Gasgoo Munich- Manifold AI has secured hundreds of millions of yuan in a fresh funding round, pushing the world model startup into unicorn status just a year after its inception. The round attracted new backers including China Reform Fund, Ince Capital, and corporate investors BAIC Capital and Xinneng Venture Capital. Four existing shareholders also doubled down with oversubscribed commitments. With this latest infusion, the company has now closed six rounds totaling nearly 1 billion yuan at the Pre-A stage. Previous investors include top-tier firms like Legend Capital and corporate arms such as Huawei Hubble. Image Source: Manifold AI Founded in late May 2025, Manifold AI is China’s first startup to build a proprietary world model as the backbone for embodied intelligence. The team combines researchers from Tsinghua University’s FIB Lab with industry pioneers who were the first to deploy world models commercially. It stands alone in covering outdoor, indoor, and aerial domains. Dr. Wu Wei, founder and CEO, is a former SenseTime executive who led teams to back-to-back championships in the Waymo SimAgents Challenge. The roster features Tsinghua professors, a 15-year-old prodigy admitted to the university, and former tech giants’ world model leads, collectively boasting over 200 top-tier papers and 100,000 citations. Video Source: Manifold AI On the technology front, Manifold AI’s proprietary WorldScape is the world’s first real-time world model to handle both mobility and manipulation simultaneously. Built on a Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture, it assigns specific experts to tasks like instruction following, navigation, and manipulation reasoning, integrating them via a gating mechanism. In WorldScore evaluations, WorldScape has held the top spot for nearly two months while running on just 10% of the parameters required by rivals. Its derivative, WorldScape Policy, has outperformed existing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models in closed-loop tests and is already being deployed in e-commerce logistics and 3C manufacturing. Image Source: Manifold AI Separately, the company partnered with dozens of research institutions globally to launch WorldArena, a unified benchmark for embodied world models covering six dimensions and 16 metrics. The platform also underpinned the CVPR 2026 WorldArena Challenge. Proceeds from this round will fuel research into next-generation tech frameworks and multimodal world models, alongside infrastructure development. The capital will also drive the deployment of embodied intelligence in sectors like e-commerce logistics, 3C manufacturing, and automotive production, while exploring applications in mixed-reality entertainment. About Seeds Discovery: Gasgoo’s "Seeds Discovery" column is designed to bridge startups, ecosystem partners, investors, and local governments, empowering the entire automotive supply chain. Since its inception, the column has focused on uncovering transformative companies, technologies, and business models driving the intelligent revolution. According to Gasgoo data, nearly every startup featured in Seeds Discovery has successfully secured resources within the industry ecosystem.
Liked by Lucas Wilson, Thomas White
Liked by Lucas Wilson, Thomas White
Liked by Lucas Wilson, Thomas White
