Seeds | Former Huawei executive develops humanoid robot, secures 500 million yuan financing

Edited by Betty From Gasgoo

Gasgoo Munich- Gasgoo Embodied Intelligence has learned that Kinetix AI recently closed an angel-plus round exceeding 500 million yuan, backed by Vertex Ventures (a VC arm of Singapore's Temasek Holdings), Fangguang Capital, and Vanshi Capital. The capital will accelerate the "data-model-hardware" iteration and drive the commercialization of embodied intelligence products.

Founded in September 2025, Kinetix AI is a full-stack embodied intelligence large model company. Its founding team brings together veteran executives from Huawei's autonomous driving division, technical experts from the University of Hong Kong, and serial entrepreneurs with deep experience in humanoid robotics—creating a complete closed-loop capability in innovation, engineering, and commercialization.

In less than a year, the company has rolled out a suite of products: a native embodied large model, the lightweight KAI Halo Lite data collection headset, an embodied AI Infra platform, the ultra-realistic KAIBot humanoid robot, and the high-degree-of-freedom KAI Hand dexterous gripper.

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Image Source: Kinetix AI

Weighing just over 300 grams, the KAI Halo Lite is designed for extended outdoor and indoor data collection, significantly cutting both acquisition costs and the physical burden on the wearer.

The headset fuses multi-camera vision with IMU sensor data to rapidly perform 3D scene reconstruction, human pose recognition, and motion semantic annotation. Its companion terminal renders dynamic reconstructions with centimeter-level precision in real time.

Image Source: Kinetix AI

KAIBot is Kinetix AI's flagship ultra-realistic humanoid robot. It serves as a platform for training human-like movements and executing real-world tasks, while adapting to a wide range of lifestyle and commercial human-machine interaction scenarios.

Standing 173 cm tall and weighing 70 kg, the robot features 117 degrees of freedom across its body. It is equipped with custom tactile skin covering 80% of its surface, embedded with 18,000 high-precision sensing points capable of detecting forces as subtle as 0.1 N—ensuring safety and precision in close-proximity interaction and object manipulation.

Image Source: Kinetix AI

The KAI Hand replicates a human hand at a 1:1 scale with 37 degrees of freedom—comprising 20 active, 1 passive, and 16 compliant DoFs. Its fingertips can output over 30 N of force, enabling stable, long-duration gripping. Even after holding an object for 10 minutes, the hand's peak temperature does not exceed normal body heat.

All of Kinetix AI's front-end hardware and algorithm demonstrations are powered by its proprietary KAI Embodied AI Infra. This platform spans the entire workflow—data collection, model training, simulation evaluation, physical deployment, and iterative operations—serving as the core engine for rapid technological iteration and large-scale product deployment.

Currently, the KAI Hand and KAI Halo Lite are available for purchase globally, with units already delivered to industrial clients.

About Seeds Discovery:

Gasgoo's "Seeds Discovery" column is designed as a service platform connecting startups, ecosystem partners, investors, and local governments to empower the entire automotive supply chain. Since its launch, the column has focused on uncovering standout companies, technologies, and business models that offer inspiration and leadership during the wave of intelligent transformation, driving the growth of innovation in the auto industry. According to Gasgoo statistics, nearly every startup featured in "Seeds Discovery" has successfully connected with industrial ecosystem resources.

Seeds | 西湖大学首个机器人成果转化,半年拿下5亿融资

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