Physical AI startup Yuanshi raises tens of millions in quick Pre-A double round
What's the deal? Yuanshi Intelligent TechnologyDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a physical AI company founded in July 2022, has closed Pre-A and Pre-A+ rounds worth tens of millions of yuan. Fortune CapitalDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → and Oriza Puhua led the respective tranches. The money will fund research and development hiring and the build-out of a standardised product line.
What's the endgame? Yuanshi wants AI to understand the physical world and act reliably within it. Its answer is a self-developed World Mechanism Model (WMM), the base layer for an integrated hardware-software system that adds edge processors and process packages to existing industrial equipment. The aim is to move machines from "automation" to "autonomy."
How does WMM work? The model embeds dynamics structures and physical constraints into learning, so limited data is used to identify rules rather than memorise every scenario. It targets two industrial pain points: stabilising continuous processes and reusing basic operations — such as grasp, twist, and insert — across tasks.
The company is led by chief executive officer Jin Junyang and chief technology officer Dong Yunlong, with team members drawn from the University of Cambridge, Tsinghua University, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, and firms including HuaweiDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →. Its core technology builds on nearly 18 years of research by professor Yuan Ye's team at Huazhong University in system identification and mechanistic modelling.
What's the product? Yuanshi ships a combined hardware-software solution. The PRIMACT R100 platform runs the core model locally and supports on-site deployment and inference, while a toolchain and process packages adapt models to specific equipment. "We are not a pure software company," the company said, noting industrial AI must control physical devices through hardware.
Who's using it? Yuanshi says it works with more than 10 industrial clients, including AVICDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, CNNCDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, CSICDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, CRRCDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and Zhongtian TechnologyDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, on digital modelling, predictive maintenance, and precision control.
What's the investor view? Pre-A+ backer Oriza Puhua called Yuanshi "a scarce target" in the field. "By injecting physical laws into AI, Yuanshi lets models work stably and transferably even in industrial scenarios where data is scarce and reliability is paramount," it said. "This carries enormous industrial value."
The signal: The quick re-raise across two tranches reflects investor appetite for physical AI — systems that act on the world rather than just process data. Yuanshi is betting that constrained, verifiable industrial settings, not open-ended demos, are where the technology proves itself first.
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