Shenshi Weishi Raises Three Rounds in a Year, Pushing Embodied AI Into Welding

Even as capital markets turn more rational, Shenshi Weishi completed three funding rounds in less than a year. The latest is a Series B worth several hundred million yuan, backed by Shanghai Semiconductor Industry Investment, Jinqiao Fund, Zero One Venture Capital, Xinding Capital, Zhongguandinghua Investment and existing shareholder Weiguang Venture Capital.

Earlier, the company closed a Series A of over 100 million yuan in the first half of 2025, followed in the second half by a Series A+ of tens of millions of yuan with South Korea's Hyundai participating.

Chairman Wang Dezhao attributes the pace to what he calls increasingly strong deployment certainty.

Welding is a rigid-demand market that has long gone unsolved. Compared with today's hot embodied intelligence, many people are less familiar with welding, yet for Shenshi Weishi this niche track is the single largest sub-market in industrial manufacturing.

Wang says the space is large enough to match an extremely rigid replacement need: welders. Working conditions are harsh and the craft demands high skill, pushing the global average age of welders to 45–55. Young people are almost unwilling to enter the profession, making recruitment difficulty, aging and severe shortages an industry-wide pain point.

China has over ten million registered welders, yet by 2025 there is still a gap of several million on-the-job welders. Demand is strong, but robot penetration in the field remains low. Wang believes the core reason is that previous-generation industrial robots had only a “cerebellum”: they handled standard parts and repeated fixed motions through teach programming, lacked human-like generalization, could not decide through a “brain,” and could not handle non-standard, flexible welding scenarios.