PHYMI Raises Nearly $100 Million in Seed Funding for Physical Agents

PHYMI now has nearly $100 million to pursue AI systems meant to operate beyond the screen: understanding goals, moving through changing settings and manipulating objects. The newly founded startup raised the seed round with IDG Capital as lead investor, giving an early company substantial capital for building physical-world AI.

The investor group includes Yunqi Capital, Didi, Fosun RZ Capital, Glory Ventures and Hesai Technology alongside IDG Capital. DealStreetAsia described Didi as a ride-hailing company and Hesai as a 3D lidar maker.

The company’s bet is on AI with a body

PHYMI describes its systems as Physical Agents. In the company’s framing, they are embodied AI foundation models that pair reasoning with physical actions in open, dynamic environments. That is a different target from an agent confined to software: PHYMI is aiming for systems that can perceive, navigate and manipulate objects as conditions change around them.

Where PHYMI says the money will go

• Core research for its Physical Agent AI offerings.
• Dynamic data systems built from real-world settings.
• Product engineering and deployment work.
• Hiring to expand the company’s team.

Those priorities put research, data infrastructure and product-building on the same financing plan. Its goal-oriented agents would need both the ability to interpret a task and the ability to carry out physical movement and object manipulation in environments that are not fixed or tightly controlled.

A founder from autonomous driving

PHYMI was founded earlier this year by Liu Nianqiu, a former DeepRoute.ai executive. DealStreetAsia reported that Liu spent more than seven years at the autonomous-driving company as a vice president and partner, where he helped with map-free autonomous-driving deployments and its shift toward end-to-end and Vision-Language-Action architectures.

That background connects PHYMI’s current effort to a field where systems must make decisions amid moving, imperfectly predictable conditions. But the financing announcement is a commitment to build, not evidence that PHYMI’s intended agents can already complete such work. The immediate test is whether its investment in research, data systems, engineering and hiring can turn the stated physical-world ambitions into deployed products.