Ant Group's Lingbo Tech Starts $150M Funding Round for Embodied AI

Lingbo Tech, an embodied AI company under Ant Group, has started its first funding round, aiming to raise 1.5 billion yuan and close a second round by year-end. Founded in March 2025 in Shanghai's Pudong, the company focuses on developing foundational models for embodied intelligence, with the goal of creating a universal brain for robots. In early July, Lingbo released the 2.0 version of its LingBot model series, including LingBot-Vision, the world's first spatial native vision model, and LingBot-VLA 2.0, a foundation model supporting multiple robot configurations. CEO Zhu Xing noted that embodied AI is still at an early stage, with limited commercial pilots in simple scenarios. As AI brains improve, they will redefine hardware design, opening up new possibilities.