PokeBot Raises Nine-Figure Pre-A Funding in Five Months, Backed by Xiaomi and Top VCs
PokeBot, a Beijing-based embodied intelligence company, announced on August 3 that it has completed a nine-figure (USD) Pre-A round of financing. The round was co-led by Shunwei Capital and GGV Capital, with participation from Jiukun Capital, Junshan Capital, SEE Fund, Liepin Investment, Yuannuo Capital, and Zhongding Capital. All angel investors, including Yunqi Capital, Xiaomi Strategic Investment, Honghui Fund, Yingnuo Angel Fund, and Oriental Jinfu, also increased their investment.
On April 29, the company had just disclosed a multi-million-dollar angel round led by Yunqi Capital, with participation from Xiaomi, Shunwei, Honghui, and Baidu Ventures. From its incorporation on March 3 to the Pre-A round, PokeBot took less than five months, pushing its valuation into the unicorn candidate track.
In June, PokeBot released a 9-minute real-robot video showing the robot independently cooking a mapo tofu dish, from preparing ingredients, cutting tofu, and mixing sauce to flipping the wok and plating. It also demonstrated folding clothes, threading cable ties, and making sachets. These tasks integrate long-horizon planning, deformable object manipulation, and multi-tool coordination into a single task chain.
Technically, PokeBot chose a wheeled chassis with dual arms instead of a bipedal humanoid, concentrating resources on manipulation. Its architecture consists of three modules: WAM (World Action Model) for modeling action-physical causality, reinforcement learning for full-chain real-robot training, and self-developed data gloves and first-person-view hardware to feed real-world data back, forming a closed loop.
Founder Xu Huazhe has stated that household tasks are highly fragmented, providing sufficient data for model training. Compared to making robots walk, teaching them to chop vegetables and fold clothes is closer to commercialization.
Xu Huazhe holds a bachelor's degree from Tsinghua's Department of Electronic Engineering, a PhD from BAIR at Berkeley, and postdoctoral experience at Stanford. He is currently an assistant professor and doctoral supervisor at Tsinghua's Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences. In 2023, he co-founded Xinghai Tu (Starlight Atlas) and served as chief scientist, leaving in February 2026 to found PokeBot in March.
The team has about 20 members, mainly from Tsinghua's Embodied Intelligence Lab and consumer hardware engineering lines. In July, Liu Shuo, former head of Meituan's drone business commercialization, joined as the company's first commercial partner, responsible for commercialization and strategic expansion. She previously worked in Baidu's intelligent driving group on ecosystem cooperation and led Meituan's drone business from 0 to 1.
The dual-lead by Shunwei and GGV marks a collaboration between Lei Jun-affiliated capital and a top VC in hard-tech consumerization. Xiaomi's Strategic Investment has followed in both rounds, fueling speculation about future integration into Xiaomi's IoT ecosystem. Jiukun Capital values physical simulation and data closure, Zhongding Capital focuses on supply chain, and Liepin Investment targets embodied intelligence talent entry points.
Xiaomi brings consumer electronics channels, Zhongding provides supply chain networks, and Liepin connects talent resources. PokeBot's investor structure mirrors the typical configuration for embodied intelligence projects in 2026: financial VCs, industrial capital, and specialized institutions all present.