(Yicai) July 15 -- LimX Dynamics, a Chinese developer of full-size humanoid robots as well as four-wheeled and bipedal robots, has completed its latest fundraising round led by China Merchants Venture Capital and auto manufacturer SAIC Motor’s private equity investment platform Shang Qi Capital.

Other participants in the Series A round included existing shareholders the Frees Fund, VitalBridge and the Future Capital Discovery Fund, the Zhuji, eastern Zhejiang province-based company said today, without disclosing details of the amount raised nor how the funds will be used.

The A series eyed investors in the industry from the outset as application scenarios are best suited to these companies’ time, funds and technologies, said co-founder Zhang Wei. In the AI ​​era, firms that make general purpose and humanoid robots need to understand how they can be applied.

The startup was initially founded by Zhang in 2022, and joint by Zhang Li, who left unmanned driving startup WeRide last year, and became LimX’s co-founder and the company’s Chief Operating Officer.

E-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding already held a 18.7 percent stake in LimX through its investment arm Haoyue Enterprise Management before the latest fundraiser. In May, Haoyue made a strategic investment in LimX, which was the Hangzhou-based firm’s first investment in a humanoid robot company.

The robots manufactured by LimX, can be used in a wide range of areas such as smart manufacturing, industrial inspections, logistics and distribution, household services and many other business-to-business or business-to-customer fields.

Almost every month this year there has been news of humanoid robot startups raising more money, a lot of which comes from China’s internet giants. In addition to Alibaba’s investment in LimX, Tencent Holdings has bought into UBTech Robotics, the first humanoid robot stock to go public in Hong Kong, Baidu has invested in Zhiyuan Robotics and Meituan in Galaxy General Robot and Unitree.

LimX’s Zhang Wei has a PhD in electrical and computing engineering from Purdue University in the US and is now a tenured professor at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen. He previously worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and as a tenured professor at Ohio State University.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Kim Taylor