Ex-Huawei model leads raise $100M+ seed funding for native physics foundation model startup
智东西 · wechat · 2026-09-23
Physics-AI startup XIRRA has raised several hundred million RMB in back-to-back seed and angel rounds within two months, led by Dunhong Capital at a $500M valuation.
Team: Founder/CEO Li Yin was CTO of Huawei Cloud large models and delivered 200+ enterprise AI projects; co-founder Zhang Hanwang is Huawei's chief multimodal scientist and a top-ranked causal ML scholar (H-index 81).
Approach: Instead of the mainstream VLM+action-head fine-tuning route, XIRRA builds a native Large Physics Model (LPM) grounded in Bellman optimality, with an AR architecture for world rollout and Diffusion for rendering. On the WorldArena 2.0 leaderboard it ranked #1 globally in trajectory accuracy and top-3 in physical adherence.
Commercialization: XR data and evaluation platforms plus a three-tier L0/L1/L2 architecture, starting with robotics and extending to autonomous driving simulation, weather prediction and molecular science, forming a delivery-data-training flywheel.
Related event: Ex-Huawei Founders Raise Hundreds of Millions for Physical AI Startup XIRRA(2 posts)→
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