Accelerating the integration of AI and robots into living spaces, "Yimu Technology" completes hundreds of millions of yuan in Series D financing | 36Kr exclusive.

Written by Wang Fangyu

Edited by Su Jianxun

36Kr has learned that "Yimu Technology", a provider of multimodal perception + AI computing solutions, has recently completed a several-hundred-million-yuan Series D financing round. This round is led by SAIF Partners, with Nanjing Innovation Investment Group and A-share listed company Solux Technology participating as co-investors, and Gengxin Capital serving as the exclusive advisor. The funds raised will be mainly used for the improvement of multimodal perception technology, AI computing capabilities, and the expansion of embodied intelligence application fields.

Previously, Yimu Technology has completed a total of five rounds of financing, with investors including Shunwei Capital, Shenzhen Investment Holdings East China Sea Investment Co., Ltd., TCL, Yingfeng Capital, and GigaDevice Semiconductor Inc., among other investment institutions with backgrounds in home appliances and chip enterprises.

Yimu Technology was established in Silicon Valley in 2015 and is a technology-driven platform enterprise.

The company has developed a multimodal perception + AI computing solution with micro-spectral AI chips and fluid recognition sensors as the core. It converts physical world signals into digital world signals and transmits them to the target users, helping multiple industries such as home appliances, water affairs, robotics, and life sciences achieve intelligent upgrades.

Up to now, Yimu Technology's multimodal perception + AI computing solution has been widely applied in the fields of smart water affairs, smart home (smart pure drinking water, smart washing), life sciences, etc., and has entered the supply chains of leading white goods manufacturers such as TCL, Whirlpool, and Panasonic.

"We believe that all human home products or products that come into contact with people will eventually be AI-enabled and robotized. This is a major direction and trend. Therefore, the company began to incubate the related AI multimodal model about three or four years ago," Li Zhiqiang, the founder and CEO of Yimu Technology, told 36Kr.

Li Zhiqiang is a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in the United States and has been researching big data, AI model software, microfluidic biosensors, spectral chips and other technologies for more than 20 years. The world's smallest microfluidic biosensor (μMFC) developed by him won the Best Academic Report Award at the American Chemical Society (ACS) Annual Meeting.

After founding Yimu Technology, he industrialized the related technologies, breaking the monopoly of foreign enterprises on high-end spectrometers, achieving domestic substitution of high-end spectrometers, and opening up the market in municipal water affairs, laboratories and other fields.

After the incubation of the high-end spectrometer industry became mature, Yimu Technology lowered the high-end technology, improved and applied it to various civilian fields such as smart home, promoting the generalization of its application fields.

At the just-ended CES 2025, the AI washing and caring robot developed by Yimu Technology made its debut and was listed on the media lists of CNET Cool Home Gadgets and Reviewed Awards at CES 2025.

It is introduced that Yimu Technology's AI washing and caring robot integrates the independently developed AI multimodal model for clothing washing and caring recognition, as well as visual perception and spectral perception technologies, which can accurately identify the material, color, quantity and stains of clothing, thereby intelligently setting and adjusting the washing program.

"This is the first dedicated multimodal model constructed for the washing and caring scene in the industry," Li Zhiqiang said. Yimu Technology's multimodal model for clothing washing and caring recognition can accurately identify photoelectric data signals through the learning and analysis of more than 1 million sample data.

In addition, this washing and caring robot also has a dexterous hand perception ability, which can sense and firmly grasp flexible objects to achieve automatic clamping and drying.

The AI washing and caring robot built by Yimu Technology based on the multimodal perception + AI computing solution         Source: Authorized by the enterprise

From smart water affairs to smart home (smart pure drinking water, smart washing), the technical foundation that Yimu Technology has accumulated for a long time provides support behind it.

"Yimu Technology is a technology platform enterprise. Our most basic foundation is two technologies. One is the perception technology represented by spectral sensing, and the other is the AI algorithm. Combining these two, we can create many applications," Li Zhiqiang said.

It is introduced that up to now, Yimu Technology has applied for more than 200 domestic and foreign patents and 61 software copyrights, and has been recognized as a national high-tech enterprise. It has won 12 international awards in four years.

After establishing a firm position in the smart water affairs and smart home businesses, in the past year, Yimu Technology has turned its attention to the fields of life sciences and embodied intelligence applications.

In the process of R & D and design of innovative drugs, it is often necessary to detect and analyze protein molecules or compounds. Yimu Technology has developed a high-throughput spectral detector based on the technical foundation. Through the microfluidic chip, high-throughput sampling is achieved, and precise ultraviolet or visible light quantitative recognition is carried out through micro-spectral technology, enabling efficient sample analysis. Combined with the AI drug analysis large model it has built, the high-throughput analysis efficiency can be accelerated, and the preclinical research cycle can be greatly shortened.

In the field of embodied intelligence, Yimu Technology is focusing on building a tactile perception ability based on optical technology and chip technology, and plans to launch a tactile sensor module for humanoid robots and an overall algorithm solution in 2025.

"In fact, the visual and auditory perception capabilities of robots are already relatively mature now, and the most lacking is the tactile perception ability. The humanoid robot will be a trillion-dollar market in the future, with the fastest growth and higher barriers, and it will also be the focus of Yimu Technology's strategic layout," Li Zhiqiang said.

Relying on multimodal perception + AI computing, Yimu Technology expands its business fields from smart water affairs and smart home to life sciences, embodied intelligence and other fields, continuously opening up new performance growth points. At the same time, through the training and accumulation of a large amount of application data in various scenarios, Yimu Technology's AI algorithm capabilities and proprietary data barriers are also continuously strengthened.

In the next step, Li Zhiqiang said that around the vision of accelerating the evolution of AI and robots to human scenarios, Yimu Technology will continue to enhance the perception capabilities of smart home and robots, and will also continue to layout AI algorithm patents, iterate the private database, and improve the construction of the system perception capabilities of humanoid robots.