Ant Lingbo CEO Clarifies Independent Fundraising Driven by Talent and Governance
Ant Lingbo CEO Zhu Xing clarified at the Inclusion Conference that the company's independent financing round—targeting 1.5 billion RMB—is designed to create equity incentives for top talent and establish an independent corporate governance structure, rather than to address capital or GPU compute shortages. Spinning off embodied AI initiatives into independently funded entities allows tech giants like Ant Group to offer competitive equity incentives to retain top robotics talent and operate with greater agility in long-term physical AI competition. Ant Lingbo aims to complete two fundraising rounds by the end of the year, with the planned 1.5 billion RMB first round setting a potential speed record for embodied AI startups. CEO Zhu Xing noted that their team integrates academic researchers, autonomous driving engineers, and commercial experts, stressing that embodied AI relies on full system engineering rather than just AI models.
## BACKGROUND
Ant Lingbo is the physical and embodied AI arm of Ant Group, known for developing spatial perception and vision-language-action (VLA) models for robotics such as LingBot-VLA and LingBot-Map. Embodied AI refers to intelligent systems operating within physical robotic bodies, requiring combined expertise in spatial navigation, hardware control, and multi-modal AI models.