Shaanxi ORCA Electronic Intelligence Technology Co. (ORCAUBOAT) disclosed recently that it completed a Series C round in July 2026. Total funding for the year comes to nearly 300 million yuan, with the latest round led by Xi'an High-Tech Venture Capital and joined by Oriza Puhua and Sanyuan Capital.

ORCAUBOAT focuses on embodied AI for water surfaces, combining artificial intelligence, robotics and marine engineering to move vessels from conventional mechanical equipment toward intelligent, unmanned products.

Backing from scientists and industrial capital

Across multiple funding rounds, ORCAUBOAT has assembled a diverse base of shareholders and industry partners.

Early backers included the XbotPark fund led by HKUST professor Li Zexiang, Turing Venture Capital founded by Turing Award laureate Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, and the Brizan Ventures fund led by professor Ping Ko King-keung, alongside other scientist-led and industrial teams.

The company has also raised money from HongKongX, the Alibaba Entrepreneurs Fund, Gobi Partners, Houxue Capital, Oriza Holdings, Oriza Puhua and Tianshan Capital, and has drawn long-term support from state-backed institutions including Xi'an High-Tech Venture Capital, Nanshan Strategic Emerging Industry Investment, Xizhou International, Xi'an Financial Holdings, Yangtze River Collaborative Innovation and Tus-Star.

The investors and industrial resources behind ORCAUBOAT now span physical AI, robotics, marine technology, advanced manufacturing and international markets.

More than a thousand surface robots in operation

ORCAUBOAT has scaled to over a thousand surface robots in commercial operation, with business in more than 10 countries, 75 cities and over 130 bodies of water. Cumulative unmanned navigation has passed 2 million kilometers.

Its products and systems now operate in urban waterways, coastal ports and open sea, with deployments in China, Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia, India, Australia, Belgium and Spain.

In these settings, vessels and surface robots running ORCAUBOAT's autonomous driving system handle waterway maintenance, environmental cleanup, inspection, sightseeing and water recreation.

A full-stack marine physical AI system

Built around the idea of "AI for Boats" and led by a team of doctoral engineers from Tsinghua University, Northwestern Polytechnical University and other institutions, ORCAUBOAT has assembled a full-stack marine physical AI system spanning an embodied brain, an intelligence hub, physical nerves and a physical body.

At the embodied brain layer, the company continuously collects multimodal navigation data across varying wave conditions, wind speeds, currents, visibility and traffic density. It has accumulated tens of millions of navigation samples on the order of 50 million, plus more than 1,000TB of data, creating a flywheel of real-world operation, data feedback, model training and algorithm iteration.

At the intelligence hub layer, the company has built an autonomous navigation system combining situational awareness, decision-making and robust control, capable of interpreting complex waterway environments, planning long-distance routes, avoiding dynamic obstacles, coordinating multiple agents and managing motion control under wind and wave disturbance.

At the physical nerve layer, the company develops its own core hardware, including onboard domain controllers, intelligent sensing modules and 4D millimeter-wave radar.

Through its ORCA-APAS vessel autonomy system, the company adapts a single set of intelligent capabilities to different hull types and water conditions, taking marine embodied AI from one-off projects to repeatable, multi-scenario deployment.

One brain, many bodies

ORCAUBOAT is pursuing a "one brain, many bodies" strategy: a single vessel intelligence brain connected to different types of surface robots and hulls.

The "one brain" is ORCA-APAS. The system already covers vessel types ranging from 10,000-ton commercial cargo ships and government service craft to leisure yachts and inspection boats, delivering L2 to L4 autonomy across different waters, hull types, speeds and mission profiles.

In the professional market, ORCAUBOAT has won orders from major customers including China State Shipbuilding Corporation, COSCO Shipping, China Merchants Industry and MSC.

In the consumer market, the company has launched an L3 autonomy package for electric yachts and supplies products to the yacht business of a leading Chinese EV maker. According to the company, its products have also secured more than 3,000 pre-orders from a smart electric paddleboard brand that ranks top in its category on Amazon in the US.

Surface robots in multiple forms enter real-world use

The "many bodies" refers to ORCAUBOAT's in-house lineup of embodied surface robots.

In smart waterway maintenance, the company sells unmanned cleanup boats, marine unmanned surface vessels, unmanned weed-cutting boats and water conservancy inspection craft, with cumulative deliveries topping 1,000 units, placing it among the industry's leading shippers.

For waterfront economy projects, the company offers its Yang, Xi and Man series of intelligent pleasure boats, now deployed at more than 50 of China's 5A- and 4A-rated scenic areas for sightseeing, business hosting and water recreation.

Combining autonomous navigation, intelligent interaction and electrification, these products give scenic areas and waterfront tourism projects a new way to serve visitors.

Mirava electric yacht targets overseas markets

Abroad, ORCAUBOAT has introduced Mirava, its next-generation intelligent electric yacht, to the European market.

Mirava is pitched on advanced driver assistance, all-electric propulsion and connectivity, aimed at the overseas outdoor water recreation market. The company wants autonomy and electrification to turn yachting from a high-cost, high-barrier, maintenance-heavy purchase into a smarter, younger, more lifestyle-oriented category of consumer hardware.

That shift means marine embodied AI is no longer confined to industrial operations and professional vessels, and is beginning to reach tourism, entertainment and individual consumers.

Standardized products to close the commercial loop

ORCAUBOAT says it enters through high-frequency, must-have use cases, serving high-value customers with standardized products while avoiding reliance on bespoke projects that are hard to replicate.

On the business side, the company is pushing products from single projects to volume deployment through scaled delivery, hardware-software integration and reuse of its autonomy stack.

ORCAUBOAT says it has reached scaled delivery and profitability. It plans to widen the range of vessels its autonomy system supports, deepen its marine data reserves and model generalization, and extend marine embodied AI into more professional and consumer scenarios.