Gasgoo Munich- Gasgoo has learned that embodied AI firm Fifth Era has recently closed back-to-back Pre-A and Pre-A+ funding rounds, raising hundreds of millions of yuan in total.
The Pre-A round was led by Sequoia China with participation from Oriental Fortune Capital, while the Pre-A+ round was co-led by Xinneng Capital and U-Hill Capital, with Tsinghua Holdings Chingxin following suit.
With fresh capital in hand, Fifth Era is poised to accelerate R&D into embodied large models, upgrade its robot products, and drive commercial deployment. The funding will help the firm solidify its technical moat in embodied AI, speed up development of a world-class commercial "embodied brain," and bridge the gap from model research to real-world application.
Founded in September 2024, Fifth Era draws on elite research from Tsinghua University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Its core technology fuses Tsinghua's deep expertise in embodied AI, cross-modal learning, and robotic dexterity with the Institute of Automation at CAS's strengths in intelligent perception and end-to-end large models. The company is dedicated to building and delivering embodied brains and robots capable of generalized learning.
Source: Fifth Era
To achieve this, Fifth Era has developed proprietary technologies including the FAM model, a few-shot embodied operation large model, and BridgeV2W, a next-generation embodied world model. Using FAM as its technological foundation, the firm has built a comprehensive "embodied brain" solution that achieves breakthroughs in three key areas: streamlined development, lossless understanding, and robust generalization.
With this technology, developers can train and deploy complex robotic skills using only a handful of demonstration samples. This significantly lowers the barrier to entry and slashes development time, laying the groundwork for the mass adoption of embodied intelligent robots.
Source: Fifth Era
Notably, Fifth Era's next-generation BridgeV2W world model grants robots the core ability to "foresee" visual outcomes. By innovatively leveraging human manipulation video data (Video To World), the model bridges the gap between action commands and visual perception. It translates abstract robotic instructions directly into predicted visual sequences, enabling high-precision, cross-view simulation of action results.
Furthermore, BridgeV2W employs a unified architecture that supports both single-arm and dual-arm systems, eliminating the need to redesign models for different robots. This feature drastically reduces cross-platform deployment costs, enabling rapid adaptation to a wide range of tasks and environments.
Fifth Era is currently integrating BridgeV2W into its proprietary robot decision-making system and has initiated pilot programs across multiple scenarios.
On the commercial front, Fifth Era has forged a deep strategic partnership with Unitree, becoming its "No. 001 Core Ecological Partner." Together, they aim to advance the deployment of embodied intelligent robots across various industries and scenarios. Additionally, Fifth Era has secured projects with several leading state-owned enterprises and top-tier clients in key sectors, covering multiple high-value industries.
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