Kinetix AI raises US$75 million to build highly humanoid robots

Kinetix AI has raised approximately US$75 million (more than RMB500 million) in an angel+ round backed by Vertex Ventures China, to advance its hardware, foundation models and data infrastructure.

Embodied AI has drawn extraordinary levels of talent and capital, but the industry is still searching for its path to commercial deployment. Many companies are choosing the fastest route to market: low-cost hardware, wheeled designs, or narrow use cases in controlled settings. These approaches can reach customers sooner, but they also limit how far a robot can go in a world designed around people.

Kinetix AI has chosen a different route. Founded in July 2025 and based in Shenzhen, the company is a full-stack embodied AI business developing foundation models for robotics. It works across hardware embodiment, cognitive intelligence, dexterous manipulation and data infrastructure. At its core is a conviction that robots can only meaningfully enter the human world by adopting human-like bodies, interaction paradigms and learning trajectories.

The reasoning is practical. Homes, factories, restaurants and hotels are built around human proportions and movement. The closer a robot is to human form, the more readily it can learn from human motion data and operate in existing environments without them being redesigned. Building hardware close to its final form also means algorithm work is less likely to be disrupted by later hardware upgrades.

Hardware first, products later

Co-founder Zheng Cunyuan is candid about where the field stands. In his view, the lower bound of embodied AI capability is still "so low that building products directly right now would be foolish."

Kinetix AI is therefore developing highly humanoid hardware and dexterous hands first, while pursuing egocentric data collection and world model research in parallel. The approach brings higher costs, a more complex supply chain and longer validation cycles, but it is designed to produce a platform that can mature into a commercialisable product.

That platform is already taking shape. In April, the company unveiled KaiBot, its first full-size humanoid robot. KaiBot stands 1.73 metres tall with 115 degrees of freedom and is built to human proportions. It is joined by KaiHand, a high-degree-of-freedom dexterous hand for precision manipulation. KAI Halo Lite and the KAI EGO Dataset form the data pipeline for real-world learning, and KAI Embodied AI Infra supports the company's continuous iteration.

The founding team brings together three disciplines that embodied AI depends on. Chief Executive Officer Yu Jie previously led Huawei's commercial vehicle autonomous driving unit, where he oversaw the commercialisation of L4 autonomous mining trucks. Co-founder Luo Ping is Associate Dean (Research) at the University of Hong Kong's School of Computing and Data Science and heads the HKU Multimedia Laboratory. Zheng previously led humanoid robot hardware at XPeng.

A maturing market

Capital continues to flow into embodied AI, but expectations are rising. Many companies have yet to meet the technical capabilities and deployment timelines they once promised. Investors increasingly look for a coherent path from founding strategy through to product and revenue, rather than a technology narrative alone.

Kinetix AI's approach reflects that shift. By integrating data, models and hardware in a single loop, the company aims to compound progress across all three, rather than optimising any one in isolation.

Vertex's perspective

For Vertex Ventures China, Kinetix AI combines a differentiated technical thesis with a founding team that spans autonomous driving, academic research and robotics hardware. It is a combination that remains rare in embodied AI, and one well suited to the integration work that highly humanoid robots demand.

Looking ahead

The new capital will accelerate iteration across Kinetix AI's data, model and hardware loop, and move its products towards commercial deployment in homes, factories and commercial settings. Kinetix AI sees highly humanoid robots as an entirely new category, and expects the businesses that build them well to define it.