Self‑Variable, the leading Chinese embodied‑intelligence startup, completed four rounds of financing worth over 200 billion RMB, unveiled its world‑unified‑model WALL‑B and open‑source models, and began deploying home robots, marking a pivotal shift from early‑stage R&D to commercial rollout in the Greater Bay Area.
Two former Anthropic researchers have founded Mirendil, raising $200 million at a $1 billion valuation to build a recursive self‑improvement AI platform that lets scientists create and iterate their own models, positioning the startup against big‑tech AI moats.
Qianxun Intelligent secured ¥30 billion in funding within a month, leveraged a scaling‑law data engine and the Spirit v1.5 VLA model to achieve breakthrough robot performance, and demonstrated the commercial loop through deployments at JD.com retail and CATL battery lines.
Mercor, founded by three 22‑year‑old college dropouts, raised a $350 million Series C round that lifted its valuation to $10 billion within two years, built an AI‑powered recruiting platform serving OpenAI, Meta, Google and others, launched the APEX benchmark to measure economic value of AI models, and survived intense work‑culture pressures, a legal dispute, and rapid team changes.
The 2025 report catalogs startups funded by major international insurers, grouping them into AI, fintech, data security, sustainability, medical tech and other categories, and provides each company's core technology, market focus and recent financing details.
