Guiyu Technology puts a universal 'brain' in drones that fly without GPS, raising hundreds of millions in six months

The embodied-intelligence startup scene is red-hot, but most players are focused on the ground — humanoid robots and quadruped machines. Guiyu Technology has taken the fight into the air: instead of building robots with hands and feet, it is putting a "brain" into drones so they can sense their surroundings, locate themselves, plan routes, and finish missions without GPS or a human pilot at the controls.

Founder Zhang Fu brings an unusual pedigree: he studied under Li Zexiang, the "godfather of Hong Kong entrepreneurship," spent eight years as an industry consultant at DJI, and is now an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Hong Kong. His MaRS Lab's FAST-LIVO series lets drones navigate even when GPS fails, work that won the IEEE Transactions on Robotics (TRO) Fukushima Memorial Best Paper Award.

Zhang argues embodied intelligence does not have to grow hands and feet — it can first grow a pair of wings, venturing into curtain walls dozens of meters high, steep slopes, and dangerous industrial sites on behalf of humans. What Guiyu really wants to sell is not just smarter drones but a universal drone brain: the same intelligence installed in different aircraft, letting them perceive, decide, and act on their own.

The company has built out technology stacks covering multimodal perception, end-to-end motion control, world navigation models, dexterous manipulation, and swarm coordination, aiming to free aircraft from dependence on GPS, prior maps, and continuous manual control.

Capital is already placing bets. Zhang says Guiyu closed four consecutive funding rounds within six months, totaling hundreds of millions of RMB, with backers including several venture capital funds as well as Alibaba. To him, investors are not betting on a smarter drone but on a coming paradigm shift in flight platforms: whether thousands of different aircraft can share one continuously evolving intelligence.

On the product roadmap, phase-one products will enter mass production by the end of this year — drones that fly autonomously into underground pipe corridors, tunnels, warehouses, factories, under-bridge spaces, and forests to carry out specific tasks without a remote pilot. Phase two adds human-like reasoning and decision-making in completely unknown environments; phase three adds the ability to intervene in the world, such as grasping, pointing to high-altitude work like glass-curtain-wall cleaning.

Zhang argues aerial embodied intelligence will commercialize faster than ground robots: the first half of the flight-vehicle industry was about engineering maturity, but the next half will be defined by autonomous capability. He notes Guiyu's products weigh under one kilogram and are about the size of an A4 sheet, with battery life similar to ordinary drones — yet autonomy sharply improves "effective endurance," cutting a 20-minute task to about five minutes.

Scarce aerial data remains a shared industry bottleneck. Real high-quality flight data is expensive and long-tail scenarios are hard to collect, Zhang says, so the team is exploring ways to build larger, richer simulation training environments from limited real-world data. Whether Guiyu delivers on its year-end mass-production promise will be a key test of the aerial-embodied-intelligence route.