Former Huawei and Baidu Executives Co-Found Tishstone Robotics, Secures $4.3B Pre-A Round—China’s Largest in Embodied AI

Itstone Intelligence was founded in February 2025 and has completed a $455 million (approximately RMB 3.1 billion) Pre-A financing round—the largest single fundraising round and the biggest Pre-A round to date in China’s embodied intelligence sector. The round was co-led by Hillhouse Ventures and Sequoia China, with participation from financial investors including Meituan Longzhu, CICC Capital, Keylink Capital, Oriental Fortune Capital, and Junshan Investment. Meituan Strategic Investment significantly increased its stake as a cornerstone strategic shareholder and co-led the round, while existing shareholders—including Qiming Venture Partners, Linear Venture, BlueRun Ventures, Xianghe Capital, and Hongtai Fund—continued their strategic follow-on investments. Industrial investors joining the round included TCL Industrial Investment, Futeng Capital, Shougang Holdings, Jianfa Emerging Investment, Hengxu Capital, and China Intelligent Automotive Investment. Additionally, the Beijing Robotics Industry Development Investment Fund and Shanghai State-owned Assets Supervision & Administration Commission’s Vanguard Fund jointly made their first-ever investment in an embodied intelligence company. The company’s founder and CEO, Chen Yilun, previously served as CTO of Huawei’s Autonomous Driving division and Chief Scientist of Huawei’s Vehicle Business Unit. Chairman Li Zhenyu formerly served as President of Baidu’s Intelligent Driving Group, where he led the development of the Apollo platform and the “Luobo Kuaipao” autonomous ride-hailing service. Co-founder and Chief Scientist Ding Wenchao was among Huawei’s first cohort of “Genius Youth” talents; he spearheaded Huawei’s intelligent driving decision-making network and built Fudan University’s first humanoid robot. Itstone Intelligence has launched its wheeled industrial robot A-series and bipedal general-purpose robot T-series, both equipped with the company’s self-developed high-degree-of-freedom dexterous hands. The company has achieved breakthroughs in human-centric data collection paradigms, the world’s first “task-capable” general-purpose embodied foundation model, and precision flexible harness assembly technologies. It has released its embodied foundation model AWE 3.0 and SenseHub data acquisition suite, and open-sourced the multimodal embodied dataset “WIYH Dataset.” Recently, the company’s A1 robot made its international debut at LogiMAT, Germany’s leading intralogistics trade fair, securing clear purchase intentions from multiple industries across several European countries.