Author | Qiu Xiaofen
Editor | Yuan Silai
Hardcore learned that the ocean embodied intelligence company 'Shihang Intelligence' has completed its Series A financing round, raising over 1 billion RMB, marking the largest single round of financing in the global marine robotics field to date. This round was funded by industry investors including Shanghe Momentum Fund from chip companies 'Moore Thread' and 'Kunlun Core', Singapore's state-owned investment platform Vertex Growth, and listed company Dayang Motor, among others.
Additionally, Jinshajiang Venture Capital also participated in this round, marking the fifth investment round by its founder Zhu Xiaohu in 'Shihang Intelligence'. Existing shareholders such as Vertex China, China Growth Capital, and Changshi Capital all made significant follow-on investments.
Chen Xiaobo, founder and CEO of 'Shihang Intelligence', is a 1989-born alumnus of Harbin Engineering University. He has long been dedicated to the field of underwater robotics. At the age of 28, he received the First Prize of National Defense Science and Technology Progress Award, becoming the youngest recipient of this award, and led the development of China's first commercial underwater cleaning robot.
(Source / Company)
'Shihang Intelligence' revealed to Hardcore that this round of financing will primarily be used for core technology R&D, global market expansion, and industrial chain ecosystem development, further promoting the large-scale application of marine robots in complex underwater scenarios.
Unlike relatively standardized environments such as factories and warehouses, the ocean has long been considered one of the most challenging scenarios for robotics applications.
In underwater environments, robots must simultaneously face multiple challenges such as low light, high turbidity, complex currents, limited communication, high pressure, and corrosion. This means marine robots not only need stable mechanical structures and motion control capabilities but also must perform perception, judgment, and autonomous operations in complex environments.
In the past, a large amount of underwater work still heavily relied on professional divers and large-scale equipment, leading to issues such as high costs, significant risks, and limited efficiency.
According to 'Shihang Intelligence' introduction, the company has long focused on independent R&D of the underlying capabilities of marine robots. Its core technologies cover six major systems: power, control, sensing, navigation, sealing, and deployment.
(Source / Company)
It is understood that 'Shihang Intelligence' robots have full-depth operational capability from 0 meters to 10,000 meters and full degrees of freedom, allowing complex movements like forward, backward, lateral shift, and rotation in three-dimensional underwater space. They also support autonomous navigation, multi-robot collaborative operations, and other functions. To date, 'Shihang Intelligence' robots have achieved application in scenarios including ship cleaning, underwater security, offshore wind power, marine ranching, and subsea inspection.
The company revealed that in the first half of 2026 alone, 'Shihang Intelligence' secured orders amounting to over 1 billion RMB.
Among them, the 'Orca Robot' from 'Shihang Intelligence' has been deployed by leading shipping enterprises like China Merchants Energy Shipping and COSCO Bulk Shipping. It has cumulatively completed maintenance operations on over a thousand large vessels. It previously also spearheaded the formulation of China's first 'Underwater Cleaning Robot Operating Procedures' standard and won the First Prize of China Navigation Society Science and Technology Progress Award in 2025.
Beyond commercial deployment, 'Shihang Intelligence' continues to advance its core technology. In April this year, 'Shihang Intelligence' released the Ocean Embodied Large Model 'Cangqiong CEORION'— unlike traditional underwater robots that rely on manual remote control or preset programs, Cangqiong aims to equip robots with perception, understanding, and autonomous execution capabilities.
Chen Xiaobo, founder and CEO of 'Shihang Intelligence', told Hardcore that 'Cangqiong CEORION' adopts a unified end-to-end architecture, integrating environmental perception, task understanding, and action generation into a single model. It is trained using a combination of real operational data and simulation data. Currently, based on millions of hours of commercial operational data, 'Cangqiong CEORION' has constructed an ocean world model and is continuously optimized through real-world tasks.
This means that marine robots equipped with 'Cangqiong CEORION' no longer need to switch between multiple models for different tasks. They can cover 12 major categories of underwater operations, including inspection, detection, cleaning, grasping, cutting, welding, exploration, search and rescue, and emergency response.
In simulation tests, 'Cangqiong CEORION' achieved a task success rate exceeding 90% and a fine-control positioning and grasping success rate exceeding 90%—matching the operational level of professional divers. Additionally, when faced with entirely new marine environments, water quality conditions, lighting changes, and different robot platforms, 'Cangqiong CEORION's model exhibited a zero-shot adaptation capability exceeding 70%.
Furthermore, a major difference between marine and terrestrial scenarios lies in the difficulty of inference—visual information is often affected by water turbidity, light attenuation, and suspended particles. Therefore, the model needs to simultaneously integrate various sensory information and possess complex physical reasoning capabilities to complete operational decisions.
In the large model architecture of 'Cangqiong CEORION', 'Shihang Intelligence' embedded a physical reasoning module, enabling the model to predict potential risks and optimize decisions before action execution, reducing collision accident rates by 80%—this means that even in weak or non-existent communication environments, robots can still autonomously complete task planning and execution.
(Source / Company)
In the first half of this year, Shihang Intelligence was also selected as the core technology partner for the Singapore Maritime and Port Authority's National Underwater Hull Inspection and Cleaning Plan, joining this national-level project.
These implementation milestones indicate that marine robots are transitioning from single-point project validation to large-scale application. Real operational scenarios not only bring order revenue to companies but also continuously accumulate high-value operational data, driving continuous improvement of robot capabilities in the cycle of 'operation—data—model'.
Chen Xiaobo, founder and CEO of 'Shihang Intelligence', told Hardcore that the company will continue to invest in core marine robot technology, ocean embodied intelligence models, and global application scenarios, promoting the application of marine robots in more high-risk, high-difficulty, and high-value underwater operations.
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