A humanoid covered in 18,000 touch points raises 500M yuan

Kinetix AI closed an angel-plus round of more than 500 million yuan, Gasgoo reported on 11 September 2026. Vertex Ventures led, with Fangguang Capital and Vanshi Capital participating. The company was founded in September 2025 by executives out of Huawei’s autonomous-driving division together with researchers from the University of Hong Kong.

Its humanoid, KAIBot, stands 173 cm and weighs 70 kg with 117 degrees of freedom. The number worth attention is elsewhere: a tactile skin covering about 80% of the robot’s surface with 18,000 sensing points, which the company says resolve forces down to 0.1 N. Its separate KAI Hand is built to human scale with 37 degrees of freedom and more than 30 N of fingertip force.

Most humanoid programmes have spent their money on locomotion and on vision. Dense touch is the sense that has lagged, and it is the one that governs whether a machine can handle something soft, something fragile, or a person. A robot that cannot feel 0.1 N cannot be trusted to lift someone out of a chair.

The company also sells a 300-gram headset, KAI Halo Lite, for capturing human demonstrations to train on. The figures here are Kinetix AI’s own.