a record for the largest angel round in China's embodied intelligence industry. The proceeds will primarily fund product and technology R&D, model training, and scenario expansion.

Harry Wang, Founder and CEO of Linear Capital, said: "We first came across the TARS project on the evening of my birthday in December 2024. I'd actually known founder Zhenyu Li for quite a few years, but we hadn't managed to connect for various reasons. We later arranged to meet the whole team, and I was deeply impressed by the newly acquainted co-founders — Yilun, Wenchao, and others. They truly combine their extensive experience refining hardware and software for autonomous driving at Huawei with large model reasoning capabilities to deploy embodied robots. After extensive technical discussions, we concluded this is the strongest dream team in the embodied intelligence space. We made our investment decision quickly. Beyond the people, what struck me most was their ability to raise such a substantial first round so quickly amid a sluggish funding environment — that's the market casting a vote of technical confidence with real money. Their technical accumulation, talent reserve, and fundraising capability are all exceptional."

On investing in embodied intelligence, Harry Wang believes that significant capital and investors are currently flocking toward "embodied" directions, and the logic is clear: in the large language model (LLM) domain, Chinese teams have already demonstrated capabilities on par with global top-tier players. From a cost perspective, they may even hold greater competitive advantages. In embodied intelligence — a track with higher hardware content — China's advantages will become even more pronounced. Meanwhile, China's massive industrial base (i.e., application scenarios) complements this strength, enabling full integration of mature domestic supply chains and abundant software and hardware engineers to form more powerful synergies and ecosystems. Therefore, both capital and entrepreneurs have a clear understanding of the "embodied" megatrend. If LLMs have already moved from the "Spring and Autumn" period into the "Warring States" era, embodied intelligence remains in the "Spring and Autumn" stage — existing entrepreneurial teams are entering from different technical paths and application scenarios, collectively showcasing technical muscle and expanding potential market size. But it requires rational recognition that the industry's core challenge right now is: in which vertical scenario will embodied intelligence first achieve its aha moment and a breakthrough-style revolutionary leap? This demands not just validation of technical feasibility, but the formation of quantifiable, replicable commercial value loops. Whoever can complete this loop first in the coming years may push embodied intelligence from "Spring and Autumn" into "Warring States," and even toward unification.

Dr. Yilun Chen, Founder and CEO of TARS, stated: "TARS's mission is to build trustworthy super embodied intelligence systems centered on physical-world AI and general robotics technology, enabling high-performance AI to integrate into human production and life at scale." Chen predicts that embodied intelligence will become a key engine for global industrial upgrading over the next decade. TARS will continue pushing the boundaries of physical-world intelligence and exploring the unlimited potential of embodied intelligence. Officially established on February 5, 2025, TARS is uniquely positioned in the industry as a company simultaneously possessing embodied intelligence large model capabilities, robotic body R&D capabilities, and software-hardware integrated product mass production capabilities. On the technical front, TARS has pioneered a new paradigm for embodied intelligence development, creating the industry's first Human-Centric Embodied Data Engine that enables leapfrog breakthroughs in real-world embodied data acquisition — injecting powerful momentum into the sustained development of physical-world AI. At the same time, TARS has also pioneered the industry's first spatial perception and reasoning decision-integrated embodied large model, accelerating the GPT moment for embodied intelligence through a data-driven, generalizable universal physical-world intelligence system. On the team front, TARS's founding team has been hailed by the industry as a "luxury dream team combination" and the "strongest full-stack AI team" in embodied intelligence to date: CEO Dr. Yilun Chen is a leading figure in China's embodied intelligence and autonomous driving technology and industry, formerly Chief Scientist for Intelligent Robotics at Tsinghua University's Institute for AI Industry Research, CTO of Huawei Autonomous Driving, and Chief Engineer of Machine Vision at DJI. Chief Scientist Dr. Wenchao Ding, formerly a Huawei "Genius Youth" honoree, is a young scientist in embodied intelligence and a researcher at Fudan University's Robotics Research Institute, having led the development of Huawei's intelligent driving end-to-end decision network from scratch and built Fudan's first humanoid robot. Chief Architect Tongqing Chen, a Tsinghua University PhD and chief scientist of a national major project, formerly head of Huawei ADS Intelligent Navigation and chief technical expert in spatial perception, has deep experience across industrial manufacturing, AI, autonomous driving, and robotics, leading multiple products to successful commercialization. Chief Strategy Officer Vincent, an expert in multimodal learning and serial entrepreneur who has led multiple startups to leapfrog development, formerly held key technical positions at Huawei and Baidu, with exceptional strategic vision and technical commercialization capabilities. Chairman Zhenyu Li formerly served as President of Baidu's Intelligent Driving Group, spearheading the creation of the Apollo autonomous driving open platform and the world's largest autonomous ride-hailing service platform "Luobo Kuaipao," making him a leading figure in China's autonomous driving sector. The TARS founding team will leverage their rich experience in successfully building star AI products and technologies to lead the company in focusing on innovative embodied intelligence products and injecting new vitality into industry development.

Investor Perspectives TARS's angel round investors are all top-tier industry institutions, combining industrial insight and enablement capabilities. Their strategic vision ensures TARS gains access to industry-leading resources from its angel round. Terry Zhu, Managing Partner of BlueRun Ventures, stated: "In the embodied intelligence track, BlueRun Ventures has conducted long-term systematic positioning and become the first investor in multiple unicorns. This conviction stems from our belief in China's comparative advantages — as the primary engine of growth shifts, China's advantages in supply chain, talent, and scenarios are elevated, and we believe Chinese enterprises will create world-class technology products and services. TARS is a team with exceptionally strong full-stack AI capabilities in the market: the team possesses world-class world model construction capabilities and the engineering execution capacity for ultra-large complex systems; the company has deep technical accumulation in robotic body design and motion control algorithms, with integrated software-hardware delivery capabilities; simultaneously, the company has profound insight into pain points in target industries, precisely anchoring high-value application scenarios to deliver complete solutions — not merely a 'robotics company,' but an 'industry scenario solution company.' We look forward to TARS driving new industrial development." Alex Zhou, Partner at Qiming Venture Partners, stated: "Qiming Venture Partners began systematically positioning in artificial intelligence, robotics, and autonomous driving fields ten years ago. We have accompanied companies in these fields through their growth, witnessing from the industry forefront the gradual integration of AI technology with the physical world and continuous breakthroughs in algorithms and hardware bodies. China has strong R&D capabilities in artificial intelligence, abundant talent, and the world's most complete hardware ecosystem, rich landing scenarios, and massive market potential — thus having an excellent opportunity to cultivate embodied intelligence and robotics enterprises with strong global competitiveness that can lead industry development. Entrepreneurship in this field requires not only profound insight into frontier technology development trends, but also rich experience in engineering, productization, and mass production. We believe TARS is one of the few excellent teams in the industry with complete capabilities." Zhenyu Li, Founder and Chairman of TARS, stated: "With a mature intelligent hardware industry chain foundation, continuously upgrading AI technology reserves, combined with rich application scenarios and top-tier talent resources, the embodied intelligence field is in a stage of rapid development. We thank our investors for their trust and support. The TARS team will always maintain its entrepreneurial初心, respect the fundamental laws of entrepreneurship, and look forward to working hand in hand with global embodied intelligence enterprises to drive sustainable industry development through accelerated breakthroughs in key core technologies." Currently, TARS's core team has been fully assembled, with employees officially based in its Shanghai office. The company is intensively recruiting for R&D positions, selecting candidates with a fighting spirit, extreme pursuit of technology and products, and development potential.

About TARS TARS was officially established on February 5, 2025, as an AI-driven embodied intelligence technology company. TARS's mission is to build trustworthy super embodied intelligence systems centered on physical-world AI and general robotics technology, enabling high-performance AI to integrate into human production and life at scale. TARS's vision is to become a global leader in the embodied intelligence field.

Careers TARS recruitment contact: hr@tars-ai.com

About Linear Capital Linear Capital is an early-stage investment institution focused on "frontier technology + industry" — that is, frontier technologies represented by data intelligence, digital new infrastructure, next-generation robotics technology, and new technological transformations in traditional fields (such as biomedicine, materials, energy, etc.), applied across vertical industries to substantially improve industrial efficiency, empower solutions to pain points, and complete industrial upgrading — achieving excess returns through substantial increases in industrial value. It currently manages ten funds with total AUM of approximately $2 billion. Its investment stage focuses on leading angel to Series A rounds, with individual investments ranging from $1 million to $10 million (or RMB equivalent). To date, it has made early-stage investments in over 120 entrepreneurial teams including Horizon Robotics, Kujiale, Sensors Data, Tezign, Rokid, Guandata, and Agile Robots. The combined valuation of Linear's portfolio companies is approximately $20 billion. In the near term, Linear Capital is striving to become the best "Data Intelligence Technology Fund," and in the long term, to gradually build itself into the most influential "Frontier Technology Application Fund."