Meituan is making a major bet on embodied intelligence.
Meituan has been making consecutive investments in the field of embodied intelligence in the past two days, once again attracting wide - spread external attention.
On July 8th, TARS, which set the record for the largest angel - round financing in China's embodied intelligence industry, completed a $122 million Series Angel + financing more than three months later, led by Meituan's strategic investment arm. So far, TARS has completed a total of $242 million in financing.
On July 9th, Meituan Longzhu and Meituan's strategic investment arm, two capital entities under Meituan, led the Series A5 financing of Xinghaitu. Since the start of the Series A financing in 2025, Xinghaitu has cumulatively received nearly 1.5 billion yuan in financing, with the combined financing of Series A4 and A5 exceeding $100 million.
Meituan's large - scale investments in TARS and Xinghaitu mark its latest moves in the field of embodied intelligence, following its investments in Unitree Robotics, Galaxy Universal, and Independent Variable Robotics. What's unusual is that this is the first time Meituan has appeared as the lead investor. Moreover, these investments were announced in quick succession.
In fact, Meituan's intensive investments in the field of embodied intelligence today are in line with the development strategy set by Wang Xing in March 2021: "The development of Meituan's business requires not only software but also hardware. Robotics is currently one of the key vertical areas for Meituan's investment."
From cleaning robots, hotel robots, and collaborative robots in previous years, to the establishment of the Meituan Robotics Research Institute in July 2022, and now to humanoid robots and embodied intelligence, Meituan has long combined its home - delivery and in - store scenarios to conduct in - depth "investment + self - research" layouts in the robotics field.
Why did TARS and Xinghaitu attract Meituan's lead investment?
Unitree Robotics is undoubtedly Meituan's most prominent success story in the field of embodied intelligence. Before it became popular on the Spring Festival Gala, Meituan and its subsidiary Longzhu Capital invested in Unitree Robotics twice in 2024. According to Tianyancha App information, after multiple rounds of investment, Meituan - affiliated entities hold a total of 10.4582% of Unitree Robotics' shares, firmly ranking as the second - largest shareholder, second only to Wang Xing himself, who holds 27.8094%.
Meituan may not want to "miss the next Unitree Robotics." Therefore, in the past three months, Meituan has intensively completed investments in Independent Variable Robotics, TARS, and Xinghaitu. These are also Meituan's only three publicly announced external investments since 2025, all targeting the field of embodied intelligence.
Source: Xiniu Data
It should be noted that TARS, which officially started operations in February this year, has not publicly unveiled any products yet. In the five months since its establishment, the team has been focusing on the research and development of the world - leading physical - world AI and the full - stack technology system for general robots, with the industry's first Human - Centric embodied data engine as the core technology, moving forward towards the goal of building a reliable super - embodied intelligence system.
Even so, TARS has still attracted the attention of many investors, including Meituan. The answer may lie in the principle of "investing in people." Investing in TARS means investing in a group of "former Huawei employees."
The founder of TARS is Dr. Chen Yilun, the former CTO and chief scientist of the autonomous driving system at Huawei's Intelligent Automotive Solution Business Unit. After joining Huawei in 2018, he was responsible for the design of Huawei's high - level autonomous driving technology solutions and led the full - stack R & D of Huawei's first - generation autonomous driving system from scratch. As a result, Chen Yilun is regarded as the "brain" of Huawei's autonomous driving and the core product leader in Huawei's automotive strategy.
After the establishment of TARS, Ding Wenchao may have been the first to respond to Chen Yilun. Like Peng Zhihui, the founder & CTO of Zhipu Robotics, he joined Huawei through Huawei's special recruitment program "Genius Youth" in September 2020 and worked in Huawei's Vehicle BU Intelligent Driving Product Department (ADS), serving as the head of the ADS prediction and decision - making team. He was committed to the research and product implementation of intelligent driving prediction and decision - making and participated in the development of Huawei's ADS 1.0 and ADS 2.0 intelligent driving systems as a core contributor.
In December 2024, Li Zhenyu, a senior vice - president of Baidu Group, assistant to the CEO, and the former head of Baidu's Intelligent Driving Business Group (IDG), was reported to have joined TARS. Currently, he serves as the company's chairman. Li Zhenyu graduated from Beihang University with a master's degree in April 2001 and joined Huawei after graduation.
So far, all three founders of TARS have worked at Huawei.
Currently, TARS' core team has been established, and the employees have officially moved into the Shanghai office area. With the completion of the new round of financing, the company also announced the launch of a global top - talent recruitment plan to continuously build a more dynamic and sustainable organization.
Compared with TARS, Meituan's investment in Xinghaitu seems more logical.
It is reported that Xinghaitu has launched several standard platform products, including the general humanoid robot R1 Pro and the wheeled dual - arm mobile platform R1 lite, and has built an end - to - end embodied intelligence development platform EDP, which integrates data collection, data management, and real - machine testing, significantly reducing the development threshold and data acquisition cost. With "standard hardware + standard data + standard tools" as the core, Xinghaitu is providing a truly implementable, scalable, and evaluable embodied intelligence infrastructure for global developers.
Regarding the investment in Xinghaitu, Wang Xinyu, a partner at Meituan Longzhu, said that Meituan Longzhu has long been optimistic about and has been investing heavily in the field of embodied intelligence. Since 2023, we have been continuously tracking Xinghaitu's development. The founding team has demonstrated strong self - iteration and execution capabilities in the past year. The hardware business has achieved a breakthrough from 0 to 1. We believe that the company will announce more exciting progress in data and models in the future.
Beyond building a "robot army," self - research has also entered the deep - water zone
Meituan has not only been expanding its influence in the field of embodied intelligence but has also gradually built an intelligent robot industrial ecosystem through investment, assembling a "robot army." According to incomplete statistics, Meituan has invested in more than 30 robot - related upstream and downstream enterprises and large - model companies, covering multiple sub - fields such as delivery, service, cleaning, and medical care, which can be described as "buying half of the robot track."
In the field of embodied intelligence, Meituan has made investments in both the "brain" and the "body" of robots.
In terms of the "embodied brain," in May this year, Meituan's strategic investment arm led a Series A financing of hundreds of millions of yuan for Independent Variable Robotics, with Meituan Longzhu following. This may be because the latter chose the "end - to - end large - model with unified big and small brains" route from the very beginning. As for the robot body, it is well - known that Meituan has participated in the investment of Unitree Robotics and Galaxy Universal.
In September 2024, Meituan signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Galaxy Universal. The two parties will jointly create the world's first humanoid robot - enabled intelligent pharmacy solution and cooperate in multiple fields such as offline retail, intelligent warehouses, and intelligent logistics. In March this year, Wang He, the founder of Galaxy Universal, revealed that two 24 - hour "unmanned" pharmacies staffed by humanoid robots have been set up in Beijing, and the company plans to open 100 such pharmacies across the country by the end of the year.
In the delivery field, Meituan has focused on the last - mile delivery robot track and has invested in indoor delivery robot company Youdi Technology, outdoor delivery robot company White Rhino, and catering delivery solution provider Purdue Technology. In the service robot field, Meituan has covered scenarios such as hotel cleaning, building delivery, and medical care, with investment targets including cleaning robot company Gaoxian Robotics and hotel robot company Yunji Technology, which went public in Hong Kong this year. In addition, Meituan has also participated in the investment of surgical robot company Shurui Technology to explore innovative applications of medical robots.
At the technical foundation level, Meituan has also invested in star companies such as Zhipu, Yuezhianmian, Silicon - based Flow, and Light Years Beyond (later acquired by Meituan) to support the R & D of large AI models.
Beyond investment, Meituan also established the Shenzhen Meituan Robotics Research Institute in November 2022.
It is reported that the institute is a robot R & D institution established by Meituan based on its life - service scenarios and data accumulation, combined with the scientific research advantages of Shenzhen and the Greater Bay Area. It is committed to the R & D of common key technologies for robots such as drones, autonomous driving, and embodied intelligence. Mao Yinian, the vice - president of Meituan and the person in charge of the drone business, serves as the chairman and director of the Meituan Robotics Research Institute.
As of December 2024, the Meituan Robotics Research Institute has reached more than 40 scientific research cooperation agreements with more than 20 universities around the world (such as Tsinghua University and Harbin Institute of Technology). The research results cover fields such as motion control and multi - modal interaction and have been included in top international conferences such as ICRA and IROS.
In addition, at the IDEA Conference held in November 2024, the IDEA Research Institute released the latest DINO - X general vision large model, which has the ability to understand objects at the object level and can achieve open - world target detection without user prompts. At the same time, it also launched an industry platform architecture, which combines the large - model base with general recognition technology, enabling the model to learn while in use without retraining to support various application requirements.
At the conference, the IDEA Research Institute announced three cooperation agreements, including exploring drone vision intelligent technology with Meituan.
Source: IDEA Research Institute
When talking about "scenario implementation" at that time, Mao Yinian believed that the primary application scenarios for robots should start with high - risk human tasks, such as mountain - top inspections, deep - sea detections, oil - field drilling, and high - rise building cleaning. "As robots are gradually used in small scenarios with whole - body control, motion control, hand - eye - touch coordination, users won't praise them, but they won't scold them either and won't kick them out. We hope they won't fail, and this is very important."
This undoubtedly points out the direction for Meituan's commercial implementation in the robotics field.
This article is from the WeChat official account "Lieyun Selection," author: Wang Fei. Republished by 36Kr with permission.