C12.ai Raises ¥50M to Accelerate Physical AI Scientist Deployment, Begins Live Testing at BeOne Medicines Lab
C12.ai completes a ¥50M funding round. Its flagship product Talos has been running continuously for 50 days inside BeOne Medicines' pharmaceutical lab, performing over 3,000 physical operations with zero execution errors.
"Physical AI Scientist" developer C12.ai has completed a new ¥50M funding round led by Yonghua Capital, with participation from Weihao Chuangxin and individual investors. The company's initial round was completed in August 2022, led by Yunqi Partners, with co-investment from Jingya Capital, BioMap, and individual investors.
Founded in 2022, C12.ai's core product Talos uses a general-purpose dual-arm mobile robot as its hardware platform. Through proprietary sensors and a custom VLA (Vision-Language-Action) architecture, the robot possesses autonomous operation skills and real-time reasoning capabilities in professional experiments. Unlike traditional automation equipment's rigid "one machine, one task" model, Talos is a goal-driven general-purpose robot that can directly operate existing instruments without lab modifications, with real-time adaptation and error recovery capabilities.
50-Day Validation at BeOne Medicines Lab
Inside BeOne Medicines' real pharmaceutical laboratory, Talos has been running continuously for 50 days, demonstrating operational proficiency close to that of a senior medicinal chemist — an industry first. Across the 15 molecular purification experiments completed so far, each molecule involved over 200 consecutive operation steps — totaling more than 3,000 physical operations with zero execution errors.
Molecular purification consumes approximately 50% of a medicinal chemist's working time and demands significant experience and manual dexterity. Talos has reached the operational level of a senior medicinal chemist with 10 years of experience — a first in the industry. C12.ai aims for 80% of routine molecular purification to be completed by robots in the future, freeing scientists to focus on more creative research decisions.
From Purification to Full Pipeline: Expanding Along the Drug Lifecycle
For medicinal chemists, purification is merely Talos's first entry point into the laboratory. Founder and CEO Zhang Chen stated that the company's roadmap extends along the drug development lifecycle: currently focused on small-molecule purification, next moving into ADME (pharmacokinetic) experiments, and eventually covering GxP-compliant manufacturing and analytical method automation.
Beyond pharmaceuticals, C12.ai is also exploring flexible cosmetics manufacturing. A consumer takes a photo, AI identifies skin conditions and generates a custom formula, and the robot produces a small batch overnight for direct delivery. "Any physical scenario that requires small-batch, multi-lot continuous manufacturing with environmental adaptability is our target," said Zhang.
A Cross-Industry Veteran's Entrepreneurial Logic
Founder and CEO Zhang Chen is a cross-industry veteran spanning internet healthcare and pharmaceutical manufacturing. He previously served as Chief Architect / Head of Algorithm and Modeling at Alibaba Health, founded Tencent's Medical Big Data Lab, and was WuXi AppTec's first Chief Digital Officer (CDO). At WuXi, he used algorithms to raise production equipment utilization from 40% to 60%, while gaining deep insight into the limitations of traditional automation — purpose-built, rigid, and unable to be reused across scenarios.
"Traditional automation solved the standardization problem, but flexibility has always been its weakness," Zhang said. "What we're building is a general-purpose, software-defined robot scientist."
With this funding round complete, C12.ai will accelerate product iteration and multi-scenario deployment. "We're not building a single-point tool — we're letting the robot penetrate step by step along the entire life of a drug. Ultimately, we want better medicines to reach patients faster and more affordably," said Zhang.