36Kr Exclusive: Shanghai Jiao Tong PhD Combines World Models and Six-Armed Robots, Raises Hundreds of Millions in New Funding, Serves Multiple Fortune 500 Clients

Image source: company Approx. 3,000 characters, recommended reading time 7 minutes Author: Ouxue Editor: Yuan Silai Hardcore AI (硬氪) has learned that Shanghai Feizhi Intelligent Technology Co., Ltd. ("Feizhi Intelligent"), a global industrial embodied intelligence robotics company, recently completed a Pre-B funding round worth several hundred million yuan. Investors include JianTou Investment Co., Ltd., Nantong Investment Management, and Yunqi Capital. The funds will mainly go toward large model R&D, iteration of multi-arm robot platforms, production line expansion, and deeper global market development. Founded in 2017, Feizhi Intelligent's core team combines nearly 20 years of robotics R&D experience with top-tier AI algorithm expertise. Founder and CEO Zhang Jianzheng holds a doctorate in engineering (intelligent robotics) from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and previously worked at Estun and FANUC. As industrial manufacturing evolves toward flexibility and complexity, traditional industrial robots are limited to fixed operations and single tasks, while most general-purpose embodied robots struggle to meet industrial-grade requirements for high precision and determinism. Feizhi Intelligent is targeting precisely this gap in complex industrial scenarios, such as precision assembly, dexterous packaging, and long-sequence testing. On the product side, Feizhi Intelligent has built a full lineup of robot bodies with single-arm, dual-arm, four-arm, and six-arm configurations. According to Zhang Jianzheng, the new-generation four-arm robot uses a spatially symmetric configuration, controlling four robotic arms with one brain and, through advanced coordination algorithms, doubling the efficiency of multi-arm parallel operation compared with the previous generation. The six-arm robot "Xuanjia" uses a spatially heterogeneous design with two arms each at the front waist, rear waist, and shoulders, enabling 360-degree coverage of multiple surrounding production lines, with dual-station parallel operation and alternating four-arm work. "More arms isn't always better. Just as a table needs at least three legs to stand steady, four or five are acceptable, but beyond that there's no point." Zhang Jianzheng told Hardcore AI that, supported by spatial configuration theory, six arms is currently the most reasonable layout. Compared with four arms, six arms add 60% more degrees of freedom, making dynamic isolation of safe zones and collision avoidance in confined spaces, as well as coordination of complex processes, highly demanding on computing power and algorithm effectiveness. The company says this spatially heterogeneous six-arm configuration is unique globally, and its operational complexity has improved exponentially over four-arm systems, with efficiency gains of 50%. At the core "brain" level of embodied intelligence, the VLA (vision-language-action) models commonly used across the industry have limitations in end-to-end reflexive imitation,