ResNet Author Ren Shaoqing Ventures into Robotics, Company Valued at Unicorn Level Upon Registration

marsbitPublished on 2026-08-25Last updated on 2026-08-25

Abstract

Ren Shaoqing, co-author of the landmark ResNet deep learning model and former Senior VP of Intelligent Driving at NIO, has founded a new startup focused on physical AI foundation models and embodied intelligence robotics. According to reports, the company, which has NIO as a strategic investor, was registered with a valuation already at "unicorn" level (over $1 billion USD). Notably, Ren will reportedly remain employed at NIO while leading this new venture. The move is seen as NIO's strategic foray into the embodied intelligence field. Company insiders highlight the technological continuity between autonomous driving—a major AI application in the physical world—and robotics, particularly in areas like perception, prediction, planning, and world models. Ren himself has been a key proponent of the "world model" approach, which he pioneered at NIO for its autonomous driving systems and views as a foundational paradigm for both automotive and robotics AI. Ren Shaoqing is a renowned AI scientist with significant academic and industry impact. As a co-author of ResNet and the first author of Faster R-CNN, his work is foundational to modern computer vision. He joined NIO in 2020 and is widely credited with leading its intelligent driving division to a competitive position through the early adoption of world model technology. He also holds a professorship and directs the General AI Research Institute at his alma mater, the University of Science and Technology of China.

Ren Shaoqing, co-author of ResNet, has personally entered the field of embodied AI entrepreneurship.

QbitAI has learned and confirmed that renowned AI scientist, ResNet author, Director of the Institute for General AI at USTC, Senior Vice President of NIO and Head of Intelligent Driving, and 2023 Future Science Prize laureate Dr. Ren Shaoqing has formally established a company to venture into embodied AI robotics.

According to LatePost, at an internal all-hands meeting for NIO's intelligent driving business, NIO CEO William Li announced internally that NIO's Head of Intelligent Driving, Ren Shaoqing, has founded an independent company focused on physical AI foundational models and embodied intelligence.

NIO has made a clear strategic investment and will engage in business cooperation. The report also states that Ren Shaoqing's new company has completed registration with a valuation reaching unicorn level (exceeding the $10 billion threshold), but the company name and specific financing details remain undisclosed.

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Notably, the exact model of Ren Shaoqing's embodied AI robotics venture is not yet fully clear——

Despite starting a robotics venture, he remains employed at NIO.

How to put it? It's like "divorced but still living under the same roof" (tongue-in-cheek).

Ren Shaoqing Dives into Embodied Intelligence

Regarding Ren Shaoqing's robotics venture, sources close to NIO management stated:

NIO has long focused on cutting-edge AI technologies, adopting an approach that balances independent R&D with open collaboration for industrial layout. In recent years, NIO has consistently invested and made key progress in critical technology areas such as chips and operating systems. Simultaneously, through strategic cooperation and industrial synergy, it continues to support innovative companies in areas like embodied intelligence, algorithmic models, smart hardware, new energy, and computing infrastructure.

It was further revealed that within NIO, it is believed:

Intelligent driving is one of the most mature large-scale application scenarios for AI in the physical world. It shares continuity in underlying capabilities with embodied intelligence in areas like perception, prediction, planning, control, world models, and reinforcement learning. Over the past two years, the increasing flow of autonomous driving and intelligent driving talent to the robotics industry is also related to this technological migration.

However, it is worth noting that NIO has obscured the nature of this "change" regarding Ren Shaoqing.

Considering NIO's business and development situation, one might discern the strategy behind this subtle ambiguity.

On one hand, if Ren Shaoqing—a world-class AI scientist and the absolute key contributor to NIO's intelligent driving transformation—were to leave to start a venture, it wouldn't be favorable for NIO, which is currently gaining momentum. On the other hand, if treated as an NIO-incubated or internal innovation project, the high-investment, long-cycle nature of embodied AI robotics would also pressure NIO, which has just achieved a financial turnaround.

Connecting the dots, XPeng Motors, an early backer of embodied AI robotics, just announced its first external independent financing round before releasing its latest quarterly earnings—a clear statement about the robot division's financial independence.

As for NIO, although its trial in embodied AI robotics isn't early, internal consideration and public positioning have been clear for some time.

During financial pressure in 2025, both William Li and Ren Shaoqing explicitly stated to QbitAI that for the next chapter of AI+automotive business, NIO leans towards robotics over Robotaxi.

Now, with Ren Shaoqing's venture, it can perhaps be seen as NIO beginning its trial in embodied AI robotics.

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Previously, regarding AI frontiers, NIO had already initiated internal R&D on world models in the second half of 2023.

In July 2024, it was Ren Shaoqing who represented NIO in launching the NIO World Model (NWM) at a Tech Day event. The model began mass OTA deployment in 2025 and was architecturally upgraded this year to "World Model + Supervised Fine-Tuning + Closed-Loop Reinforcement Learning."

Ren Shaoqing himself has repeatedly emphasized that world models are a foundational paradigm shared by autonomous driving and robotics.

Capabilities accumulated in vehicles regarding spatiotemporal cognition, long-sequence reasoning, and closed-loop optimization can be directly migrated to physical AI and embodied intelligence scenarios. This is also one of the technical underpinnings of his recent founding of a company related to embodied intelligence.

In fact, Ren Shaoqing is one of the earliest practitioners in the industry to bet on world models, a key reason for NIO's intelligent driving catching up on the straight track. And world models are becoming the convergent direction for robot brains.

NIO's own business scenarios and supply chain manufacturing are also naturally suited for closed-loop robotics implementation.

Furthermore, those familiar with Ren Shaoqing might know that although he co-founded Momenta directly after his Ph.D., his personality and strengths lean more towards roles like Chief Scientist or CTO......

World-Class AI Scientist Ren Shaoqing

Ren Shaoqing was born in Bengbu, Anhui Province in 1988. He graduated from Bengbu No.2 Middle School in 2007 and was admitted to the Information Security program at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC).

In 2016, under the supervision of Sun Jian, one of the ResNet authors, Ren Shaoqing obtained his Ph.D. through a joint training program between USTC and Microsoft Research Asia.

He himself is also one of the four authors of ResNet.

ResNet is a milestone work in deep learning. Its achievement lies in fundamentally solving the vanishing gradient problem in training deep neural networks. It made building high-performance, very deep neural networks practical, contributing immensely to fields requiring high perceptual capabilities, especially computer vision and autonomous driving.

The research won the CVPR 2016 Best Paper Award and currently has over 340,000 citations.

The core authors are He Kaiming, Zhang Xiangyu, Ren Shaoqing, and Sun Jian.

He is also the first author of Faster R-CNN. This is an efficient two-stage object detection algorithm that successfully solved the time-consuming problem of region proposal generation in previous object detection algorithms, achieving a good balance between speed and accuracy. It has been widely applied in autonomous driving, security, medical image analysis, etc.

After his Ph.D., Ren Shaoqing joined the autonomous driving startup Momenta, serving as R&D Director and Co-founder.

In 2020, he officially joined NIO. Initially, he served as Chief Expert in Autonomous Driving R&D and Assistant Vice President, primarily responsible for the unmanned driving algorithm team; later adjusted to Vice President of Intelligent Driving R&D, reporting directly to CEO William Li. At the end of 2024, NIO's Intelligent Driving R&D department underwent structural adjustments, establishing a new Technology Committee. Ren Shaoqing directly managed this team and led the Large Model Department, further expanding his scope of authority.

After Ren Shaoqing took over NIO's intelligent driving R&D system, he pioneered the implementation of "World Models" in vehicles globally. Combined with NIO's self-developed chips, this enabled NIO's intelligent driving to catch up on the straight track, making him one of the key contributors to NIO's turnaround to profitability for the first time in 2025-2026.

Following the success of the world model, Ren Shaoqing was promoted to Senior Vice President of NIO.

Simultaneously, Ren Shaoqing began "giving back" to his alma mater, USTC. In September 2025, Ren Shaoqing concurrently returned to USTC to enroll students, serving as Chair Professor, Doctoral Supervisor, and Director of the Institute for General AI. Earlier, Ren Shaoqing donated the entire prize money from the Future Science Prize to USTC.

On Ren Shaoqing's academic homepage at USTC, his listed main research areas already include "Embodied Intelligence," specifically: Artificial Intelligence, World Models, Embodied Intelligence, Autonomous Driving, Computer Vision, Deep Learning, AI for Science.

Of course, what remains most eye-catching is Ren Shaoqing's proven achievements:

As of March 2026, his academic papers have been cited over 490,000 times, ranking first among domestic scholars and top three among Chinese scholars globally.

Awards include the 2023 Future Science Prize—Mathematics and Computer Science Award, the 2025 Wu Wenjun AI Science and Technology Progress First Prize, CVPR Best Paper Award, the 2025 NeurIPS Test of Time Award, the 2025 Helmholtz Prize (ICCV Ten-Year Impact Award), Software Defined Vehicle Innovator Award, ImageNet Competition and MSCOCO Competition Global Champion, and ranking third overall on the AI 2000 Global Artificial Intelligence Scholar list.

This article is from the WeChat public account "QbitAI", author: Yu Yang

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