Gasgoo Munich- Yimu Tech has closed a Series E funding round exceeding 1 billion yuan, pushing its valuation past the 10 billion yuan mark, according to Gasgoo.
The round was backed by a consortium of top-tier RMB funds, leading U.S. dollar funds, and prominent industry players. Proceeds will fuel R&D in embodied AI tactile perception materials, chips, algorithms, and models, alongside the mass production and high-quality delivery of production line orders.
Yimu Tech specializes in embodied AI tactile perception. Using proprietary visuotactile sensors, the company translates microscopic surface deformations into multidimensional data—pressure, shear force, contact geometry—allowing robots to sense tightness, slip trends, and contact states in real time. This enables dexterous manipulation that is both smoother and more resistant to interference.
Image Credit: Yimu Tech
The company’s sensor thickness has now been reduced to under 3 millimeters, making it the thinnest mass-producible bionic visuotactile sensor globally. This breakthrough effectively solves the industry bottleneck where dexterous hands simply couldn't accommodate the hardware.
Other key specs include a resolution exceeding 10,000 points, milligram-level force precision, force resolution of 0.005N, and an industrial lifespan of over 1 million presses. Collectively, 90% of core tactile metrics match human-level performance.
Underpinning this performance is deep proprietary R&D across five fields: material science, precision optics, mechanical simulation, fusion chips, and AI algorithms. Yimu Tech has also constructed a three-layer architecture around its sensor, transforming tactile sensation into a capability robots can understand and deploy.
The first layer focuses on tactile data acquisition and standard dataset construction. By deeply integrating with mainstream technologies like UMI, DexUMI, and Ego, the system records the force required to manipulate different objects in real-world scenarios, along with tactile feedback signals from both successful and failed tasks. Essentially, this builds a high-quality "tactile textbook" library for robots.
The second layer features a proprietary Tactile Transformer Encoder algorithm module. Acting as a "translator," it extracts critical information—surface morphology, material hardness, texture smoothness or roughness—from raw signals captured by diverse hardware, then converts them into a universal encoding. This ensures that downstream robot strategy models can interpret and utilize the data, regardless of the underlying tactile sensor hardware.
The third layer involves training multimodal embodied AI large models. Here, encoded multidimensional tactile data is fused with visual and linguistic inputs, filling the long-standing tactile perception gap in robotic manipulation. This foundation enables the training of complete models capable of perception, decision-making, and action, resulting in more precise and reliable robot operations in the real world.
For customers, this means acquiring more than just a sensor; it is a physical interaction data solution designed to evolve continuously.
Image Credit: Yimu Tech
Yimu Tech’s commercial footprint now spans multiple sectors globally, including humanoid robotics, automotive, data acquisition, pharmaceuticals, and food processing. Building on this, the company is collaborating with top-tier international institutions like Stanford University on TouchNet, an open-source tactile dataset project. The goal is to release more real-world tactile data by the end of 2026, giving researchers and engineers low-cost access to data for algorithm testing and driving the industry forward.
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