Chinese embodied-AI startup Kinetix AI has closed a $75 million Angel+ round — roughly RMB 500 million — led by Singapore-based Vertex Ventures, the venture arm of Temasek Holdings, the company announced on September 11, 2026. F&G Venture and Wanshi Capital joined the round, one of the largest early-stage checks written into China's humanoid-robotics sector this year.
Betting On Full Humanoid Form Factors
Founded in September 2025 and based in Shenzhen's Nanshan district, Kinetix AI has grown to nearly 200 employees under CEO Yu Jie — previously a commercialization lead on Huawei's autonomous mining trucks — with HKU associate dean Luo Ping and former XPeng robotics head Zheng Cunyuan among the founding team. The startup is deliberately rejecting the wheeled or lower-DoF humanoids many rivals are shipping, arguing that only a fully human form factor lets AI models trained on human-motion data transfer to hardware without breaking on each joint upgrade.
KAIBot And The Data-Model-Hardware Loop
Its flagship robot, KAIBot, stands 1.73 meters tall with 115 degrees of freedom and paired KAI Hand dexterous manipulators. Kinetix uses that hardware to close what it calls an "intelligence flywheel": egocentric multimodal data is collected in the field, feeds a native embodied foundation model, and returns to hardware as new behaviors — with the fresh capital earmarked to scale each leg of the loop in parallel.
From The Robot Games To Commercial Deployment
Kinetix said its system played table tennis against former world champion Ding Ning at the 2026 World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, a test the company presented as evidence its architecture is production-ready rather than demo-only. With the new funding, Kinetix joins a fast-growing cohort of well-financed Chinese humanoid makers such as UBTech's UWORLD U1, Huani Intelligence, and the crop of foundation-model shops chasing global rivals such as Positron on the infrastructure layer.
Why It Matters
China's humanoid sector took roughly 93–97% of global first-half shipments, according to industry trackers, and Vertex's cheque signals that Temasek-linked money is prepared to underwrite the most hardware-intensive end of the market. Kinetix's bet is that a premium human form factor plus a tightly integrated foundation model will scale better than commodity humanoids once real-world deployment begins in earnest.
Reporting based on coverage from Ventureburn, Gasgoo Autonews and Kinetix AI's company communications.