On February 24, 2026, leading embodied intelligence company Qianxun AI (Spirit AI) announced it has recently closed two consecutive funding rounds, raising a total of nearly 2 billion yuan. This marks the largest single fundraising amount in the embodied intelligence sector since the beginning of 2026. With the completion of these rounds, Qianxun AI's valuation has surpassed the 10 billion yuan threshold, becoming the second embodied intelligence unicorn to achieve this status within two days, following Zhipingfang.
The investor lineup for this round is notably robust, featuring premier institutions such as Yunfeng Capital, Sequoia China, and HunDuo Capital. Strategic investments also came from Synstellation Capital, TCL Ventures, and Minghui Investment, alongside strong support from state-backed funds including the Chongqing Industrial Investment Mother Fund and Hangzhou Financial Investment. Notably, all existing shareholders, such as Shunwei Capital, Prosperity7 Ventures, and others, chose to participate significantly in the oversubscribed rounds.
According to sources close to the company, the intense investor interest was driven by Qianxun AI's better-than-expected progress in model development and the successful validation of its technology in mass-production scenarios within a CATL factory. These dual breakthroughs in technology and commercialization created high demand for investment allocation.
Qianxun AI, founded in January 2024, focuses on developing a "general brain" for robots, with its core technology centered on the self-developed Spirit series of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. The open-source Spirit v1.5 model, released in January 2025, was the first Chinese open-source model to outperform the Pi0.5 model in performance, demonstrating strong zero-shot generalization capabilities. The company has reduced data acquisition costs by 90% through proprietary wearable devices and has accumulated over 200,000 hours of real interaction data, with projections to exceed one million hours by 2026.
The company's founder and CEO, Han Fengtao, is a serial entrepreneur in the robotics industry with nearly a decade of experience, having previously overseen the delivery of more than 20,000 industrial robots. Co-founder Gao Yang, an assistant professor at Tsinghua University, is recognized for his contributions to reinforcement learning and visual-language models. The team, with an average age under 30, combines deep academic and engineering expertise in multimodal AI and robotics.
Qianxun AI's rapid ascent to a 10-billion-yuan valuation in just over two years has been supported by multiple funding rounds. Its collaboration with CATL has become a benchmark case, with Qianxun's robots successfully deployed on a new energy battery production line, achieving high reliability and efficiency comparable to skilled workers.
The broader embodied intelligence sector continues to attract significant investment. Industry analysis suggests 2026 is a critical "delivery year," shifting focus from technological demonstrations to practical, reliable deployment, particularly in industrial night-shift roles. For investors, components like actuators and sensors may offer more stable opportunities than betting on specific robot manufacturers.
Qianxun AI's journey demonstrates that when technology delivers tangible industrial value, capital recognition follows. However, a 10-billion-yuan valuation is merely a starting point, with the true value of embodied intelligence yet to be fully realized.