Faraday Future Secures $70M Funding; Jia Yueting Returns as CEO to Lead Full Pivot to Embodied AI

On May 18, Jia Yueting, founder of Faraday Future (FF), announced that the company has recently secured a total of $70 million in financing, including $25 million received just two days prior. The funds will support FF’s first-phase strategic goals for its robotics business. Jia also revealed that he has resumed his role as FF Global CEO after a seven-year hiatus. Having reached its 12th anniversary, FF plans to fully transform into a Physical AI ecosystem company, focusing on the embodied artificial intelligence (EAI) sector. To achieve this, FF will implement five major transformations across strategy, product and business operations, finance, capital structure, and AI systems, with development milestones set for 2026, a two-year horizon, and a five-year timeline. Strategically, FF aims to rank among the top three in North America for real-world deployment volume of EAI humanoid and bionic robots within five years and become the market leader in the MPV segment of North American EAI automotive robotics. On the business front, FF will concentrate resources on humanoid and bionic robots, raising its 2026 shipment target from 1,000 to 1,500 units, primarily targeting home education scenarios. Simultaneously, the company will advance the productization of its EAI Brain platform, aggregating over 100 developers to launch more than 100 skills and AI agents, with a goal of generating over $1 million in data-related revenue. In the Middle East, FF targets positive operating cash flow, deploying over 200 robots across three countries. With the new funding secured, FF will comprehensively accelerate its EAI automotive business, establishing a dual-engine growth model. Financially, FF targets achieving positive operating cash flow by Q4 2027. Key measures include maintaining a positive gross margin across its robotics hardware business, sustaining high-margin ecosystem services, reducing reliance on financing-driven cash flows, enhancing cost control and operational analytics through its AI system, and holistically managing its income statement, cash flow statement, and balance sheet. From a capital perspective, FF commits to restoring FFAI’s market valuation to its level at the time of its Nasdaq listing in 2021 within two years. Jia stated that this $70 million institutional financing marks a strategic shift in the company’s funding structure—from “liquidity-driven” to “capital-structure-governance-driven”—and reaffirmed FF’s ongoing efforts to counter illegal short-selling activities. In building its AI system, FF aims to become an AI-native organization by forming hybrid teams combining human experts and AI agents, and comprehensively upgrading its management and operational framework. Jia emphasized that the team will adopt a “zero excuses, zero internal friction, results-oriented” execution mindset, asserting that the era of Physical AI has arrived and that FF is poised to become a key driver in the commercial deployment of EAI in real-world scenarios.