HKU Professor Zhang Fu's Startup Silicon Feather Bags Hundreds of Millions for Aerial Embodied AI
量子位 · wechat · 2026-08-22
HKU associate professor Zhang Fu, a student of Li Zexiang and an 8-year DJI industry advisor, founded Silicon Feather (硅羽科技) to build a "universal brain" for drones—enabling autonomous flight without GPS, prior maps, or remote control. His FAST-LIVO2 autonomous navigation work won the IEEE TRO King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Paper Award. The sub-1kg, A4-sized product enters volume production this year, targeting tunnels, factories, bridges, and hillside inspections, with commercial scale expected within two years.
To tackle scarce aerial data, the team built a Real-to-Sim system that reconstructs high-fidelity digital twins from a few real flights, amplifying each real sample thousands-fold for reinforcement learning. The startup closed four funding rounds totaling hundreds of millions of RMB in six months, with investors including Yaotu Capital, Jinqiu Fund, and Alibaba.
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