Ex-autonomous driving e2e tech lead Zhang Ying launches Physical AI startup, raises hundreds of millions of RMB in a month
机器之心 · wechat · 2026-09-09
Zhang Ying, former core tech lead for end-to-end autonomous driving at a top Chinese AV company, has launched a startup focused on general Physical AI. Founded in July, the company raised multiple funding rounds totaling hundreds of millions of RMB within a month, with backers including AV/embodied AI VCs, a major internet company, and strategic capital; Xiaomi's strategic investment arm and Baidu Ventures voiced support.
The team's approach is AutoResearch: connecting an automated research system with data, training, evaluation, and deployment infrastructure so that problems exposed in real-world execution continuously convert into new data and research tasks. The long-term vision benchmarks against North American frontier players like Generalist, targeting zero-shot and few-shot generalization.
The core team forms a 'golden triangle': Zhang Ying (production e2e systems), Chief Scientist Zhang Fangneng (HKUST assistant professor, 3D world modeling, ex-MIT/Harvard), and post-2000 scientist Ji Mazeiyu (UCSD, ex-ARI founding member—acquired by Meta into Superintelligence Labs—humanoid whole-body control). The AutoResearch tooling is in pilot release.
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