PHYMI raised nearly $100M at seed to build physical agents

PHYMI disclosed a seed round of nearly $100 million on 9 September 2026 through a post on its official WeChat account. IDG Capital led, with Yunqi Partners, FOSUN RZ Capital, Glory Ventures, Didi Global and Hesai Group participating.

The company was founded earlier in 2026 by Liu Nianqiu, who spent more than seven years at the autonomous-driving firm DeepRoute.ai as vice president and partner, working on vision-language-action architectures, and before that was a senior engineer at Intel. PHYMI describes what it is building as Physical Agents: embodied systems meant to perceive, navigate and manipulate in open, dynamic environments rather than in the constrained cells where industrial robots normally work.

The round size is the fact worth holding onto. A seed of this scale buys a company several years of compute and data collection before it has shipped anything, and it is being raised on the premise that driving a car and moving a body are the same problem wearing different hardware. That premise is currently being tested by a dozen well-funded teams at once; none of them has yet demonstrated a general manipulation policy that survives contact with an ordinary room.