Nio Capital, the investment fund co-founded by Nio’s CEO William Li, and the Chinese giant Alibaba Group have led a funding round for embodied intelligence robotics startup Dexmal.
The tech giant was the sole investor of the latest A-plus round announced on Friday, with several hundred million yuan.
Combined, the two rounds brought Dexmal’s total funding to nearly 1 billion yuan ($138 million).
The Shenzhen-based startup, founded last March, develops software and hardware for embodied intelligence robots capable of performing tasks across different scenarios and configurations.
For Nio Capital, it marked its latest expansion beyond its traditional electric vehicle supply chain investments into broader artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics technology.
The fund founded by William Li and Ian Zhu nearly a decade ago invests in several battery manufacturers such as CATL and CALB, the LiDAR maker Seyond (previously known as Innovusion), the AD startup Momenta, the robotaxi maker Pony.AI, among several others.
Nio Capital led Dexmal’s previous Series A financing, joined by follow-on investments from Hongtai Fund, Legend Capital, Xi Venture Capital and Zhengjing Fund.
Existing shareholder Legend Star made an over-allocation follow-on investment, while Qiming Venture Partners and Jiukun Investment also participated.
Alibaba then invested as the exclusive backer in the A-plus round, according to public filings.
Dexmal said proceeds from both rounds will be used primarily for research, development and commercialization of intelligent robot software and hardware technology.
Nio Capital’s Diversification Strategy
Since 2016, the fund has raised five funds—three denominated in US dollars and two in yuan—with approximately 15 billion yuan under management.
While the portfolio includes traditional electric vehicle suppliers such as battery makers Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd. and China Aviation Lithium Battery Co., Nio Capital has increasingly targeted next-generation technologies.
The fund holds a stake in US suspension startup ClearMotion, which supplies Nio‘s flagship ET9 sedan, and has invested in several component suppliers for the L90 SUV launched in July under Nio‘s mass-market Onvo sub-brand.
Nio Capital has separately moved into the automotive chip sector.
A filing disclosed earlier this year showed the fund invested in Xinxin Hangtu Technology, a startup that designs automotive chips, positioning Nio Capital in the critical semiconductor supply chain as automakers face persistent chip shortages and seek to develop proprietary solutions.
Last August, the fund established a new business management consulting partnership in Anhui province alongside local government-linked investors, expanding beyond pure investment activities into operational consulting services.
Embodied Intelligence Bet
Last month, Dexmal released Dexbotic, an open-source software toolkit that allows researchers to develop robots capable of understanding visual and verbal commands and translating them into physical actions.
The toolkit is built on PyTorch, a widely-used machine learning framework developed by Meta Platforms.
Vision-Language-Action models represent an emerging category of artificial intelligence that combines computer vision, natural language processing and robotic control systems.
These models allow robots to respond to concrete commands by visually identifying the object, understanding the instruction and calculating the precise movements needed to complete the task.
