China Telecom leads funding for embodied-AI data startup Mifeng
State capital is quietly moving into the data layer beneath China's robot boom — this time through a six-month-old startup that sells the raw material physical AI runs on.
Mifeng (Maniformer), a Shanghai startup building one-stop data infrastructure for physical AI, has closed a new round of several hundred million yuan led by China Telecom. Zhangjiang Group followed, while existing backers Sequoia China and Yuanqi Innovation over-subscribed — the latest in a string of rounds since the company was founded about six months ago. Proceeds go to scaling production of its MEgo series of "bodyless" data-collection devices, which are deployed in real factories, logistics hubs, supermarkets, hotels and homes to capture the physical interaction data robots need, and to expanding a collect–clean–evaluate pipeline it claims is ten times more efficient than manual processing.
The bet is that embodied AI is stuck on a data problem, not just a model problem. Physical interaction data carries far lower information density and far more noise than language data, so training useful robot models demands volumes that today's hand-built collection farms can't supply. Mifeng's answer is industrializing that supply: its MEgo devices capture environment perception and hand-operation data with millimeter-level trajectory accuracy, and in some scenarios each closed-loop data cycle lifts task success rates by 5–10 percentage points. The company says it already runs innovation centers in more than 20 Chinese cities and over five overseas nodes, and provides training data for Ant's LingBot-VLA 2.0 foundation model. The timing lines up with a sector that is drowning in money but short on proof: Leiphone's industry analysis this week put Chinese embodied-AI funding at ¥93.5 billion in the first half of the year — about five times the year-earlier period — while top humanoid makers have shipped only just over 10,000 units.
The notable part isn't the check size, it's who signed it. China Telecom brings cloud-network integration, compute scheduling and security compliance to a joint "cloud-network + embodied data" push aimed at humanoid robots and smart manufacturing, and Zhangjiang Group opens its park, industrial and commercial scenarios to the company. A state telecom operator effectively placing a strategic bet on the data layer — not the models, not the hardware — is a signal that the physical-AI value chain is splitting into specialized layers, and that the data layer is where state capital sees a defensible, standardized product emerging. Mifeng still has everything to prove: the round is modest by Chinese AI standards and its customers are mostly still piloting. But when the state starts funding the plumbing, the industry usually follows.
What to watch: whether China Telecom's cloud-network muscle turns into standard data products other robot makers actually buy — and how many more state giants follow it into the data layer.
State telecoms are now funding the data layer of China's robot boom — do you think data infrastructure, not models, will decide who wins embodied AI? Tell us in the comments.
