Gasgoo Munich- Gasgoo has learned that Spirit AI and JD Group have officially signed a strategic partnership agreement. From 2026 through 2029, the two will deepen collaboration on consumer product customization, technical integration, real-world deployment, and joint marketing. The goal: to accelerate the application of embodied intelligence in the retail sector.
Prior to this, JD led Spirit AI's Pre-A+ funding round in mid-2025 and subsequently increased its stake, becoming a shareholder in the robotics startup.
Image Source: Spirit AI
As the partnership's first tangible outcome, Spirit AI's Moz robot has officially gone online at JD MALL physical stores to handle high-precision coffee brewing and service demonstrations. This deployment serves as more than just a functional test of embodied intelligence in a retail setting; it establishes a complete closed-loop training mechanism for data and models.
Specifically, leveraging JD's JoyAI large model and JoyInside technology, teleoperators can remotely control the Moz robot with high precision from different locations. They execute complex, non-standard tasks—grabbing cups, grinding beans, and extracting espresso. Throughout the process, the robot synchronously captures multimodal sensory data, joint movement trajectories, and fine-grained force feedback, all of which will be used directly to train and fine-tune embodied models.
Building on this, the partners plan to expand the boundaries of embodied intelligence into specialized retail sectors. Take JD Pharmacy: future efforts will explore deploying Spirit AI robots for core functions like automated sorting and precise dispensing—tasks that demand extreme accuracy and reliability—to help build unmanned, highly dependable smart pharmacy solutions. Meanwhile, to meet diverse retail needs ranging from consumer electronics to patrol guidance and automated cleaning, the two will drive joint product and solution development. The aim is to achieve comprehensive deployment of embodied intelligence across business, consumer, and government sectors.
Founded in February 2024, Spirit AI is focused on developing general-purpose models for embodied intelligence to drive breakthroughs in robotics applications. To achieve this, the company developed its own VLA model and used it to create a high-performance humanoid robot with whole-body force control, which is already operational in select scenarios.
