Gasgoo Munich- Synapx has closed a seed round worth hundreds of millions of yuan, backed by Horizon Robotics and several prominent U.S. dollar funds, Gasgoo has learned. Founder Du Dalong confirmed the news on social media.
Founded in late 2025, the startup is on a mission to build "Physical AGI" and aims to crack what it calls the "Physical AI Turing Test," according to public filings.
Image Source: Synapx
Synapx boasts a heavyweight founding team. Du Dalong holds a master's degree from the Institute of Computing Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a Ph.D. in Innovation Leadership Engineering from Tsinghua University. His resume includes stints at Baidu and Horizon Robotics.
As the sixth founding employee of Horizon Robotics, Du played a key role in designing China's first AI chip, the BPU, and led the R&D and engineering deployment of forward-looking AI algorithms. He is also a founding member of Baidu's Institute of Deep Learning (IDL).
In 2021, Du founded Jianzhi Robotics, where he led the team in achieving mass production of high-level autonomous driving systems for models from Voyah and Chery. By late 2025, Jianzhi Robotics was acquired by NavInfo in a deal that set a record for the largest investment and merger in China's A-share intelligent driving sector.
Co-founder Liang Zhujin is a pioneer in Physical AI. He has long focused on end-to-end AI, world models, imitation learning, and reinforcement learning closed loops. He was among the first in the industry to drive "World Model + End-to-End RL" closed-loop training systems into real-world applications. Before Synapx, Liang served as vice president of technology at Jianzhi Robotics.
Another co-founder, Pan Yangjiayi, spent nearly a decade at top-tier global investment banks including Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. He directly led or participated in cross-border M&A, private financing, and capital market projects with transaction values exceeding $100 billion, covering core sectors like technology, consumer goods, and the new economy. This experience helped him build a vast network of industry resources.
Pan joined Horizon Robotics in 2017 as vice president of group capital operations and strategy. He managed nearly $3 billion in financing and oversaw multiple corporate-level strategic projects, leading the zero-to-one establishment of strategic insights, business planning, organizational structure, and implementation.
Co-founder Fan Qingyuan spent nearly a decade at Texas Instruments (TI), a global leader in hardcore technology, accumulating deep industry resources and international operational experience. He joined Horizon Robotics in 2016, where he drove multiple businesses from zero-to-one breakthroughs and scaled them from one-to-N commercialization.
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Gasgoo's "Seeds Discovery" column is designed to build a service platform connecting startups, industrial chain partners, investment firms, and local governments, deeply empowering the upstream and downstream sectors. Since its inception, the column has been dedicated to uncovering high-potential companies, technologies, and business models that offer inspiration and leadership during the wave of intelligent transformation, thereby driving the growth of industrial innovation forces. According to Gasgoo statistics, nearly all startups featured in "Seeds Discovery" have successfully connected with resources across the industrial ecosystem.
