Gasgoo Munich- Spirit AI announced on April 7 that it has closed a new 1-billion-yuan financing round, led jointly by ShunWei Capital and YF Capital. The round also drew participation from several prominent investors, including Fortune Capital, a leading RMB-denominated fund, Galaxy Yuanhui Investment, Xin Ding Capital, and Glacier Capital.
Image source: Spirit AI
The latest raise comes just weeks after the company disclosed two consecutive funding rounds at the end of February, totaling nearly 2 billion yuan. In effect, Spirit AI has secured close to 3 billion yuan across three rounds within roughly one month, underscoring an unusually rapid capital inflow.
Such a concentrated wave of large-scale financing signals strong investor confidence in the company's growth trajectory, while equipping it with substantial resources to accelerate R&D and commercialization in embodied AI technologies.
Founded in February 2024, Spirit AI focuses on developing general-purpose embodied intelligence models to unlock new capabilities in robotics. The company has built its own vision-language-action (VLA) model and, in January, open-sourced its Spirit v1.5 system. According to the company, the model surpasses the performance of Pi0.5, making it the first Chinese open-source model to do so. It demonstrates strong zero-shot generalization, enabling robots to complete complex tasks—such as object wiping, hinge manipulation, and handling deformable items—without additional training, highlighting its adaptability across diverse environments.
Parallel to its model development, Spirit AI is building a large-scale data infrastructure centered on diverse real-world inputs. The company has already accumulated more than 200,000 hours of multimodal interaction data, spanning internet video, teleoperation, and wearable capture systems. It expects this dataset to exceed 1 million hours by 2026.
To support this effort, Spirit AI has also developed its own data acquisition hardware. Its wearable data collection system has now reached its fifth generation and is reported to reduce data gathering costs to roughly one-tenth of traditional methods.
By April 2026, the company's data team is expected to scale to around 1,000 personnel, providing a steady stream of high-quality physical interaction data to support ongoing model iteration.
Spirit AI is now accelerating the deployment of its high-performance, full-body force-controlled humanoid robots across industrial scenarios. Its in-house developed robot, Xiaomo, has already been put into operation at CATL's Zhongzhou facility, where it serves as a core production-line unit and has supported the fault-free mass production of nearly 1,000 battery cells.
On March 19, the company formalized a strategic partnership with JD.com, integrating its Moz robot into JD MALL's smart retail ecosystem. In high-precision tasks such as automated coffee preparation, the robot has demonstrated stable real-world operation. More importantly, the deployment has validated a closed-loop system linking live data collection with continuous model iteration—an essential step toward scalable commercial applications of embodied AI.
