DexForce Raises $147 Million for Robot Training via Virtual Simulations

DexForce, a Shenzhen robotics startup founded in 2021 by machine-learning professor Jia Kui, raised 1 billion yuan (about $147 million) in Series B funding at a valuation of more than 10 billion yuan. The firm employs around 500 people and is backed by Lenovo Capital, Lens Technology and several state-owned funds. At its offices a screen shows a virtual robot placing objects on a table as arm angle, table color and objects change; skills learned in simulation transfer to physical machines. Jia Kui said trying to achieve “physical artificial general intelligence” purely through real-world data collection would require 10 trillion samples and that manual collection for infinite human tasks is fundamentally inefficient. He compared the potential impact to ChatGPT’s 2022 release. Human demonstrations may need repeating more than 100 times for precise examples. DexForce software is used by Toyota, Samsung, Panasonic, Foxconn, Haier and Hisense; its humanoids make coffee and serve customers at malls and tourist sites in more than 15 Chinese cities. Bloomberg reported DexForce was considering a Hong Kong IPO; Jia declined to comment. Reliable performance outside simulations remains an open test, and many developers still combine simulated and real-world training.