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Physix Frontier · News Briefing Card (TMTPost · Aug 11, 2026)

Oaknut Robotics lands angel round for tactile instinct tech

KEY FACTS

  • Embodied AI company Oaknut Robotics has closed an angel round led by China Merchants Venture and NIO Capital.
  • The team, founded by PhDs from Tsinghua University's Department of Mechanical Engineering, proposes an "instinct-driven" technology roadmap built on a tactile foundation.
  • It adopts a decoupled architecture separating task planning from manipulation execution, with its self-developed Natus model enabling zero-data cold start.
  • The company focuses on assembly in flexible industrial production, using millisecond-level on-device reflexes to boost changeover efficiency across multiple SKUs.

KEY DATA

近亿元Seed round amount
250赫兹Control frequency
千万次级别Sensor lifespan

PHYSIX OBSERVATION

As VLA large models spiral into fierce competition, Oaknut Robotics returns to physical fundamentals, using contact mechanics to crack the generalization problem. Its "instinct-driven" approach sidesteps the end-to-end black box, achieving millisecond-level response with an extremely small model and striking directly at the pain points of flexible manufacturing. This signals that embodied intelligence is shifting from stacking compute toward a deeper understanding of the laws of physical interaction, offering a more pragmatic path to deployment in highly dynamic industrial scenarios.

Source: TMTPost report