Received tens of millions of investments from Professor GAO Bingqiang and his Gaofeng Patience Fund. A 2004-born entrepreneur entered the field of robot collaborative clusters through intelligent mobility.

Yingke has learned that Hangzhou Langji Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Langji Intelligent") recently completed its angel - round financing, with a financing amount reaching tens of millions of yuan. This round of financing was invested by Professor Gao Bingqiang and his Gaofeng Patient Fund. Xingchen Capital served as the financial advisor. The funds will be mainly used for the research and development of next - generation intelligent mobile devices, the iteration of the robot collaboration system, the construction of the supply chain and mass - production capabilities, as well as the expansion of the core team.

The Innovation Philosophy of the "Genius Teenager"

Professor Gao Bingqiang's Gaofeng Patient Fund is well - known for investing in the hard - tech field. Its investment characteristics are to invest early in small startups, provide in - depth support, and focus on specific sectors.

Langji Intelligent, which received the financing, is a young enterprise founded in 2024. However, its founder attracted the attention of the technology and innovation circles during his middle - school years.

Shi Mulan, a member of Generation Z, has had a talent for invention and innovation since childhood. From primary school to middle school, he experimented with drones, built satellite radio receivers, and even attempted to make miniature chemical rockets, with dozens of projects in total. These experiences were not just childhood interest experiments. Instead, through long - term hands - on work, he gradually developed a comprehensive understanding of electronics, machinery, software, and control systems.

All these experiences earned him the reputation of a "genius teenager". With both innovative ideas and strong implementation capabilities, these qualities ultimately drove him to start a business and brought him good opportunities.

In his first year of high school, Shi Mulan got the opportunity to intern and communicate at large companies such as iFlytek. In high school, he won the Global Final Computer Merit Award and the First Prize in the Chinese Region of the Qiu Chengtong Middle School Science Award for his "Self - balancing Bicycle Intelligent Driving System and Control Algorithm". After winning the award, Shi Mulan did not rest on this verification - type platform. Instead, he began to think about how to apply this system to more real, complex, and engineering - challenging mobile devices. Subsequently, he spent a year continuously building an autopilot scooter system based on a pure - vision solution, covering core modules such as perception, positioning, planning, and control. It was this continuous exploration in this direction that earned him the support of ZhenFund's Zhen Summer Entrepreneurship Scholarship, providing early - stage support for his continued research and development in the fields of intelligent driving and robotics. When Shi Mulan started his business, ZhenFund became one of the angel - round shareholders of Langji at the first opportunity.

However, Shi Mulan is not the kind of "genius teenager" who only stays at the inspiration level. What makes him special is not only his wild and imaginative ideas but also his ability to break down these ideas and turn them into tangible things in the real world.

In the sixth grade of primary school, he was fascinated by the robot BB - 8 in the movie "Star Wars" and tried to recreate it by hand. Shi Mulan later explained, "Strictly speaking, this was the first robot I built." What attracted him to BB - 8 was not just its cute or sci - fi appearance but the highly self - consistent system behind this small robot that could operate continuously in complex environments. He saw vitality in this system.

"(System) engineering is not a cold - blooded assembly. It can create order and determine fate." He used highly geeky language to describe his innovation philosophy.

The rational tension of a complete system attracted the young Shi Mulan and made him devote himself to creating a robot system that "directly acts on the real world" at the beginning of his growth, giving his research and development a high degree of focus and consistency from the start.

From the self - balancing bicycle and autopilot wheelchair scooter in high school, Shi Mulan gradually established his later technical route: on the one hand, he began to deeply understand the motion control, stability, and safety boundaries of various forms of robots; on the other hand, he continuously chose a vision - dominated perception solution to explore how to enable devices to complete a closed - loop in the real world.

From "Carrying People" to "Carrying Tasks"

The step - by - step exploration reflects the innovation direction pursued by Shi Mulan and laid the foundation for the launch of the mini - pickup Kago in 2025. This is Langji's first commercial product.

It is a battery - powered intelligent travel tool inspired by the common wagons and scooters in the United States. Different from traditional scooters that can only carry people and wagons that can only carry goods, Kago has both the ability to carry people and load items, with functions between "walking" and "driving". Through visual perception and intelligent control, Kago can also achieve functions such as following and assisted driving.

At the end of 2025, Langji Intelligent launched a one - month crowdfunding campaign for Kago on a crowdfunding platform as a real - market verification before the large - scale commercialization of the product. According to the previous plan, the product will start batch delivery in the second quarter of this year, and then receive continuous orders and user feedback through its self - built independent website.

The launch and sales of Kago verified that Langji has the ability for product mass - production and delivery. The successful implementation of this process by Langji shows that its R & D capabilities are effectively connected with real - market demands. At the same time, Langji's productization and supply - chain capabilities have been verified by the market. The system reuse ability of "one - time development, multiple - time use" has also been proven.

However, Kago did not come out of nowhere. Before its birth, Shi Mulan went through a rigorous process of system theory construction and iteration.

In 2022, Shi Mulan went to the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the United States for further study. From the beginning of his enrollment, he studied under Professor Mohit Bansal and participated in research related to multi - modal GenAI, visual - language understanding, and embodied intelligence. Professor Mohit Bansal is a professor at the UNC Department of Computer Science, who has long been deeply involved in natural - language processing, multi - modal learning, and visual - language research and has won the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. Later, with the arrival of well - known robotics scholar Ding Mingyu at UNC, Shi Mulan further cooperated in research and training in the fields of locomotion and manipulation.

The value of this experience is not only that he was exposed to the most cutting - edge fields such as multi - modal AI, robotics learning, and embodied intelligence but also that he received systematic scientific research training from his two mentors. Compared with the early days when the goal was just to "make" and run a system, he began to pay more attention to how to enable the system to understand the world and tasks more efficiently and execute them robustly in the real environment. While creating from scratch, he also thought about how to make choices among algorithms, hardware, cost, stability, safety, and real - world constraints to find a better system solution.

The new system philosophy applied to Langji's R & D has led to a qualitative change in its comprehensive capabilities in hardware and software. At the hardware level, Langji combines the chassis with different upper structures and task modules to derive various product forms: the chassis plus a loading structure can form Kago; the chassis plus a seat can become an intelligent scooter; the chassis plus a robotic arm can further evolve into a mobile operating robot. The "chassis" is also Langji's first high - frequency carrier to enter the real physical world.

At the software level, Langji is building an upper - layer intelligent brain and a robot collaboration and scheduling system to enable different devices to cooperate in terms of perception, planning, control, and task execution. It is not simply about making multiple hardware devices operate independently but about enabling different robots to perform division of labor and linkage in scenarios such as travel, home use, and accompanying through a unified system architecture.

In this system, the underlying perception and positioning capabilities are the foundation. Langji uses self - developed vSLAM (technology for environmental perception using cameras) and integrates information from multiple sensors such as cameras and IMUs (Inertial Measurement Units) to enable devices to understand the environment, locate, and plan routes. On this basis, the upper - layer intelligent brain further connects to multi - modal perception, intention - understanding, task - planning, and execution - control models to break down the user's natural - language needs into action chains that the robot can execute.

For users, it's like having an "electronic butler". They don't need to learn complex operations or issue mechanical instructions step by step. Instead, they only need to give simple and direct commands, and the machine will autonomously complete the corresponding tasks. For example, when the user says, "I'm thirsty", the system needs to do more than just recognize the voice. It needs to understand the user's real needs by analyzing the content it hears, determine the task goal of "the user needs to drink water", plan the execution path (such as going through the living room to the kitchen to get water and then returning to the bedroom to hand the water to the user), and dispatch the mobile chassis, robotic arm, or other collaborative devices to complete the required actions. Langji's goal is to enable robots to have an independent - thinking brain, understand human language, think of the optimal strategy through logical reasoning, and finally bring the execution result back to humans.

In this way, by integrating thinking ability and mechanical ability, the device is no longer just a "people - carrying" tool but an extension of the human body, capable of carrying tasks like a human being.

Obviously, Langji has planned a robot collaboration cluster for personal scenarios in a more long - term vision.

This means that in the future, there may not be just one "all - around robot" beside an individual but a set of robot combinations that work together around the user: travel robots are responsible for movement, home robots are responsible for cleaning, accompanying, and security, and delivery or accompanying robots are responsible for picking up and delivering items. Different devices cooperate through a unified brain and scheduling system, ultimately forming a personal robot ecosystem.

This ecosystem is the core technological barrier that Langji is striving to build.

Bringing Magic into Reality

After the launch of a new product, how will Langji take the next step? This largely depends on Shi Mulan and his geek colleagues' understanding of the future path.

Actually, Langji is not short of funds for production startup and market promotion, but it still adopted the crowdfunding model for R & D and production. The geeks believe that crowdfunding is not just a simple sales channel but a real - market test before the large - scale launch of the product, giving them the opportunity to face users directly, understand scenarios, and collect feedback. Shi Mulan once took on the responsibility of "customer service" himself, constantly paying attention to the private messages and comments he received, reading and responding to the backers' questions and suggestions one by one. He said that those who were willing to support the product in the early stage were not just customers but more like collaborators in the product - polishing process.

The teenager who wanted to perceive the world by building systems is now bringing magic into reality.

"Extremity" and "pragmatism" are the genes of Langji's R & D. Shi Mulan is a person who speaks very fast and conveys a large amount of information, but his mind works even faster. During the interview, his catchphrase - "extremity" - frequently appeared. Even the company name "Langji" is a combination of a character from his name and the character for "extremity", expressing the grand ambition of this young entrepreneur.

Most of Shi Mulan's colleagues are also like this. Most of the nine employees of Langji are in their twenties, and they are all full - stack engineers. Most of them have had R & D cooperation with Shi Mulan. In addition to mutual trust, their extreme love for R & D has brought them together.

The company culture has a Silicon Valley style, being simple, transparent, task - oriented, and having a flat management structure that enables rapid decision - making. Interestingly, when Elon Musk founded PayPal and SpaceX, the management mode of his companies was quite similar. Unconsciously, Musk during his entrepreneurial period seems to have become a mirror image for Shi Mulan and his colleagues.

Silicon Valley heroes often have broad - minded thinking and lofty goals. In contrast, Langji emphasizes a more pragmatic implementation path. In the eyes of Shi Mulan and his geek partners, the robot world is highly complex and systematic. There won't be an all - around robot that can handle everything, but a set of robot clusters that meet the user's full - scenario needs, each with its own responsibilities and cooperating with each other.

Therefore, Langji emphasizes entering the robot cluster market through intelligent travel. This is because intelligent travel can start from the simple and gradually become more complex, and in a lightweight form close to daily - life scenarios, it can improve the public's awareness and usage habits of robot clusters.

This young company has a grand vision and also understands the truth that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. It has achieved a breakthrough in intelligent travel and is now deeply exploring scenarios and striving to build a