PsiBot, also known as Lingchu Intelligence, is raising close to US$100 million (S$129 million) of funding at a US$1.48 billion valuation, joining a growing roster of Chinese AI start-ups. The financing is led by Chinese carmaker Chery Automobile and investors such as Lens Technology. The Chinese start-up has raised about US$300 million since its inception in 2024, becoming one of the few unicorns in embodied AI and world models, which help robots and self-driving cars interact with their surroundings. Established in Shanghai, PsiBot was founded by Viktor Wang, a PhD from George Washington University; Xiaojie Chai, a robotics veteran of Alibaba and Tencent; Yaodong Yang, an assistant dean at Peking University; and Yuanpei Chen, a visiting scholar at Stanford University. PsiBot’s models learn from real-world data collected with bespoke hardware, such as gloves and humanoid robots, and it is testing its platforms at a large Chinese logistics vendor and one of the world’s largest fibre-optic cable makers. Wang said data is China’s clear advantage but also the primary bottleneck, citing high collection costs, data scarcity, lack of standardisation and poor quality. He stated, “We will collect one million hours of data this year and work toward building a generalised world action model,” and foresees significant advancement in physical world foundation models over the next 24 months.