Alibaba has invested in another general robotics company

Author | Liu Baodan

Editor | Huang Yu

After personally participating in and investing in numerous AI startups, Alibaba has extended its focus to the field of robotics.

On October 16th, Wall Street News learned that Tsinghua University-affiliated startup Xingdong Era recently completed nearly 300 million yuan in Pre-A financing, with Alibaba, Clearstream Capital, and Yuanjing Capital jointly leading the investment, Source Code Capital participating, and existing shareholders Lenovo Capital, Century Golden Source, Jinding Capital, Zeyu Capital, and Qingkong Tiancheng continuing to invest.

Established in August 2023, Xingdong Era is the only humanoid robot company with shares held by Tsinghua University. It mainly focuses on the research and development of embodied intelligence and general humanoid robot technology and products. This is the company's third round of financing since its establishment, with the seed round and angel round receiving tens of millions and 100 million yuan in financing, respectively.

This is already the second robotics company Alibaba has invested in this year. In July, Alibaba invested in the general robotics company Zhiyijidongli, which focuses on the research and manufacturing of embodied intelligence and bipedal robots.

At the Yunqi Conference on September 19th, Alibaba Group CEO Eddie Wu stated that the greatest imagination of generative AI is not to create one or two new super apps on a mobile screen, but to take over the digital world and change the physical world.

In his view, the transformation and development of AI has just begun. "AI has the ability to create and help solve complex problems for humans, and the path is clear, opening up the possibility of widespread application of AI in various industry scenarios."

Currently, under the influence of AI large model technology, the embodied intelligence industry is experiencing rapid development. Alibaba's investment in Xingdong Era is precisely because of the interaction between AI and the physical world. Through this financing, the latter can gain more initiative for development.

Wall Street News learned that the main focus of this round of financing for Xingdong Era will be to accelerate breakthrough research and development of embodied intelligence technology and the commercialization of general humanoid robots, as well as to continue to strengthen the company's talent, technological barriers, and market-leading position.

Xingdong Era founder Chen Jianyu stated, "In the future, we will continue to focus on technological breakthroughs and application landing, jointly promoting innovation and progress in the field of embodied intelligence."

Xingdong Era aims to endow intelligent machines with the most universal and native way to interact with the physical world, namely humanoid and multimodal. To achieve this, the company has built an original robot large model and a new hardware platform defined for AI.

Xingdong Era's original robot large model is a new AI-native learning paradigm, where the algorithm fuses sensory information such as vision, hearing, and touch through multimodal input, reproducing the most fundamental way of interaction between organisms and the physical world.

In terms of generality, Xingdong Era upholds the concept of "the bitter lesson," allowing robots to abandon human priors and achieve true autonomous evolution and wide application through self-exploration and self-learning. In terms of simplicity, the company adopts an end-to-end architecture, enabling the intelligent body to adapt to tasks and environments in real-time, significantly enhancing flexibility and development efficiency.

In terms of hardware platform, Xingdong STAR 1 has already adopted an end-to-end pure learning approach in mobility and manipulation, achieving generalized walking and grasping of robots in different environments relying solely on a neural network After extensive data training, the model has demonstrated outstanding generalization capabilities.

In July, at the 2024 World Robotics Conference, Star Era unveiled the sixth generation humanoid robot STAR 1 and the dexterous hand XHAND 1, showcasing remarkable hardware innovation capabilities. STAR 1 has currently passed multiple product-level tests, fully meeting market application standards. In addition, the recently launched desktop robot M1 and wheeled robot W1 by the company have fully demonstrated its long-term vision and strength in promoting the widespread application of general-purpose robots in various industries.

This round of financing for Star Era not only brings financial support but also forms more synergy and linkage in business, accelerating the company's innovation and application in the field of embodied intelligence.

For example, Alibaba will explore cooperation opportunities with the company in AI technology, cloud computing, and other fields, areas in which the latter excels. In fact, Alibaba's investments in the AI field are often reflected in the form of computing resources.

With the investment in Star Era, Alibaba's layout in the AI field is further enhanced