HardKr Exclusive | As the first to achieve profitable operation, Zhigu Tianchu has raised nearly 100 million yuan in a financing round led by China Merchants Venture Capital
Recently, Zhigu Tianchu, an intelligent cooking robot enterprise, officially announced the completion of a new round of nearly 100 million yuan in strategic financing. This round of financing was led by China Merchants Capital, followed by Transition Capital, and oversubscribed by existing shareholders such as Cloud Capital and Qifu Capital.
In the current capital environment, the oversubscription by existing shareholders is often the most direct vote of confidence in a company's commercial implementation capability and technical barriers. With "cooking robot hardware + AI digital cuisine large model" as the core, Zhigu Tianchu is transforming the highly chef-experience-dependent links in Chinese cooking into product capabilities that can be standardized for development and delivered on a large scale. After the financing is completed, the company will continue to promote physical AI R&D and accelerate the global implementation of Chinese and pan-Asian catering.
AI Digital Cuisine Large Model: Empowering Products and Delivery, Taking the Lead in Achieving Profitability
The commercial intelligent cooking track has entered a deep water zone. For customers, what they want from purchasing cooking robots is never the machine itself, but stable and delicious dish output. However, traditional program-controlled cooking machines can only execute fixed instructions; while different brands and regions have different definitions of taste, as well as differences in ingredient selection and meal budget levels, the corresponding "dish programs" are also completely different. To eliminate these differences, the usual path in the industry is to continuously invest a large amount of manpower in dish R&D and service to develop for customers one by one — making up for the lack of intelligence with manpower, resulting in high delivery and operation costs, which is one of the long-standing problems that make it difficult for this track to achieve profitability.
Zhigu Tianchu's answer is a standardized, scalable and replicable product: one end is the cooking robot hardware, and the other end is the "AI digital cuisine large model" that runs on both the cloud and the machine. The hardware is responsible for stable execution, while the digital cuisine large model shifts dish development from relying on human experience to model-driven — customers can flexibly complete the development and iteration of dishes at the model level according to differences in local taste preferences, ingredient supply chain characteristics, meal budgets, and even single-portion sizes. The combination of the two forms a complete product of "hardware + AI digital cuisine large model", rather than an automated device that passively executes preset programs.
Behind this is a seemingly contradictory but actually critical design. There is no uniform standard for deliciousness, and diversity and individuality are the soul of Chinese cuisine; what Zhigu Tianchu provides is not a set of fixed recipes, but a "standardized dish development capability" — with the support of this standardized capability, customers can instead produce more personalized dishes. The recipes are standardized, the flavors are diverse, and it is the model, not manpower, that connects the two.
More importantly, this model-driven product naturally has a "data flywheel effect" for customers: every time the robot runs, its real cooking and operation data continues to flow back, and millions of real structured cooking data accumulated every day train the cloud model; after the model is iterated, it is distributed to all intelligent terminals in a batch strategy, making the output of each robot more stable and dish development more efficient.
The better the output, the higher the benefit, the more terminals are used, and the more data is accumulated — terminals, data, and models drive each other, and the flywheel spins faster and faster. It is under this flywheel that the quality of dishes can be traced throughout the process and stably reproduced across different terminals and regions; the company's growth no longer relies on the linear stacking of manpower, but accelerates with the expansion of data scale — this is the deepest moat of Zhigu Tianchu.
"The flipping techniques, heat intuition, and seasoning skills of the older generation of chefs, those unique skills hidden in the hands of experienced chefs, and those local flavors that are on the verge of being lost, are being accumulated into traceable and inheritable digital assets through data collection and model training." said Dr. GENG Kaiping, founder of Zhigu Tianchu.
In his view, cooking robots with intelligent hardware as the carrier and relying on the AI digital cuisine large model are building a "Digital Ark" for the thousand-year-old Chinese culinary skills.
This business model, which takes standardized products and data platforms as the core, is being verified in performance. In this track where scale is generally achieved at the expense of losses, the ability to achieve profitability is the litmus test for a truly viable business model — and Zhigu Tianchu is one of the few cooking robot enterprises in the industry with revenue exceeding 100 million yuan and achieving profitability. Among them, the repurchase rate of old customers is strong, new customers are diverse and continuously expanding, the company as a whole is developing healthily and rapidly, and it is expected that the revenue in 2026 will maintain a 300% growth rate compared with 2025. It is understood that the company's products have penetrated into multiple business formats such as intelligent manufacturing, health care for the elderly, campus canteens, fast food chains, fresh food retail, cultural tourism hotels, etc. Recently, they have even been deployed in the logistics canteen of the world's largest new energy original equipment manufacturer, and have been rolled out in batches in school canteens in Beijing. Its customers include leading enterprises and institutions in various fields.
When "Heat Intuition" Meets Hardcore Engineers
If the AI digital cuisine large model solves the problem of "what dishes to cook", then to make the same dish stably reproduced on different terminals, another hurdle in the physical world must be crossed: there are differences in ingredient batches, fluctuations in ambient temperature, and the same set of cuisine models deployed on different terminals may not output the same taste. Traditional cooking machines stay at the stage of "numerical control execution", only mechanically repeating according to preset time and temperature, and it is difficult to cope with this complexity. The "Physical AI" that Zhigu Tianchu has been continuously deploying is born for this purpose.
The essence of "Physical AI" is to enable machines to no longer mechanically follow recipes, but to understand real physical processes and adjust in real time. Its long-term goal is to transform the heat judgment and operation habits formed by excellent chefs relying on experience into measurable, analyzable, verifiable, and continuously iterative engineering parameters and algorithm models, forming a complete closed-loop control — so that the output of the cuisine model can be accurately transformed into a stable result of each cooking process.
The multi-modal AI perception system developed by Zhigu Tianchu
At the end of 2025, the new CTO, Vincent, officially joined Zhigu Tianchu and promoted the formation of an independent AI cooking R&D team. Vincent obtained his bachelor's and master's degrees from Tsinghua University, and his doctorate was jointly trained by the National University of Singapore and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He then served as a senior engineer at Apple. Over the years, he has accumulated profound practical experience in the fields of robotics, sensors, algorithms, and software and hardware system development, and has deeply participated in the R&D and mass production of consumer-grade intelligent hardware.
At present, the team is carrying out R&D and small-scale verification around cooking data collection, multi-modal perception, and cooking parameter optimization — identifying the initial state of ingredients and key differences in the cooking process through temperature, weight, vision, and robot operation data, and accumulating the relationship between these differences and parameters such as firepower, time, rotation speed, and feeding rhythm into a continuously trainable model.
"I hope our intelligent cooking robots can become the 'smart partners' of catering practitioners, making cooking change from an experience-dependent 'physical labor' to a precisely controllable and freely creative enjoyment." Vincent said.
From "Going Global" to "Integrating In", the Overseas "Second Growth Engine"
Overseas markets are opening up new growth space for Zhigu Tianchu.
Since the end of 2025, the average daily number of customer visits in overseas markets has increased by about three times, and the order signing conversion rate of visiting customers has exceeded 50%. Its overseas business growth rate ranks among the top in the industry, and its products have been deployed in Europe, North America, Australia, Southeast Asia, Japan, South Korea, and other regions.
Overseas customers are very interested in Zhigu Tianchu's intelligent cooking robots
Behind the high growth is in-depth insight and judgment of the overseas catering market. "In the global catering market, the consumer demand for pan-Asian cuisines represented by Chinese, Japanese, and Southeast Asian flavors continues to rise, and the market size is expanding steadily." said the head of Zhigu Tianchu's overseas business.
In March this year, Marco, the owner of an Italian restaurant, brought an intelligent cooking robot from Zhigu Tianchu into his kitchen. Unexpectedly, this robot allowed his restaurant to instantly add more than a dozen new Chinese dishes — from Kung Pao Chicken to Stir-Fried Rice Noodles with Beef, with stable output and strong wok hei. Customers had more new choices to try, the return rate increased, and the monthly revenue rose by nearly 30%. Marco smiled and said: "It broke my mystery about Chinese food, injected new vitality into the restaurant, and achieved new growth in store revenue."
Overseas scenarios are not the same as domestic ones, and the real going-global model does not copy the Chinese solution. In the process of co-creation with overseas customers, Brian, the owner of a Chinese restaurant in the United States, who has long been troubled by the shortage of kitchen staff and unstable output during evening peak hours, exclaimed after using the T-Chef (Zhigu Tianchu) cooking robot: "Amazing!"; Mr. Ono, the operator of a Japanese izakaya, said after using it that it perfectly reproduced and integrated the local teriyaki flavor; Muhammad, a Turkish customer, admitted that the uniformity of the fried noodles produced by the machine was better than manual work, and sincerely exclaimed: "This is exactly what we wanted!"
"Cooking robots are one of the few fields in intelligent robots that can truly implement business scenarios and form a closed loop of user value, and we have full confidence in its large-scale popularization." said an investor from China Merchants Capital. "After in-depth research on the main players in the industry, we found that the Zhigu Tianchu team used the least amount of capital in the industry to produce the best products and took the most efficient path to commercialization."
From Zhigu Tianchu to Qianyi Intelligence: A Strategic Upgrade for the Future
It is reported that in order to better match the globalization strategy and the technical core of "cooking big data + Physical AI", Zhigu Tianchu is about to complete a comprehensive brand upgrade and officially change its name to "Qianyi Intelligence" — "Qian" represents thousands of intelligent terminals all over the world, and "Yi" represents the intelligent game driven by data and models. Behind the brand upgrade is a more simple vision: Technology makes cooking boundless and food accessible to all.