AI investment & startup in China Brief — 2026-09-17

Top Stories

Source: The Business Times · September 17, 2026
Summary: Chinese-founded AI agent startup Manus is reportedly nearing a $500 million financing round at a valuation of about $4 billion, according to people familiar with the matter cited by Bloomberg. The financing would be Manus’ first since its operational separation from Meta and would roughly double its previous $2 billion valuation. Existing backers include Tencent, HSG and ZhenFund, while the identities of prospective new investors remain undisclosed.
Why It Matters: The proposed valuation highlights continued investor appetite for AI-agent companies despite rapidly improving foundation models and falling model costs. It also illustrates the growing importance of capital structure, ownership and regulatory considerations for China-founded AI companies pursuing global markets.
URL: https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/companies-markets/telcos-media-tech/manus-eyes-us4-billion-value-first-round-meta-breakup

Source: PR Newswire · September 17, 2026
Summary: Beijing-based Apex Intelligence completed angel and angel-plus rounds totaling nearly $50 million. IDG Capital, LinkX Capital and XtalPi co-led the angel round, while Zhongguancun Science City Fund, Shenzhen Capital Group and Shanghai Future Industries Fund co-led the follow-on round. Founded in June 2026, the startup is developing foundation models based on recursive self-improvement for scientific research and discovery.
Why It Matters: The financing signals investor interest moving beyond conventional scaling toward models capable of iterative experimentation and autonomous improvement. AI-for-science applications such as chip design, molecular research and quantitative analysis could become important commercialization pathways for this emerging model architecture.
URL: https://www.prnewswire.com/apac/zh/news-releases/4-302880705.html

Source: PR Newswire · September 17, 2026
Summary: D-Robotics announced a $400 million Series C financing round backed by strategic and institutional investors, alongside continued participation from existing shareholders. The company plans to expand its Sunrise chip portfolio across computing tiers and build software spanning data collection, model training, simulation, validation and inference deployment. D-Robotics said Sunrise-series chip shipments exceeded 8 million units in the first half of 2026, while its embodied-AI business entered mass production.
Why It Matters: Capital is increasingly moving toward the infrastructure layer of China’s physical-AI ecosystem rather than only robot brands. The combination of chips, software and developer infrastructure positions D-Robotics to capture value across multiple robot categories as embodied AI moves toward larger-scale deployment.
URL: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/d-robotics-completes-400-million-in-series-c-funding-driving-the-robotics-industry-into-a-boom-in-product-categories-302881297.html

Source: ChinaVenture · September 17, 2026
Summary: Beijing-based physical-AI startup LiberAI completed a new Pre-A++ financing round worth several hundred million yuan, with participation from Huaying Capital, Zhongguancun Science City, Dachen Caizhi and Gaoxin Capital. The company is developing world models focused on multimodal pretraining and physical-world interaction, while also building its own data-collection and hardware systems. LiberAI simultaneously introduced its Liber-0 Preview model.
Why It Matters: The round reflects growing Chinese venture interest in world models and embodied intelligence as a foundation-model category rather than a narrow robotics application. The combination of model development, proprietary data and hardware infrastructure suggests a capital-intensive strategy aimed at controlling more of the physical-AI stack.
URL: https://www.chinaventure.com.cn/news/113-20260917-393306.html

Source: Economic Observer · September 17, 2026
Summary: Shanghai-based Scinetics completed a first financing round of nearly RMB 50 million, led by Inno Venture Fund with participation from Yijing Capital, Xiaomiao Langcheng and Lingge Venture Capital. The company is developing scientific foundation models capable of working across DNA, RNA, protein structures, omics data and experimental information. Funding will support model iteration, scaled deployment of automated experimentation and team expansion.
Why It Matters: The financing adds another data point for the emergence of AI-for-Science as a distinct Chinese startup investment category. Scinetics’ emphasis on connecting model reasoning with automated experiments points toward a closed-loop model in which AI generates hypotheses, designs experiments and learns from experimental feedback.
URL: https://www.eeo.com.cn/2026/0917/1039397.shtml

Source: PR Newswire · September 17, 2026
Summary: Apex Intelligence’s nearly $50 million financing and D-Robotics’ $400 million Series C arrived on the same day as new capital for LiberAI and Scinetics. Across these transactions, investors are backing self-evolving foundation models, AI-for-Science systems, robotics chips and physical-world foundation models rather than focusing exclusively on consumer-facing generative AI. The financing mix also combines major private VC firms with industrial and government-backed investment institutions.
Why It Matters: The day’s financing activity points to a broader shift in Chinese AI capital toward infrastructure and domain-specific intelligence. Scientific discovery, robotics and autonomous experimentation require deeper technical moats and substantial compute, data and hardware investment, creating a different venture-capital profile from application-layer AI.
URL: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/d-robotics-completes-400-million-in-series-c-funding-driving-the-robotics-industry-into-a-boom-in-product-categories-302881297.html