Asia Tech Wire (Oct 16) -- Alibaba-backed Chinese humanoid robot startup Robot Era has recently closed a nearly 300 million yuan ($42 million) Pre-A round of financing.

The round was co-led by Crystal Stream, Vision Plus Capital, and Alibaba, followed by Orinno Capital, with existing investors Lenovo Capital, Century Golden Resources, Jinding Capital, Wing Capital and TH Tiancheng Capital continue to participate.

China Renaissance, one of China's leading investment firms in the technology sector, continues to serve as the exclusive financial advisor for the round.

Robot Era, which was born at Tsinghua University, said the round will focus on accelerating native breakthrough research and development of embodied intelligence technologies as well as the commercialization of general-purpose humanoid robots.

Founded in August 2023, the company strives to be the definer of native universal embodied AI agents, i.e., building a large model of native robots + a new hardware platform defined for AI.