Kinetix AI

Co-founded by CEO Yu Jie (YU JIE), former general manager of Huawei commercial-vehicle autonomous driving (Huawei level 22, who led L4 mining-truck commercialization); co-founder Luo Ping, associate dean for research at the HKU Faculty of Computing & Data Science and head of HKU MMLAB (PhD advised by Tang Xiao-ou); and co-founder Zheng Cunyuan, formerly head of robot integration at a leading NEV startup. Kinetix AI positions itself as a full-stack embodied-AI foundation-model company focused on highly human-like robots, growing to nearly 200 staff within a year and running an R&D center in Hong Kong. In April 2026 it launched its first full-size humanoid, KAI Bot (173cm, ~65-70kg, 117 whole-body DOF, with tactile skin over nearly 80% of its body at about 18,000 sensing points, a 1.7kWh semi-solid battery for ~3 hours, targeted under US$40,000), backed by the native KAI World Model (parallel video generation + 4D spatial modeling, pretrained on millions of videos), the KAI Halo Lite first-person data-collection headband, the high-DOF KAI Hand (37 DOF, >30N fingertip force) and the SMASH whole-body motion-control system (already ported to bodies such as Unitree G1 and Agibot Yuanzheng A3 for a one-brain-many-bodies setup). Its funding cadence is rapid: an angel round in October 2025 (Fenxiang Investment, Qingniao Fire), a Pre-A led by Songhe Capital in December 2025, and in September 2026 an Angel+ series round exceeding RMB 500M (with Vertex Ventures, Fangguang Capital and Wanshi Capital, and China Renaissance as exclusive financial advisor) to accelerate the data-model-body iteration and product rollout.

City

Shenzhen

Founded

2025

Ticker

Unlisted

Website

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Team size

200 · 2026-09 晚点Auto