TARS
Shanghai embodied-AI startup founded in 2025 by former Huawei and Baidu autonomous-driving leaders, building the AWE foundation model and A1 robots.
TARS is a Shanghai embodied-intelligence company that, according to its lead investor Lanchi Ventures, was founded on 5 February 2025. Its leadership comes largely from autonomous driving: chief executive Chen Yilun was chief robotics scientist at Tsinghua University's Institute for AI Industry Research, CTO of Huawei's autonomous driving unit and earlier a lead engineer in DJI's machine vision division; chief scientist Ding Wenchao worked on autonomous decision networks at Huawei and built Fudan University's first humanoid robot; chief architect Chen Tongqing led Huawei's ADS department; and chairman Li Zhenyu was president of Baidu's Intelligent Driving Group, where he worked on the Apollo platform. The company describes its goal as general-purpose robotics built on physical-world AI, with a data engine centred on human demonstrations and integrated spatial perception models. In a release distributed on 23 July 2026 around the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, TARS said its AWE 3.5 embodied foundation model had been trained on more than one million hours of human-centric real-world data, that it roughly doubled task-execution efficiency against Pi 0.5, and that the model had won a SAIL award; it showed A1 robots packing phones, sorting screws and assembling automotive wiring harnesses, plus a dexterous DexHand, and said it planned to grow the pre-training dataset to 10 million hours by the end of 2026. Lanchi Ventures announced on 26 March 2025 that TARS had recently completed a 120 million dollar angel round, which it called the largest angel round in China's embodied AI sector, co-led by Lanchi Ventures and Qiming Venture Partners with Linear Capital, Hengxu Capital, Hongtai Fund, Lenovo Capital, Xianghe Capital and GL Ventures. Later rounds reported in the press are not confirmed on a primary page and are not recorded.
- Latest funding
- $120M
- Total funding
- $120M
- Latest valuation
- —
- Founded
- 2025
- Country
- China
- Mar 26, 2025Angel$120M