Ant Group Makes First Investment in Robot 'Fingertips' with Hundreds of Millions, Launching World's First Physical Interaction Brain

Daimon Robotics announced the completion of a strategic funding round of several hundred million yuan on August 11, led by Ant Group with follow-on investments from existing shareholders. This marks Ant's first investment in the tactile sensing layer, expanding its portfolio that already includes Unitree, Xinghai, Lingxin, Sudo, and Wuji. Daimon recently completed a Series A round two months ago, with investors including China Merchants Venture Capital, Lenovo Capital, Inovance, China Mobile, and China Telecom. The company has released Daimon-TWM, described as the world's first tactile-grounded world model, which uses native touch throughout understanding, reasoning, prediction, and verification. The model is based on Daimon's large-scale multimodal physical world dataset and demonstrates stability in complex tasks such as cleaning broken glass. Daimon's team is led by CEO Duan Jianghua, Chief AI Scientist Yuan Weihao, and R&D and tactile lead Du Yipai, with Professor Wang Yu as co-founder and chief scientist. The company claims to have achieved eight global firsts, including mass production of tactile sensing devices, and serves over 200 clients worldwide, including OpenAI, Figure, Physical Intelligence, Skild AI, Meta, BMW, and Google DeepMind.