China's Psibot Becomes Latest AI Startup to Hit $1 Billion Value

China's Psibot is raising close to $100 million at a $1.48 billion valuation, becoming the latest Chinese artificial intelligence start-up to reach unicorn status, Bloomberg reported. The financing is led by Chinese carmaker Chery Automobile and investors including Lens Technology, a sensor supplier for Apple and Tesla. The company, also known as Lingchu Intelligence, has raised about $300 million since its inception in 2024. It operates in the field of embodied AI and world models, which help robots and self-driving cars perceive and respond to physical surroundings. The start-up was established in Shanghai 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. Wang said data is China's clear advantage but also the primary bottleneck for building physical AI, citing high collection costs, scarcity, lack of standardisation and poor quality. He said the company will collect one million hours of data this year and work toward building a generalised world action model. Wang foresees significant advancement in physical world foundation models over the next 24 months and predicts a GPT-2 moment for embodied AI within two years.