Nio will take a strategic stake in an embodied intelligence company founded by Ren Shaoqing, the Vice President who runs its smart-driving research and development, while keeping him in the job.
Founder and chief executive William Li announced the arrangement at an all-hands meeting for smart-driving staff on Monday, the Chinese outlet LatePost reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
EV reported on Friday that Ren had founded an embodied robotics company, based on an account by the Chinese outlet Red Probe.
Monday’s meeting is the first confirmation from Nio‘s management.
The company works on physical AI foundation models and embodied intelligence. Its registration is complete and its valuation has reached unicorn level, meaning above $1 billion, according to the report.
Neither the company’s name, the size of Nio’s investment, the valuation figure nor the scope of the intended collaboration has been disclosed.
A person who attended the meeting said Li and Ren both stated that Ren would continue as Head of Nio’s smart-driving business. The meeting was brief and raised no organisational changes.
Nio’s Position
According to the report, a person close to Nio management said the company pursues both in-house research and open collaboration, has invested continuously in chips and operating systems, and supports innovative companies across embodied intelligence, algorithm models, smart hardware, new energy and computing infrastructure.
Its investment arm has been active in the sector already, leading a pre-B round of more than 100 million yuan ($14.9 million) for Linghou Robotics in February and backing an A+ round for LimX Dynamics.
Who Ren Is
Ren took his doctorate in 2016 from the joint programme run by the University of Science and Technology of China and Microsoft Research Asia, where he won the CVPR best paper award the same year.
He was a co-founder of the autonomous driving company Momenta, serving as partner and research and development director, before joining Nio in August 2020 as chief expert for autonomous driving research and assistant VP.
He was promoted to VP in 2023.
In September 2025 he joined the University of Science and Technology of China as a chair professor and doctoral supervisor, and as director of its artificial intelligence institute, with research spanning AI, world models, embodied intelligence, deep learning and AI for science.
What He Built at Nio
Nio‘s smart-driving algorithms moved from a modular approach to end-to-end and then world-model architectures during his tenure.
The company brought its in-house Shenji NX9031 chip into mass production and switched the smart-driving hardware in some models from four Nvidia Orin chips to a single Shenji.
World model development began in 2023. Nio released a world model for assisted driving in 2024 and began pushing it to production vehicles in 2025.
A new version shipped in June covering more than 700,000 users, upgrading the framework to a combination of world model, supervised fine-tuning and closed-loop reinforcement learning, released simultaneously on both the bought-in and in-house chip platforms.
