Spirit AI

Spirit AI (万境千寻(北京)科技有限公司) is a Beijing-based embodied AI company founded in 2024. It develops general-purpose humanoid robots and the VLA (Vision-Language-Action) foundation models that power them. The company maintains additional offices in Hangzhou and Shenzhen. The founding team includes researchers from UC Berkeley, Tsinghua University, and Peking University. Chief Scientist Yang Gao holds a PhD from UC Berkeley and serves as an assistant professor at Tsinghua, with a research background spanning multimodal LLMs, robot learning, and reinforcement learning. Spirit AI has attracted significant venture backing since inception. The company raised approximately RMB 528 million in a pre-A round, followed by a pre-A+ round of RMB 600 million led by JD.com. In February 2026 it announced a $280 million round to scale its embodied model development and commercial deployment efforts. The company's stated ambition is to make robots accessible at scale, with a public mission of enabling 10% of the world's population to own a robot within ten years.

Spirit AI's publicly disclosed portfolio consists of a single humanoid robot, the Moz1 (also referred to as "Moz" in some company materials). It is a full-body force-controlled humanoid with 26 degrees of freedom, including 7-DoF bionic arms that combine force/torque and position control for fine manipulation tasks. The Moz1 uses an omnidirectional wheeled base rather than legs, which simplifies locomotion but limits stair and uneven-terrain capability. The robot integrates an in-house VLA (Vision-Language-Action) model stack designed to handle perception, task reasoning, and motion control within a unified architecture. The company has open-sourced its Spirit v1.5 model, which ranked first on the RoboChallenge global leaderboard in January 2026. Developer documentation and an SDK are available through the company's developer portal, suggesting some level of third-party access. No additional robot models, variants, or form factors have been publicly announced. Spirit AI has not disclosed production volumes, unit pricing, or lead times for the Moz1.

Spirit AI publicly claims to have deployed its Moz1 robot on CATL battery production lines, performing connector insertion and wire harness handling tasks at the battery manufacturer's Zhongzhou base. The company reports a 99%+ task success rate and states that cycle times match skilled human workers. These claims, if independently verified, would represent a notable manufacturing use case for a wheeled humanoid. The company has also announced partnerships with Bosch, focused on developing a universal robot brain, and with Shanghai HiSilicon on embodied AI computing. Spirit AI reports over 200,000 hours of accumulated interaction data as of early 2026. Despite these announcements, deployment relevance remains conditional on factors not yet publicly verifiable. Customer-confirmed deployment scale, unit economics, operating uptime across extended shifts, and the repeatability of results across different production environments have not been independently documented. The single-platform portfolio and wheeled form factor may bound the addressable use-case range. Commercial access terms, service infrastructure, and production availability are not publicly disclosed. As with many early-stage embodied AI companies, the gap between announced milestones and sustained field operations is a consideration for potential buyers.