Sudo AI, a technology company specializing in embodied AI, has completed its latest financing round, bringing its valuation to USD 2 billion. Its founder Su Hao, of Fudan University, is one of the world’s most cited scholars in embodied AI and robotics.

Su holds two PhDs, one in Mathematics from Beihang University and one in Computer Science from Stanford, where he was a student of Fei-Fei Li. Before moving to Fudan, he was a tenured professor at UC San Diego (UCSD).

Prior to founding Sudo AI, Su was a primary creator of PointNet (a foundational architecture for 3D deep learning) and SAPIEN (a high-fidelity simulator for robotic interaction). He was also one of the early researchers on ImageNet and ShapeNet. 

Sudo AI founder Su Hao

Hengdian Capital (HgC) is among a diverse pool of industrial and financial investors in Sudo AI, including CATL, Alibaba, Tencent, Hillhouse, and IDG. With this second consecutive investment in Sudo AI, HgC advances the Group’s long-term strategy towards foundational AI technologies and their industrial applications.

Alongside this round, Sudo AI has also introduced the #sudo R1, an integrated robot system focused on object picking, what the company calls the “gateway” to physical manipulation. The model aims to address core challenges in robotic control, including reliance on slow, expensive, and narrow real-world data collection.

Sudo AI uses a “Real2Sim2Real” simulation pre-training paradigm to reduce real-world data dependence, thus increasing efficiency in model iteration and scaling. This enables wider application to commercial scenarios like industrial sorting and warehouse depalletizing.

Sudo AI's #sudo R1 Model 

#sudo R1’s performance in various real-world environments has shown stable grasping capabilities for various types of objects (including transparent, reflective, or irregularly shaped items), as well as with random physical interference mid-task.

Supporting Su, formally a tenured professor at UC San Diego, is a consortium of top experts from top academic institutions like Tsinghua and Stanford, as well as firms including Tesla and NVIDIA. Through Sudo AI, they seek to align technological development with the practicalities of industrial automation.

Sudo AI’s primary focus is on building a sustainable technology system and developer ecosystem. In turn, this will support the model’s expansion into broad industrial applications and ongoing modernization of manufacturing.

HgC’s investment in the company reiterates the Group’s strategic commitment to foundational embodied AI, and the Group’s own focus on industrial development. Together with Sudo AI, Hengdian Group seeks to deepen its involvement in frontier tech, accelerate next-gen technology uptake, and help to shape the future of manufacturing systems.

Sudo AI's #sudo R1 Model