Lyte Secures $107M in Fresh Funding to Accelerate Physics-Based AI Perception Systems for Real-World Robotics
On January 14, 2026, Lyte — the stealth-to-scale startup building physics-native AI perception — announced a massive $107 million Series B round led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and new backers including NVIDIA's NVentures and Toyota Ventures. The capital will turbocharge development of Lyte's core "Physics Engine Perception" stack, which fuses real-time physical simulation with multimodal sensing to enable robots to understand and interact with the physical world at human-level intuition. This round brings Lyte's total funding to $162M and positions it as the hottest physics-AI play in the robotics renaissance.
X Square Robot (自变量机器人) Secures 1 Billion Yuan in A++ Round: ByteDance Joins Alibaba and Meituan in Backing China's Leading Embodied AI Pioneer
On January 12, 2026, Shenzhen-based embodied intelligence company X Square Robot (自变量机器人) announced the completion of a 1 billion yuan (≈$143 million) Series A++ financing round. Led by ByteDance, with participation from HongShan (formerly Sequoia China), Shenzhen Capital Group (DeepTech AI Fund’s first investment), Beijing Information Industry Development Fund, Nanshan Strategic Investment, and others, this marks the only domestic embodied AI firm backed simultaneously by ByteDance, Alibaba, and Meituan. Funds will accelerate WALL-A model iteration, hardware scaling, and real-world deployments in logistics, manufacturing, and elderly care.
Arm Establishes Dedicated Physical AI Division: A Strategic Pivot to Own the AI Hardware Stack from Silicon to Embodied Intelligence
On January 8, 2026, Arm officially announced the creation of its new “Physical AI Division” — a dedicated organization focused on accelerating embodied AI, robotics, and edge intelligence across Arm-based silicon. Led by former Google DeepMind robotics lead, the division will integrate Arm’s CPU/GPU/NPU architecture with real-world physical simulation, sensor fusion, and low-latency inference frameworks. The move positions Arm as the foundational compute platform for the next wave of physical AI — from humanoid robots and autonomous drones to industrial cobots — directly challenging NVIDIA’s dominance in training while claiming the edge/embodied crown.
Dexmal's "Mind's Engine" Secures $1B+ in Mega-Rounds, Backed by Alibaba and NIO Capital, Defining New Frontiers of Embodied AI
Chinese embodied AI startup Dexmal (原力灵机) has secured nearly 10 billion RMB (approx. $1.4 billion USD) across two massive funding rounds led separately by Alibaba Group and NIO Capital. This colossal investment, one of the largest globally in AI for 2025, fuels the company's ambitious mission to develop a "one brain for all" general-purpose cognitive engine for robots and autonomous systems, signaling a fierce new battleground in the global race for advanced embodied intelligence.
