A co-author of ResNet has registered a robot company. It was worth a billion dollars before it had a name.
Ren Shaoqing — one of the four authors of ResNet, senior vice-president and smart-driving chief at the Chinese carmaker NIO, a co-founder of Momenta and a 2023 Future Science Prize winner — has set up an independent company for physical-AI foundation models and embodied robots. Chinese outlets report it was registered at a unicorn valuation, above one billion dollars, before its name, product or funding round were disclosed. NIO is taking a strategic stake and will work with it, and Ren is keeping his day job running NIO's smart driving rather than leaving. Neither the size of NIO's investment nor the company's name has been made public. The news landed in the same week Xpeng committed 900 million dollars to its own in-house robotics arm.
Why it mattersSelf-driving and humanoid robots need the same thing — a model that turns what the sensors see into physical movement — so China's autonomous-driving departments have become the main supply of robotics founders. The current or former self-driving chiefs of all three big Chinese EV startups are now involved in embodied AI. What is new here is the structure: instead of building a robotics unit like Xpeng, NIO is buying into an outside company, which keeps the researcher without carrying the whole cost. And a billion-dollar valuation before there is a product tells you exactly what investors are pricing — the résumé.
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