Focusing only on embodied "intelligent brains", the post-85s entrepreneur from Shanghai Jiao Tong University has secured more than 200 customers in a single year.

Up to now, Sun Bo still clearly remembers the scene of his first Wuxi Marathon.

He completed the whole race all by himself with almost no prior experience. Wearing sunglasses, he did not notice the rising ambient temperature and ended up with severe dehydration. After running 32 kilometers, his legs cramped suddenly — he hit the well-known "wall" period for long-distance runners.

His body sent a clear signal: energy was completely exhausted, and he had to find a way to adjust immediately. He called his classmate who had already finished the race, and the other party only replied with two sentences: "Don't worry, you won't die." and "Don't walk, you must keep running."

"Running an enterprise is sometimes the same." Sun Bo told *China Entrepreneur* in August this year. When encountering obstacles, you should adjust by yourself first. If it still doesn't work, turn to experienced people for help. In the final analysis, you still need to "seek inward".

In 2025, he reused this set of logic: he left Zhuhai Jingce Measurement and Control, which he co-founded. The company had an annual revenue of over 1.1 billion yuan and was about to launch an IPO, but he did not wait any longer. In July of that year, he founded MScape in Shanghai and served as CEO, committed to building "brains" for embodied intelligence.

His choice is very "paranoid": he only focuses on the underlying base, does not make robot bodies, and does not develop large models. When the whole embodied track is rushing to roll out "steel bodies", he chose a more niche but more fundamental path.

According to the disclosure from MScape: since its establishment one year ago, the company has connected with more than 300 enterprises in total, and over 200 customers have completed the equipment installation. But Sun Bo believes this is only the superficial performance. Looking at the whole industry, there is no ready-made standard for embodied intelligent brains yet. 

Building the "Brain": The Birth of a "Base"

In the first half of 2025, Sun Bo looked at almost all the robot "brains" on the market. His impression can be summed up in four words: diverse and unstandardized.

Some people use NVIDIA's developer kits, some insert graphics cards into robots, some make do with industrial computers, and some even build controllers from scratch starting with chips... These solutions basically stay at the "controller" level, and none of them is designed for a real "intelligent brain".

Sun Bo judged that the problem of this industry is not that no one is working on the track, but that the technical route is wrong.

The traditional general "CPU+GPU" architecture is not designed for robots. When the eyes perceive things, the signals are transmitted to hands and feet to make responses, and this entire link requires real-time performance and certainty. However, the general-purpose architecture will get stuck at a certain link in the middle — the physical world will not wait for the system to respond.

Since there is no ready-made answer, just create it by yourself.

MScape connects the three layers of chip, operating system and model, and designs a computing system born for embodied scenarios from scratch: Dvorak. This is a hyper-heterogeneous architecture inspired by biological brains, which can efficiently couple functional units such as vision, audition and motion, breaking through the latency bottleneck of "separation of decision-making and execution" in general computing.

Source: Interviewee

The name "Dvorak" was given by Yan Weixin, senior consultant of MScape, who is a doctoral supervisor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and chief scientist of Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Research Institute. During the R&D stage, Dvorak's *Symphony No. 9 (From The New World)* was often played in the company. The implication is straightforward: they are exploring the new continent of embodied intelligence technology.

Later, the names of the first and second generation chips of MScape also came from Dvorak's music works.

The technical exploration of MScape started as early as two full years before the company was officially registered. In 2023, Sun Bo began to build a team at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, repeatedly deducing "what a good embodied computing base should be". At that time, ChatGPT just set off the wave of large models, and embodied intelligence was still a little-known concept. The more the team discussed, the broader the scope of the "brain" seemed to be, and various concepts and technical routes kept emerging.

Other similar products on the market also pay little attention to the appearance design.

Sun Bo set a rule for the team: "We are a product company, not a system integration company." He also put forward a requirement for R&D: try to make the product look as close to the form of a biological brain as possible. The final product adopts a "hamburger" shape, with the main brain and cerebellum buckled together, and the effect he wants is to make people accept it visually at the first glance.

The first batch of customers of MScape were acquired through on-site promotion at exhibitions. At the World Robot Conference last August, Sun Bo borrowed the booth of his partner iFLYTEK to display the product for the first time. He also led the core team to visit all robot-related booths in the exhibition hall and recommended their products one by one. According to him, more than one customer told him directly after seeing the product: "This is exactly what I have been looking for, but I just couldn't find it before."

Testing, technical verification, engineering verification, aging test... The first customer placed an order quickly, and completed all the processes within one month. Robot companies such as Fourier and Starry River Map have successively appeared on the customer list.

The deployment process is not complicated either. In the fields of electric power inspection, special operation and commercial services, customers can install the "intelligent brain" in the chest or chassis of their own robots, inform the corresponding usage scenarios, and then complete the adaptation on MScape's products; MScape will provide technical support according to the engineering requirements put forward by customers such as high and low temperature resistance, IP protection level, shock resistance and heat dissipation.

Sun Bo said that originally, small and medium-sized customers needed two or three months to build a set of systems by themselves, but now it can be completed in just one week. However, he draws a very clear boundary for cooperation: "Models and data are the most precious assets of customers, and we only provide the best carrier for them." Hundreds of customers have thousands of types of demands. The team extracts the common demands and finally integrates them into more than a dozen products. Sun Bo said, from another perspective, "maybe what we conceive is more radical than what customers need."

Some customers put forward a demand that the controller must withstand 5g of vibration and remain intact even if it falls to the ground. MScape has achieved this goal.

Subtraction: Not Doing Is Harder Than Doing

"In this round of entrepreneurship, I have achieved what used to take 5 years to complete in only one year." Sun Bo said.

"Fast" is the first impression MScape leaves on the outside world, and some people even describe that the development speed of this company is simply "like riding a rocket".

According to the disclosure from MScape, the core product was sent for testing on the 5th day after the company was founded. 18 days after the product was unveiled, the first order was signed. 10 days after the first order, the bulk order was obtained. At present, the maximum order quantity from a single customer of the company exceeds 1000 units.

Source: Interviewee

The capital side is also advancing steadily. In July 2026, MScape announced the completion of over 100 million yuan in angel round and angel+ round financing. Matrix Partners China led the angel round and continued to invest in the two consecutive rounds, and State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of Minhang District, Shanghai participated in the investment as a strategic investor.

But in Sun Bo's view, "fast" is just a misunderstanding from the outside. The company internally calls this rhythm "MScape speed". Just like hurdling, "MScape speed" does not mean blindly pursuing speed, but being fast, accurate and stable. The practice is to set clear nodes, review and align progress at each node, and then move on to the next step. He has planned the product roadmap to 2028, covering four generations of products. The cycle from chip design to tape-out is one and a half years, which is fixed, and all other links are pushed back according to this cycle.

He also divided the company's development path into five stages from P0 to P4, and the time error of completing each stage has never exceeded one month.

This rhythm is related to his past experience. Sun Bo's first job was at National Instruments (NI), a veteran foreign enterprise in industrial testing.

In those years, he was assigned to build the southern branch company and often went to factories. Customers were full of "jargon" such as IQC, PQC and OQC, which are all inspection terms unique to the industry. He compiled a booklet to translate these "jargons" into words that both sides can understand. He speaks fast by nature, so he had to deliberately slow down when talking with people in the factory. In the first year, he often thought the other party had understood, but later found that they did not.

The development path in foreign enterprises is very clear: market, sales, technology, every path is visible. Looking ahead, he could see what he would be like 5 or 10 years later. He asked himself: Is that what I want? The answer is no. In 2014, he went south to Guangdong to co-found Jingce Measurement and Control, and defined this company as "a service enterprise in the manufacturing industry". Instruments and equipment are carriers, and what they really sell to factories is technical service.

One year after leaving the foreign enterprise, he began to realize that the road of entrepreneurship was not as cool as he imagined. "I have to stay on the front line every day, and do all the work from technical debugging to project management all by myself." Talking about the difference between the two times of entrepreneurship, he said that in the last round he thought while doing, but most things in this round have been fully considered before starting, so he will not hesitate during the implementation.

Sun Bo wrote the definition of MScape into the planning long before the company was registered: an international enterprise, a platform plus ecosystem-oriented enterprise, and an enterprise that leads technological progress through product innovation.

He said that the company needs two types of talents now. One type is focused on cutting-edge fields such as chips, operating systems and underlying supply chains, most of whom are university professors leading their teams. Sun Bo calls them "little geniuses". The other type are industry veterans, who are strong in engineering and productization, and can turn technology into real products. Now, this one-year-old company has more than 200 employees, 70% of whom are in the R&D department, and more than 30 of them are Sun Bo's alumni from Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Sun Bo   Photography: She Guisen

In his words, the proportion of Jiao Tong University alumni in the company is very high.

From job hunting to entrepreneurship, he has always had a habit: cross out the things he will not do first. After graduating from postgraduate study, there were three paths for him: staying in school for further study, going abroad, and looking for a job. He crossed out the first two paths first. When defining the boundary of MScape, he also drew a very clear line: only do the underlying base, do not make robot bodies, and do not develop large models.

He is from Huaihua, Hunan Province, where the college entrance examination competition is very fierce. In high school, he always ranked first in his grade. After entering Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the first lesson he learned was "there is always someone stronger than you". The college he studied in had more than 1000 students in one grade, which was known as "the largest college in the universe".

Later, a large number of well-known startups founded by alumni emerged from the school: SenseTime, YITU Technology, Fourth Paradigm (later renamed "Paradigm"), miHoYo... Most of these enterprises are in the fields of software, AI and Internet. Sun Bo took a harder path, "which is more difficult to walk, but can accumulate value for a very long time".

"The One Among the 2 to 3 Enterprises"

As the popularity of embodied intelligence spreads to the upstream of the industry, more and more players are entering the underlying base track. In the first half of this year, many startups announced that they would start the R&D of embodied computing chips, and some traditional computing manufacturers are also making relevant layouts. Will there be strong competitors?

"Of course." Sun Bo said, he believes that strong competitors "may emerge both at home and abroad", but no enterprise can dominate the whole market. When the industry enters the mature stage, the specialized division of labor will become more and more detailed, and the final competition will focus on cost. However, he estimates that there will be only "2 to 3" enterprises that can build a "platform + ecosystem" model. What he wants to "bet" on is to make MScape become one of them.

MScape Inside Ecosystem. Source: Interviewee

"Entrepreneurship itself is a kind of bet," he said, "no one wants to face failure, especially people who have high requirements for themselves." After more than ten years of experience, entrepreneurship for him has changed from a lifestyle to "the core choice of life". "I found that I can hardly do anything well except running an enterprise." Sun Bo joked with *China Entrepreneur*.

The headquarters of MScape is located next to Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Sun Bo often goes to the school, and basically only does one thing: running. At eight or nine o'clock in the evening or even later, he runs along the campus road. The outer circle of the campus is 10 kilometers. Recently, due to the surrounding construction, he changed to run the inner circle, which is 6 kilometers per lap. That is the most familiar place for him, with a good environment and very comfortable for running. When jogging, he will think about some work matters, and sometimes think about nothing. Last year, he ran more than 10 marathons.

He hopes to get rid of the energy-consuming things through sweating. Occasionally, he also finds fun in long-distance running, and draws a little "monster" pattern on the map with his running track.

His running habit was developed by his classmates when he was studying for a doctorate at Zhejiang University. Previously, he preferred playing football, playing as a winger and doing all the sprint work. He said that running alone is very boring, the first one or two kilometers are the most painful, and after running 5 kilometers, the body will enter a steady state. "5 kilometers is a threshold, 10 kilometers is another threshold. When you run more than 30 kilometers on the road, you are basically competing with yourself and talking to your will."

He firmly believes in "seeking inward", but that does not mean he has to carry everything by