Chinese startup PsiBot, also known as Lingchu Intelligence, is raising close to $100 million in a new funding round at a $1.48 billion valuation, making it one of the few unicorns in the fast-emerging field of embodied AI and world models. The round is being led by Chinese automaker Chery Automobile, with participation from Lens Technology, a sensor maker that supplies companies including Apple and Tesla.

The deal, reported on July 23, 2026, by Bloomberg and The Business Times, underscores how Chinese companies are betting aggressively on world models — AI systems that help robots and self-driving vehicles perceive and respond to their physical surroundings. For the latest on how the global AI race is unfolding, follow the breaking AI news at AI Buzz Wire.

What PsiBot Builds

PsiBot is developing world models that aim to go beyond the large language models and chatbots that dominate today's headlines. Whereas an LLM predicts the next word in a sentence, a world model predicts how a physical environment will change in response to an action — letting a robot grasp an object, navigate a warehouse, or let a car anticipate a pedestrian's movement.

"World models aim to achieve something more consequential than the large language models and chatbots," PsiBot co-founder and CEO Viktor Wang told The Business Times.

The company's models learn from real-world data collected with bespoke hardware, including sensor-equipped gloves and humanoid robots. PsiBot is already running and testing its platforms with a large Chinese logistics vendor and one of the world's largest fiber optic cable manufacturers.

A Founding Team With Deep Roots

PsiBot was established in Shanghai in 2024 by a quartet of founders with strong academic and industry credentials:

  • Viktor Wang — a PhD from George Washington University who previously worked at BlackBerry and JD.com
  • Chai Xiaojie — a robotics veteran of both Alibaba Group and Tencent
  • Yang Yaodong — an assistant dean at Peking University
  • Chen Yuanpei — a visiting scholar at Stanford University whose adviser is renowned AI scientist Li Fei-Fei

That combination of Silicon Valley academic ties and deep Chinese industry experience is increasingly common among China's top AI startups. PsiBot has now raised approximately $300 million since its inception in 2024.

Why Embodied AI Matters Now

Embodied AI and world models are widely seen as the next frontier in artificial intelligence. They represent a shift from systems that understand language to systems that understand physics — and that can act in the real world.

This is also a key battleground in the US-China AI race. Chinese companies are among the world's most aggressive builders of world models, banking on three advantages: strong state support, abundant industrial data from manufacturing and logistics, and a thriving open-source ecosystem.

The promise is that world models could define the next wave of machines that do not merely answer verbal queries but physically interact with objects — warehouse pickers, delivery robots, autonomous vehicles, and eventually general-purpose humanoid robots.

Data Is China's Edge — and Its Bottleneck

Wang was candid about both the opportunity and the challenge. He argued that data is China's clear advantage in embodied AI, but also the primary bottleneck holding the field back.

"Even the frontier AI labs in Silicon Valley such as OpenAI and Meta don't have good data," Wang said. He cited high collection costs, data scarcity, a lack of standardization, and poor quality as the key obstacles.

PsiBot's answer is to collect its own data at scale. Wang said the company plans to collect one million physical interaction data points — a figure that hints at the enormous data requirements of training models that must understand the physical world, not just text.

The Chery Connection

The involvement of Chery Automobile is strategically significant. As a major Chinese automaker, Chery provides PsiBot with access to the kind of real-world driving and manufacturing data that is essential for training world models — and a clear path to deploying those models in production vehicles.

This mirrors a broader pattern in which Chinese AI startups are partnering with industrial giants rather than trying to build everything from scratch. The combination of a deep-pocketed automaker, a sensor maker embedded in global supply chains, and an AI research team creates a vertically integrated flywheel that is difficult for Western competitors to replicate quickly.

A Crowded Chinese Unicorn Field

PsiBot joins a growing roster of Chinese AI startups hitting unicorn valuations in 2026. The wave reflects investor conviction that China's combination of capital, data, and industrial deployment capacity makes it a serious contender in the next phase of AI — even as US export controls and geopolitical tensions complicate the landscape.

Stay Ahead of AI

The embodied AI race is just beginning, and China's startups are moving fast. Whether world models live up to their promise will depend on who can solve the data problem — and PsiBot is placing a very large bet that it can.

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