(Yicai) April 2 -- Galaxea AI has completed a deal to raise nearly CNY2 billion (USD290.4 million) from investors that values the Chinese embodied intelligence startup at CNY200 billion (USD29 billion), placing it in the top tier alongside compatriot Galbot.

Industrial investors, leading long-term funds, and state-backed capital took part in the Series B+ fundraiser, Beijing-based Galaxea announced today. In February, Galaxea bagged nearly CNY1 billion in a Series B funding round.

The new funds will be used to scale up Galaxea’s research and development of foundational models, expand its global ecosystem, advance the progress of its real-data-driven Vision-Language-Action models and World Action Models, and hasten the large-scale commercial deployment of embodied AI, it said.

Despite a surge of new entrants into the embodied AI arena, Galaxea’s Chief Financial Officer Luo Tianqi expects more than half of China’s eventual top 10 companies in the field to emerge from the current generation of startups.

Established in 2023, Galaxea is pursuing a tightly integrated approach in which VLA models and World Action Models evolve together. The firm argues that massive datasets from real, open-world environments enable a deep coupling between intuitive physical-world understanding and precise task execution. So far, it has open-sourced three VLA models.

Unlike Beijing-based Galbot, which opted for simulation data as its main approach, Galaxea has chosen a real-world embodied data engine, which comes with challenges, including high data collection difficulty, high costs, and slower scalability.

Editor: Martin Kadiev