China's PsiBot Nears $100M Round at $1.48B Valuation as Chery Bets on Embodied AI

China has minted another embodied AI unicorn — and this time the money is coming from a carmaker. PsiBot, the Beijing-based startup also known as Lingchu Intelligence, is finalizing a funding round of close to $100 million at a $1.48 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported last week, with automaker Chery Automobile leading and Lens Technology — the touch-sensor supplier whose customers include Apple and Tesla — among the participants.

The deal brings PsiBot's total funding to roughly $300 million since its founding in 2024, a remarkably steep trajectory even by the standards of China's overheated robotics scene. By one count reported by The Next Web and Value Add VC, PsiBot is at least the twenty-second Chinese embodied AI company to cross the unicorn threshold in 2026.

Software, not robots

Unlike the humanoid makers that dominate headlines, PsiBot does not manufacture its own machines. The company builds general-purpose embodied intelligence software — large-scale vision-language-action models and dexterous manipulation algorithms — and licenses them to third-party robot makers. At the center of its roadmap are "world models," AI systems that let robots and autonomous vehicles perceive and predict how physical environments behave rather than merely react to them.

The founding team's pedigree explains investor enthusiasm: its three co-founders include a Peking University dean, a robotics veteran of Alibaba and Tencent, and a Stanford scholar who studied under computer vision pioneer Fei-Fei Li. That mix of academic depth and platform-company experience has become the standard template for China's top-tier embodied AI plays.

Data as edge and bottleneck

PsiBot's approach to training data is notably hands-on. The company gathers proprietary interaction data using custom-built gloves and humanoid robots, and is already testing its systems with logistics firms and cable manufacturers — the unglamorous industrial settings where dexterous manipulation actually earns revenue.

Chief executive Viktor Wang told The Next Web that data is both China's competitive edge and its bottleneck, and said the company is targeting one million hours of training data this year. He is bullish on timing: "We should see the GPT-2 moment in embodied AI in two years," Wang said, comparing the coming inflection to the point at which language models first showed genuine generalization.

Carmakers move up the stack

Chery's lead position in the round is the more strategically interesting signal. Chinese automakers, squeezed by brutal price competition in EVs, are increasingly investing in robotics startups as both suppliers and future product lines — echoing moves by Chery rivals that have unveiled humanoid programs of their own. For PsiBot, an automaker anchor brings manufacturing know-how, factory deployment sites and a channel into vehicle autonomy, where its world models could do double duty.

The broader context is a Chinese embodied AI sector that is scaling — and consolidating — at breakneck speed, central to the US-China competition over the next platform of AI. Rival world-model startup GigaAI has already filed for a Hong Kong listing, and public-market exits for the category are likely to arrive faster in China than anywhere else. PsiBot's bet is that when the sector's GPT-2 moment does arrive, the winners will be the companies that own the models and the data underneath every robot brand — not the brands themselves.