Wuxi-based Discover Robotics has closed a $100 million Angel+ funding round led by IDG Capital, cementing unicorn status less than a month after an initial angel raise that topped $100 million. LinkX Capital, SummitView Capital, Fortune Capital and Meridian Capital joined, alongside strategic investor Joyoung, the Chinese small-kitchen-appliance maker, and a local state-owned industrial fund. All existing shareholders re-upped.
A Tsinghua-Bred Embodied AI Play
Incubated out of Tsinghua University's Intelligent Industry Research Institute and stocked with former DJI talent, Discover Robotics has focused on the plumbing of consumer embodied intelligence — hierarchical foundation models, data closed-loop systems and high-fidelity simulators designed to attack the generalization and data-scarcity problems that keep general-purpose home robots from shipping.
The Airbot Product Line
The commercial front end is the Airbot Play, a 3.5 kg six-axis lightweight arm that runs off 24V DC without an external control cabinet and integrates with wheeled robots, quadrupeds and cameras through ROS, Python, C++ and web APIs. The larger Airbot MMK2 stacks two 6-DoF arms, dexterous hands, Lidar and multi-camera vision on a mobile base with nearly one meter of vertical lift, driven by a 10 TOPS Sunrise 5 compute chip. Both platforms run embodied-AI stacks such as ALOHA, RT-X and VoxPoser, and are marketed as research and data-collection systems as much as end products.
Part Of A Bigger Wave
Discover Robotics is one of a cluster of nine-figure Chinese embodied-AI deals in August, alongside Noin Intelligence's $74M raise and PokeBot's $100M+ Pre-A. The public-markets bookend is Unitree's $9B Shanghai IPO. The China sector attracted roughly $13.9 billion in the first half of 2026.
Reporting based on coverage from AI Insider, DealStreetAsia and Global Times.