(Yicai) May 12 -- Lumos Robotics, Vbot, and Uncharted Dynamics, three Chinese firms working on embodied artificial intelligence, each announced fresh funding on the same day, highlighting how capital is continuing to flow into the booming sector despite growing investor caution.

Lumos raised several hundred million Chinese yuan (tens of millions of US dollars) in Series A1 and A2 fundraisers led by Mitsubishi Electric Intelligent Manufacturing Technology China Group, the Shenzhen-based company announced yesterday.

Since being set up in 2024, the maker of AI-powered humanoid robots for industry and logistics has banked nearly CNY1 billion (USD137.2 million), with the proceeds of the latest financing round earmarked for researching and developing embodied large models and find more real-world uses for the technology, it said.

Mitsubishi Electric was a client before the pair agreed to jointly develop an embodied intelligence solution for flexible quality inspection uses last June, which have since entered trial use at the Japanese electronics maker's factories in China.

Money poured in China’s embodied AI businesses in the first quarter of this year. The sector recorded 197 financing events involving 182 companies, with early-stage rounds dominating, according to EqualOcean, an investment research firm and information provider.

The space has become crowded and some valuations have spiked, an investor told Yicai. With the industry yet to form a clear commercial closed loop, some investors are becoming more cautious and are starting to look harder at consumer robotics opportunities, the person noted.

Vbot also said yesterday that it raised nearly CNY500 million (USD73.6 million) in a pre-Series A financing round. The new capital will be used for scaling mass production, sales network development, and next-generation humanoid robot R&D, the Beijing-based designer of household robots said.

Vbot, which was set up in December 2024, expects to deliver its first product, a super-capable robot dog priced at almost CNY13,000 (USD1,915), to more than 1,500 customers this month. The initial batch of 500 has rolled off the production line, while the firm aims for monthly output to exceed 2,500 in June.

Vbot founder and Chief Executive Yu Yinan said that only by continuously entering users’ lives and taking part in real-world tasks can robots generate an effective data feedback loop and ultimately achieve genuine physical AI.

Uncharted Dynamics, incorporated in March, bagged several million dollars in a seed round led by early-stage venture capital firm K2VC, it revealed yesterday. The funds will support the R&D of high-precision multibody dynamics solvers and expansion into the North American market.

Uncharted Dynamics aims to build a "ground truth layer for physics," or an underlying engine centered on a high-precision multibody dynamics solver that computes physical processes simplified or ignored by existing simulation systems.

Training data still lacks large amounts of real robot posture-feedback and tactile data, Liu Yinghang, a partner at Scale Partners, has said. Embodied AI models also lack spatial understanding and the ability to predict interactions with objects, he noted.

Editor: Martin Kadiev