Ant Group Leads Angel+ Round in Physical AI Infrastructure Startup Liqing Intelligent
On October 8, Ant Group's strategic investment arm disclosed that Liqing Intelligent, a Physical AI infrastructure company, has completed hundreds of millions of yuan in angel and angel+ financing. Ant Group invested in both rounds and led the angel+ round, with CMC Capital, Guoqi Investment, funds under CICC Capital, and the Shanghai AI industry funds also participating. Existing investors Shunwei Capital, Century Jinyuan, FreeS Fund, and Shui Mu Tsinghua Alumni Seed Fund added follow-on capital.
Founded in April 2026 by Li Yiming, an assistant professor at Tsinghua University's School of Artificial Intelligence, Liqing positions itself as Physical AI Infra, providing tools for data collection, model training, physics simulation, capability evaluation, and deployment feedback as embodied AI moves into real-world scenarios. The company is currently focused on data collection and simulation, with its T1 data-collection gloves and Ego devices capturing multimodal information from real tasks, and a self-developed physics engine that lets models iterate in simulation before being aligned with small amounts of real robot data.
Liqing also offers model vendors task design, data production, quality inspection, and capability verification services, and is seeking to deliver combined packages of tasks, models, devices, and deployment systems to end customers. The investment reflects Ant's focus on the data and simulation layer of the embodied AI chain rather than another robot hardware bet. Ant has previously invested in robotics companies covering bodies, joint modules, and dexterous hands, and is building its own robot-brain stack through Ant Lingbo, whose embodied models have reportedly adapted to more than 20 robot configurations from 17 manufacturers. Whether Liqing's data and simulation services can mature into a reusable platform remains to be seen.
