Xi Xiaoyao's technology sharing
author | Heng Yu
source | qubit
"Huawei Genius Boy" Zhihui Jun's entrepreneurial project has just been invested by Baidu Venture Capital!
Qubit learned that Zhiyuan Robotics, an entrepreneurial project of Zhihui Jun , has recently completed the third round of financing , and the market valuation has been exposed to around one billion US dollars.
According to the Tianyancha App, the new shareholders in this round include Sanya Baichuan Zhixin Private Equity Investment Fund Partnership (Limited Partnership) under Robin Li, as well as first-line VCs such as Jingwei and Gaorong . The registered capital has increased to about 48.4702 million yuan.
Zhiyuan Robot's affiliated company is named Shanghai Zhiyuan Innovation Technology Co., Ltd. , which was established in February 2023, and its legal representative is Shu Yuanchun.
The business scope includes research and development of intelligent robots, artificial intelligence theory and algorithm software development, artificial intelligence hardware sales, electronic product sales, etc.
Committed to the deep integration of AI and robots
In short, what Zhiyuan Robotics has to do is to devote itself to the deep integration of AI and robots .
This can be seen from Zhihui Jun’s latest B station video.
In the video, Mr. Zhihui spoiled the new biped robot Nezha . In his own words, this is a combination of "national style myth" and "cyber machinery".
The "myth of national style" is reflected in the robot's name, as well as "Huojian Gun", "Huntian Ling" and "Hot Wheels":
"Cyber machinery" is mainly reflected in the robot's feet.
That is, the use of "wheels + feet" combines the footstep characteristics of traditional biped robots (such as Boston Dynamics) and various wheel-footed robots to complete terrain adaptation/flexibility + high endurance.
Mr. Zhihui named this as the two-phase leg of the wheel and the foot . The "feet" is the foot when it is horizontal, and the wheel when it is vertical.
The effect is like this:
There is a small detail in the video, which was discovered by careful netizens at that time——
Mr. Zhihui is wearing a headset, keeping in sync with Nezha's movements.
This may be one of the functions that Nezha will show in the future.
As for the rest of Nezha's effect display, Mr. Zhihui said that he will reveal more in subsequent videos as the follow-up progress progresses.
The team will make some moves on the combination of general robotics and LLM in the AI field .
More importantly, Mr. Zhihui has a wonderful spoiler at the end of the video:
If nothing else, Nezha will be an Easter egg later this year at the press conference of a big event we are currently preparing.
Therefore, Nezha's "coming out" represents only the beginning of Zhihui Jun's entrepreneurial project .
On the current Zhihui Jun B homepage, the latest progress is still on the dynamics of the Nezha biped robot, and there is no news about the "later" press conference.
But the third round of financing that has just been completed reveals a corner of the undercurrent surging under the calm lake, and it is enough to make people feel the market's expectations for it.
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Who is Zhihui Jun
Mr. Zhihui, whose real name is Peng Zhihui, has a bachelor's and master's degree from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China.
However, when he was an undergraduate, he majored in biomedical engineering. Because he had been teaching himself computer knowledge, he turned to information and communication systems as a graduate student.
After graduating in 2018, his first stop was the OPPO Research Institute . During the interview, he won two offers for the hardware post and the algorithm post.
Like when he was at Huawei later, he chose to be an AI algorithm engineer.
In 2020, Mr. Zhihui joined the "Huawei Talented Youth Program" and officially became an employee of Huawei.
Generally speaking, the recruitment process for a "genius boy" is very strict. It usually takes about 7 rounds of the process, and finally passes the interview with Huawei's president.
According to this plan, Huawei's "genius teenagers" recruited start with an annual salary of 1 million.
After becoming a member of the Ascend Department of the computing product line, Huawei gave him the external title of Ascend AI Edge Computing Expert.
Regarding Ascend Computing, according to Huawei's official website, it is mainly to create a full-scenario AI infrastructure solution for "device, edge, and cloud".
The year after joining Huawei, Ren Zhengfei praised him in his speech, calling him the driving force behind Huawei's innovation.
At the end of December last year, two years after joining Huawei, Huawei employees broke the news online that Zhihui Jun's job number could not be found within Huawei, and he may have left the company.
Later, Mr. Zhihui responded positively:
The rumors are true, he has left Huawei and is preparing to start a business .
As for why he suddenly left Huawei, as well as the plan and details of starting a business later, Mr. Zhihui did not give a detailed explanation at that time.
But at that time, a person familiar with Zhihu said that Mr. Zhihui's resignation was not for business reasons .
Before resigning, Mr. Zhihui’s performance in the department was very good (all A’s in recent times), and the honor wall on the intranet shows that he has won many awards in the past few years (President Award, Rising Star, Gold Medal team, etc.).
It is certain that he did not resign for business reasons. What he is doing is indeed a direction that he is interested in and good at.
Currently, his status on GitHub is still in the Huawei research post.
In addition to the halo of "Huawei Genius Boy", Zhihui Jun is the most familiar identity, and he should be a well-known UP host with nearly 2.5 million fans in the technology area of Station B.
In 2021, he won the title of "Top 100 UP Masters of the Year".
According to him, at first he only used Station B as a video storage server, but unexpectedly, he gained a group of stable fans, so he began to transform into an up host.
However, within half a year, Mr. Zhihui became popular, and was nicknamed "Wild Iron Man" and "Stack Overflow" engineer by netizens because of the too hard-core video content.
Among them, the most famous ones, including "Iron Man Robotic Arm", "Automatic Driving Bicycle", "mini Card Computer", etc., have been played more than 3 million times.
It can be seen that most of his updated content on station B is related to robots .
This can probably also explain from the side that Mr. Zhihui left Huawei to join Zhiyuan Robotics to start (again) his entrepreneurial career in order to pursue his interests.
After all, he once publicly expressed his love for the field of robotics, saying that his favorite projects are intelligent interaction and electromechanical control, and the most important thing is that it is related to robots .
He once expressed it when communicating with Gitee:
"If programmers are the gods of the digital world, then give the robot a body with your own hands, and then use AI to give it a soul. This is the romance of a true geek!"
