Wang Kai, investment partner at Vision Plus Capital and former CTO of Li Auto, has reportedly launched a startup in embodied intelligence. A senior executive responsible for assisted driving technology at a major automaker has also joined the project and is currently on leave from the company.
According to 36Kr, the startup has attracted strong investor interest. Within months of its founding, it secured about USD 50 million across two funding rounds. Vision Plus Capital led the first, while HongShan and Lanchi Ventures backed the second.
The team’s track record in artificial intelligence and large-scale engineering is seen as a key factor in drawing support, in addition to growing interest in embodied intelligence.
Wang joined Li Auto in September 2020 as CTO, where he oversaw R&D and mass production of intelligent vehicle systems, covering electronic and electrical architecture, smart cockpits, autonomous driving, platform development, and real-time operating systems.
Before Li Auto, he spent eight years at Visteon, where he was the founding designer of DriveCore, the company’s assisted driving platform. He led five mass production projects spanning chips, algorithms, operating systems, and hardware architecture.
At Li Auto, Wang accelerated the rollout of assisted driving solutions, reaching mass production in just seven months. He left the company in early 2022 to become an investment partner at Vision Plus Capital, a role he continues to hold. In venture capital, however, such positions often function more as advisory roles rather than full-time operational posts.
The senior executive who joined him at the startup brings rare experience in end-to-end mass deployment, including work on vision-language-action (VLA) systems. Such expertise remains unusual among embodied intelligence ventures.
Beyond assisted driving, embodied intelligence has emerged as a key application area for AI, attracting talent from the autonomous driving sector and drawing significant funding.
In March, for example, Tars, another embodied intelligence startup, raised USD 120 million in an angel round just 50 days after its founding, representing the largest angel investment in the segment in China. Like Wang’s venture, Tars was founded by an executive with autonomous driving experience, Chen Yilun.
Automotives are often described as “robots without hands.” With autonomous driving and embodied intelligence closely aligned, carmakers such as Tesla and Xpeng see the field as their next growth frontier. Many automotive executives are also choosing it as their path to entrepreneurship.
Before Wang, others, including Yu Yinan, a former vice president at Horizon Robotics, and Gao Jiyang, who previously led mass production R&D at Momenta, had already launched startups in embodied intelligence.
Automakers are racing ahead in assisted driving technology. Huawei, for instance, has announced that its computing power investment in the field has reached 45 exaflops. Meanwhile, capital is pouring into embodied intelligence as well. Competition for top talent between the two segments is set to continue.
KrASIA Connection features translated and adapted content that was originally published by 36Kr. This article was written by Fan Shuqi for 36Kr.