- SenseCapital led the round alongside CDH Investments VGC and Frees Fund
- Startup aims to build consumer 3D cameras for AI world models and robotics data collection
Hangzhou-based spatial camera startup Bampony (竹马创新) has raised tens of millions of yuan in an angel+ funding round led by SenseTime-affiliated SenseCapital, as investors bet on rising demand for real-world 3D data used in robotics and embodied AI systems.
The round also drew participation from CDH Investments’ tech-focused VGC fund and Frees Fund. Proceeds will go toward product development, manufacturing preparation and overseas expansion.
Founded in late 2025 in Hangzhou’s Gongshu district, Bampony positions itself as a “Camera plus AI” company focused on spatial intelligence.
Founder Zhang Ji previously served as vice president at spatial intelligence pioneer Manycore Tech (群核科技), where he worked on large-scale spatial data processing and commercialization.
Chief scientist Guo Jie is a tenured associate professor at Nanjing University specializing in 3D Gaussian Splatting and spatial simulation.
The startup is developing a consumer-facing spatial camera category that it says could function both as a 3D content creation tool and as a data collection gateway for embodied AI and world models.
Its first product, Pebble, integrates 3D Gaussian Splatting, multi-sensor fusion, cloud-edge collaboration and AI-native interaction into a single device designed to let users “capture the real 3D world as easily as shooting video.”
The product remains in development and has not entered mass production, though.
The company is positioning itself around a growing industry shift driven by embodied AI and vision-language-action models, which require large volumes of real-world spatial data.
Redefining data collection
Traditional robot training has relied heavily on teleoperation data collection, an approach widely viewed as enormously costly and thus difficult to scale.
Bampony says its spatial cameras can capture first-person-view data containing 3D structure, semantic information and real-world scale, potentially creating a new infrastructure layer for robotics-era data collection.
“Making the physical world computable, understandable and editable will become the foundation for future applications,” SenseCapital partner Yu Jun said in a press release. “We hope Bampony can become the Insta360 of the 4D world.”
Mou Liushan, vice president at CDH VGC, said breakthroughs in 3D Gaussian Splatting and falling lidar costs had created a market inflection point.
“We bet big on the team’s execution capability and expect the company to become a new data entry point for world models,” Frees Fund partner Ma Rui said.
