Light Origins raises hundreds of millions in Pre-A round
What's the deal? Chinese startup Light OriginsDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → has raised several hundred million yuan in an early-stage funding round, it announced on 14 August 2026. Guoke InvestmentDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → led the round, with China Merchants VentureDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → and Xianghe CapitalDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → participating.
What's the endgame? Light Origins is building embodied artificial intelligence. The startup will use the money to train ultra-large-scale embodied AI models, build multimodal data infrastructure, develop a full-stack software and hardware platform, and expand its team.
Who's behind it? Founder and chief executive officer Jiang Xu previously worked as an algorithm expert at OpenAI. He took part in full-stack algorithm development there, spanning the technical arc from InstructGPT and ChatGPT to GPT-4.
Why now? Light Origins' team exceeds 100 people, with research staff making up more than 90%. The company says it plans to release large-scale pretraining results and cross-embodiment capability demonstrations.
The signal: The round's backers point to institutional confidence in embodied AI. With a founder carrying OpenAI credentials and a research-heavy team, Light Origins is positioning itself at the intersection of large-model training and robotics — a sector drawing growing investor attention.
Image credit: Office of Naval Research
Read more: Jiemian News
