Stellar Epoch completes a new round of RMB 1 billion financing, with cumulative financing of nearly RMB 5 billion since 2026.

Author | Huang Yu

On July 6, the embodied intelligence company Xingdong Jiyuan announced the completion of a new round of 1 billion yuan in financing. Within just two months, this Tsinghua-affiliated robot company has raised 2.5 billion yuan in rapid succession, becoming a sample of how capital in the embodied intelligence track continues to concentrate on leading projects.

According to incomplete statistics from Wall Street Insights, since the beginning of this year, Xingdong Jiyuan has cumulatively completed nearly 5 billion yuan in financing.

When it completed 1 billion yuan in financing in March 2026, market sources indicated that the valuation of Xingdong Jiyuan had already exceeded 10 billion yuan.

It is reported that the latest financing round was led by Chengtong Fund, with participation from multiple large state-owned capital entities including Jiangxi State-owned Capital, Guoyuan Equity, Yufu Zhongxin Fund, and Hangzhou Capital. Follow-on investors included Zhongjin Renault, Jiukun Venture Capital, Hony Capital, Juntai Capital, and Shenghe Capital. Existing shareholders Houxue Capital, Qingkong Tiancheng, and Qianshan Capital made additional investments.

Xingdong Jiyuan was founded in August 2023, incubated by the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences (IIIS) at Tsinghua University, with founder Chen Jianyu. Chen Jianyu is an assistant professor and doctoral supervisor at Tsinghua IIIS, holding a bachelor's degree from Tsinghua's Department of Precision Instruments and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

The company has chosen an integrated software-hardware technical path. Xingdong Jiyuan conducts in-house research and development around the "embodied brain" and "humanoid body," covering areas such as brain algorithms, motion control, robot body, joint modules, and dexterous hands.

In the embodied intelligence industry, the core divergence in technical routes is no longer just about what a robot looks like, but how a robot understands tasks and executes actions.

Embodied large models mainly fall into three categories: end-to-end VLA, brain-cerebellum hierarchical architecture, and world models. Among them, Xingdong Jiyuan's ERA-42 follows the end-to-end VLA route, emphasizing integrated modeling from perception and understanding to action control. Additionally, Xingdong Jiyuan is collaborating with the Chelsea Finn team at Stanford University to advance world model research.

Behind the consecutive financing rounds, humanoid robots are transitioning from being "able to move" to "able to work."

The logistics industry is a key scenario for Xingdong Jiyuan's product deployment. In April, the company disclosed that it had implemented over 10 logistics centers in collaboration with China Post, SF Group, and others, and began batch delivery of thousand-level robots in the second quarter of 2026.

Early investments in embodied intelligence often revolved around algorithm teams, academic backgrounds, and humanoid robot prototypes. However, after entering 2026, the financing narrative for leading companies has shifted toward orders, delivery, supply chains, and application scenarios.

For local state-owned capital and industrial investors, embodied intelligence is not only a cutting-edge technology project but also a tool for industrial upgrades in manufacturing, logistics, pharmaceutical distribution, and e-commerce warehousing.

For Xingdong Jiyuan, the new 1 billion yuan financing brings more than just capital replenishment. More critically, with state-owned capital, industrial investors, and existing shareholders all on board, the company needs to demonstrate its ability to scale deliveries within a shorter timeframe.

In 2025, the global humanoid robot market entered a scale-up starting point. Although growth is encouraging, it must be acknowledged that the production volume of humanoid robots is still very small. According to Omdia data, only three companies shipped over 1,000 units in 2025, all from China: AGIBOT (Zhiyuan Robot), Unitree Technology, and UBTECH, with respective shipments of 5,168, 4,200, and 1,000 units.

IDC predicts that multiple leading Chinese manufacturers are expected to achieve ten-thousand-level production capacity in 2026, further strengthening their scaled supply capabilities and potentially continuing to solidify their first-mover advantages.

It is reported that the first truly commercial order for Xingdong Jiyuan appeared in 2025, coming from an overseas scientific research customer who was interested in the Xingdong XHAND1 five-finger dexterous hand. However, in terms of overall machine shipments, Xingdong Jiyuan still lags behind the first tier of the industry.

Chen Jianyu believes that 2026 will be a critical year for embodied intelligence to transition from technical validation to commercial deployment. He hopes Xingdong Jiyuan can achieve shipments of a thousand units, with a longer-term goal of ten thousand units. The biggest current constraint on the industry is not supply chain or delivery capability, but demand validation and product refinement.

The window for the embodied intelligence track is still open, but the evaluation criteria are becoming more stringent. Model capability, hardware reliability, data closure, and supply chain costs must ultimately be validated in real-world scenarios.

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