The star company in the field of "embodied brain" has raised funds again.

According to Touzhongwang, Zhongke Fifth Epoch has completed hundreds of millions of yuan in Series A financing. The lead investor is Futeng Capital, and the follow - on investors include Shanghai Semiconductor Industry Investment, Guoke Capital, China Venture Capital, and Hongruida. Old shareholders such as Zhuoyuan Asia have also made additional over - subscribed investments.

This is also the third round of financing completed by the company within 2026. The funds will be mainly used for the iterative upgrading of the self - developed end - to - end ultra - few - shot large model and the world model, the engineering implementation of reinforcement learning technology, the mass production of robot products and the introduction of core talents, as well as accelerating the company's technology productization and global commercialization process.

In 2026, the embodied intelligence and humanoid robot industry has entered the stage of large - scale mass production and commercial implementation. On the other hand, for these globally - oriented enterprises, global expansion is also a main theme. Leading enterprises are rapidly going global through technical certification, local factory construction, and ecological cooperation. Zhongke Fifth Epoch is also on this path. Since this year, it has made frequent appearances in Europe and has received hundreds of millions of yuan in orders from several well - known leading overseas enterprises.

This means that Chinese embodied intelligence technology represented by Zhongke Fifth Epoch has entered the global core supply chain of industrial digitalization. The high precision and high generalization ability of the few - shot embodied operation large model in real industrial scenarios have also been further verified.

Few - shot technology, the non - consensus of the embodied "brain"

Zhongke Fifth Epoch was founded in September 2024. Through core technological achievements such as the ultra - few - shot end - to - end embodied large model (FAM series), the new - generation embodied world model (BridgeV2W model), and human - in - the - loop reinforcement learning, it delivers embodied brains and embodied robots with general generalization ability to customers.

Among them, software and algorithm capabilities are the core, and hardware is the carrier to achieve this goal.

Therefore, most importantly, let's take a look at the model R & D ability of this "brain" company. As we all know, the bottleneck restricting the development of embodied intelligence at present is data. The rapid improvement of the performance of large language models relies on the Scaling Law of data accumulation. However, text - based data can be directly obtained from the Internet, while the real physical interaction data required for embodied intelligence models is more difficult to collect. In the long run, a high - quality dataset for embodied models is the key to achieving generalization, cross - ontology migration, and real - world implementation.

Embodied companies around the world are exploring solutions to this problem. From a technical path perspective, four paths, namely teleoperation, simulation, UMI, and video learning, have formed a differentiated competition pattern, each with its own advantages and disadvantages in terms of cost control, data accuracy, and scenario adaptability. In short, the consensus is that the quantity, quality, and diversity of data determine the performance of the embodied model.

Different from many of its peers in the field of embodied intelligence, Zhongke Fifth Epoch has chosen a path to achieve few - shot capabilities through model architecture innovation.

In addition to the scarcity of data, another pain point in the industry that the company has identified is that the existing model architectures are inherited from large language models, making it difficult to adapt to three - dimensional embodied intelligence scenarios and resulting in serious information loss. Zhongke Fifth Epoch's differentiated path aims to solve these two problems:

First, it has made a practical choice, abandoning the high - cost data creation route and focusing on improving data utilization efficiency.

At the same time, it has created a unique heat - map architecture that allows the model to focus on both global information and local information of the operation object. This not only solves the architecture adaptability problem but also significantly improves the operation accuracy and greatly reduces data dependence. Only 3 - 5 pieces of data are required for a single task, while peers may need hundreds or even thousands of pieces.

Based on this, on the model side, Zhongke Fifth Epoch has launched the world's first ultra - few - shot embodied operation model. The few - shot embodied operation large model can quickly generate an operation path after identifying the target object through the visual system and drive the robotic arm to complete grasping and handling, achieving a closed - loop decision - making from environmental perception to action execution. Currently, this model has been applied to a leading robot body and has served more than a dozen core customers such as Sinopec Group, Leapmotor, and State Grid, achieving initial commercial implementation.

In September 2025, Zhongke Fifth Epoch stood out from a group of competitors and won an order from a leading robot company, becoming its No. 001 brain supplier. As the core brain supplier, Zhongke Fifth Epoch supports the robot in completing tasks such as power line inspection and sorting. These collaborations not only verify the brain's capabilities but also bring nearly 100 million yuan in related business. The continuous procurement from customers has also attracted more leading robot body enterprises to seek cooperation with the company.

From the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Tsinghua University

Speaking of which, the ability to develop the few - shot embodied model benefits from the team's past accumulation. The relevant technical accumulation can be traced back to 2013, when some members of the team began to focus on the multimodal fusion of vision and language.

This is a team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Tsinghua University. Dr. Liu Nianfeng, the founder and CEO, is a doctor from the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, with a research direction of pattern recognition and intelligent systems. He is a student of Academician Tan Tieniu. He has more than 10 years of experience in artificial intelligence R & D and has participated in many key projects of the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

Among the companies developing embodied brains, although Zhongke Fifth Epoch was not established the earliest, with a practical and problem - solving approach, it has found its foothold and quickly completed multiple rounds of financing. The outside world's evaluation of Liu Nianfeng is that he has a certain "martial - arts spirit", which is closely related to his practice outside his academic identity and his many years of entrepreneurial experience.

Sun Fuchun, the chief scientist, is the first person in embodied intelligence at Tsinghua University. He is a top expert in the early research of intelligent robots in China, with more than 30 years of research results and technological accumulation in robotics. Huang Yan, the co - founder and young chief scientist, is also a student of Academician Tan Tieniu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He has more than a decade of research accumulation in multimodal large models and is one of the youngest full - professors at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

It is this team with academic background, technological accumulation, and industrial implementation experience that enables Zhongke Fifth Epoch to take a practical path centered on few - shot technology from the laboratory to the real industry in the fierce embodied intelligence track.

Commercial implementation based on real needs

Let's look at the industrial implementation ability. In addition to the endorsement of leading robot customers, the core of Zhongke Fifth Epoch's commercialization path is the power operation scenario. It has first broken through the scenario of the State Grid and implemented power operation - related projects in many places such as Guangdong, Yunnan, eastern Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang, verifying its technology and implementation ability.

What is relatively rare is that the cooperation between central state - owned enterprises and Zhongke Fifth Epoch is based on real needs, rather than simply exploring cutting - edge technologies. For example, the equipment of the State Grid, the South - to - North Water Diversion Project, and the five major power generation groups are mostly built in remote areas, with high inspection costs. Existing inspection robots and robotic dogs can only detect problems but cannot complete simple operations, while Zhongke Fifth Epoch's robots can combine inspection and operation. Another example is the convenience stores and gas stations of Sinopec Group. There are few customers at night, but someone still needs to be on duty. Zhongke Fifth Epoch's robots can complete simple operations such as selling goods and heating food, solving the problem of labor costs.

Many practitioners in the field of embodied intelligence I have communicated with recently believe that 2026 is the first year of the industrialization of embodied intelligence. After hundreds of millions of yuan in financing, the industry will enter the stage of delivering results. The ability to move from technology demonstration to large - scale commercial implementation will increasingly become the focus of investors' consideration.

Futeng Capital, the lead investor in this round, said that Zhongke Fifth Epoch is a rare team in the field of embodied intelligence that masters the core technologies of "ultra - few - shot learning" and "world model". Its technical route directly addresses the pain points of difficult data acquisition and weak generalization ability in the industry. At the same time, its commercial implementation speed, product reliability, and overseas business progress are all leading in the industry.

In Liu Nianfeng's view, the core standard for an excellent startup company today is to "have it all". It should have strong model R & D ability, outstanding commercial implementation ability, a strong team, and a continuous stream of customer resources. The reason why Zhongke Fifth Epoch has been recognized by institutions is that it has demonstrated development advantages beyond the industry level in these aspects.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Touzhongwang". The author is Liu Yanqiu. It is published by 36Kr with permission.