Gasgoo Munich- Daimon Robotics has wrapped up a strategic funding round worth several hundred million yuan, led by Ant Group with existing investors doubling down. The announcement on August 11 comes just two months after its previous raise. In June, the company closed a 100 million yuan Series A round.
This back-to-back capital injection has drawn a roster of strategic investors, including CM Venture, Lenovo Capital, China Mobile, and China Telecom. Rather than just betting on humanoid hardware, these players seem focused on where embodied intelligence is heading next: upstream infrastructure for perception, data, and models.
Tactile sensing is emerging as a new competitive frontier. While mainstream Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models rely heavily on sight and language, vision alone isn't enough to guarantee reliability when robots tackle contact-heavy tasks like grasping, assembly, or handling soft objects.
Image Credit: Daimon Robotics
Research released in June, dubbed T-Rex, reinforces that view. By designing a new architecture for high-frequency tactile signals, the study achieved an average success rate boost of over 30% across 12 tasks requiring precise force control and manipulation of soft objects. The implication is clear: adding tactile capability isn't as simple as strapping on a sensor—it demands a redesign of data, model architecture, and control methods.
Daimon is pushing further into the model layer along this path. The company recently unveiled Daimon-TWM, a tactile-anchored world model designed to integrate tactile feedback throughout physical state understanding, action prediction, and real-time control. It aims to boost performance in contact-rich tasks using a "slow planning, fast correction" approach.
The three-layer architecture of Daimon-TWM; Image Credit: Daimon Robotics
The company has already built a product ecosystem centered on visuo-tactile sensors, teleoperation data collection, and VTLA models, aiming to bridge the gap between sensors, data, models, and deployment. Daimon was spun out of a research team at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and began formal operations in 2023.
Still, heavy capital inflows don't guarantee a winning technical path. Daimon's claims regarding Daimon-TWM's performance, data scale, customer reach, and various "global firsts" are largely self-reported. The real test will be whether the model can consistently replicate results across different robot platforms and industrial settings—and whether the performance gains from tactile sensing justify the costs of sensors, data collection, and deployment.
From that perspective, Ant Group's move looks like an early bet on an uncertain future. As embodied intelligence shifts from "walking and seeing" to "working," the question remains: Will tactile sensing become a standard feature, or will its value be confined to niche, high-precision tasks? Only large-scale application will provide the answer.
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