- Startup targets whole-body intelligence for next-generation humanoids
- Funding backs model development, global hiring and research expansion
Embodied AI startup Archon Robotics (源策未来) has raised several hundred million yuan in a seed funding round, setting what the company describes as a record for China’s embodied intelligence sector at the seed stage.
The round was backed by leading venture capital firms including ZhenFund, Gaorong Ventures, IDG Capital and 5Y Capital, alongside investors including Gobi Partners, a joint fund established with The University of Hong Kong, MiraclePlus and Shanghai Institute for Advanced Study of AI.
Founded in April 2026 and headquartered in Shanghai’s Caohejing Development Zone, Archon Robotics is developing a general-purpose foundation model for humanoid robots designed to achieve what it calls “whole-body intelligence”—enabling robots to coordinate movement and manipulation in a more human-like manner.
Humanoid foundation model
The funding will be used to accelerate development of the company’s humanoid foundation model, build large-scale multimodal motion datasets, expand its global research team and establish additional R&D centers.
Archon aims to release what it says will be the world’s first open-source humanoid foundation model later this year.
Unlike conventional robotics models that focus primarily on guiding an end effector such as a robotic hand, Archon’s approach is built around Human Body Learning, a framework that teaches robots to understand and coordinate full-body posture and movement.
The goal is to enable robots to acquire the kind of whole-body coordination humans use naturally when walking, balancing and manipulating objects.
The company believes this approach will allow humanoids to move beyond task-specific skills toward more general-purpose physical intelligence capable of adapting across diverse environments.
Founding team
Founder Li Hongyang is an assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong. He previously led the end-to-end autonomous driving project UniAD, which received the Best Paper Award at the 2023 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition. This was the only winning work from a mainland Chinese academic institution in nearly a decade.
In 2026, he also became the first Chinese recipient of the RSS Early Career Award in the award’s 20-year history.
Archon’s core team includes researchers from leading universities including the University of Hong Kong, Tsinghua University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Fudan University and Zhejiang University, bringing expertise spanning autonomous driving, robotics and large AI models.
The company said it remains committed to an open-source strategy aimed at accelerating the development of general-purpose humanoid intelligence worldwide.
