Ant Group leads strategic round in robot-touch startup Daimon
China's embodied-AI money is moving from robot bodies to robot senses. Ant Group led a strategic round in tactile-sensing startup Daimon Robotics, which also unveiled what it calls the first "physical interaction brain"; meanwhile Westlake Robotics banked its fourth round in six months, and researchers showed an AI agent can crack a critical Zoom bug in a day.
Daimon Robotics, the Shenzhen startup building tactile sensing for robots, has closed a strategic round of several hundred million yuan led by Ant Group — Ant's first bet on the "fingertips" of machines, with existing investors following on.
Two months after a 100-million-yuan A-round led by Inovance's investment arm and China Telecom, Daimon now counts Ant, China Merchants, Lenovo Capital, China Mobile and China Telecom among backers — an unusually dense roster of industrial capital for a company that sells the sense of touch rather than the robot itself. Daimon pairs high-resolution vision-tactile sensors with Daimon-TWM, a 10-billion-parameter, tactile-grounded world model the company calls the first "physical interaction brain": it uses touch to understand contact, predict how an object will behave, and correct grip at 100 Hz in real time. Daimon says the model roughly doubles success rates in contact-heavy manipulation versus a leading baseline, leaning into the industry's emerging bet that dexterity lives in the brain, not the hand. That thesis is why Ant — which has invested in a dozen robotics companies since early 2025 and runs its own LingBot embodied-AI arm — is buying into a supplier rather than a robot maker. The catch: nearly all of Daimon's "world-first" claims are company-reported, so the real test is whether the touch advantage survives independent replication in factories and homes.
Security researchers at A Security say they found a critical Zoom vulnerability using fewer than 20 prompts on publicly available AI models — turning what they call "nation-state work" into a single day's work.
The flaw lived in Zoom's annotation feature and could let an attacker on a call run malicious code on every participant's device — stealing data, switching on cameras or microphones, or installing malware — with no action from victims and no visual cue of compromise. Zoom patched the bug (bulletin ZSB-26015) across Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS; Wired first reported the research. The demo is a marker for how fast AI agents are compressing the cost of vulnerability discovery: the same off-the-shelf models anyone can rent found and weaponized a bug that previously would have taken elite teams months.
Westlake Robotics, the Westlake University-affiliated embodied-AI startup, completed an A-round that caps four funding rounds in six months at 500 million yuan (about $70 million).
The round closed less than a month after the previous one, with SAIF, Henan Investment Group's Huirong fund and others on the cap table. Westlake says the proceeds go toward a whole-body unified large model for humanoid robots — the company's "Westlake o1" humanoid shipped earlier this year — plus an embodied-AI talent pipeline. It is the same funding cadence as Daimon's, and it reinforces where Chinese capital thinks the humanoid race will be won: not in chassis and joints, but in the model that drives them.
What to watch: whether Ant's LingBot starts feeding Daimon real-world data — the two are now in the same orbit.
Do you trust company-reported robot benchmarks, or should independent evals gate these funding rounds? Tell us in the comments.
