(Yicai) Aug. 12 -- Chinese embodied artificial intelligence startup Spirit AI has secured nearly CNY200 million (USD27.9 million) in an angel financing round, according to the statement released today. 

The fundraiser was led by Highlight Capital. New investors Fortune Capital and Fibonacci Venture Capital also took part, along with existing investors Vitalbridge and Shunwei Capital. 

Founded in February, Spirit AI researches and develops general-purpose robots for both commercial and household uses. It aims to help the world enter into an era of intelligent robotics when people own and use robots like smartphones.

Investors have expressed optimism about the company’s perspective. They believe Spirit AI’s technological innovation, together with the experience of its management team in the field of embodied AI, will boost the development of this sector.

Spirit AI’s co-founder Han Fengtao is the former chief technology officer of Chinese robot maker Rokae. He boasts over a decade of experience in the robotics sector, with its main field being high-performance, lightweight industrial robots.

The startup’s other co-founder is Gao Yang, who also has more than 10 years of research experience in embodied AI, computer vision, and machine learning. Gao proposed visual language model ViLa, which has been installed on Figure’s humanoid robot Figure 01, and Robotic Manipulation through Spatial Constraints of Parts, a novel framework that incorporates common sense knowledge embedded with foundation-vision language models into the low-level robotic manipulation tasks.

Gao has also explored a new method of training robotic models with online videos to optimize AI technologies and unleash hardware performance.

Editor: Futura Costaglione