Nature Will
Category: Robotics / Embodied AI
Beijing-based physical AI lab, founded by Tsinghua professor Ning Ding, building general foundation models for the physical world; first model is Natura-1, a 50B-parameter dexterous-hand model. Nature Will was founded in 2026. The company is led by Ning Ding (丁宁). Based in Beijing, China. Latest round: Angel. Key investors include IDG Capital, Fengrui Capital (峰瑞资本), ZhenFund (真格基金), Shunwei Capital (顺为资本), Huafang Capital (华方资本), Ant Group, CATL, HongShan / Sequoia China, Kinzon Capital (凯辉基金), 5Y Capital (五源资本), Huakong Dianke (华控电科).
- Founded
- 2026
- Headquarters
- Beijing, China
Value proposition
General physical foundation models that turn large-scale human experience into dexterous, instruction-following robot action. The company sells the 'embodied brain' and does not build robot hardware.
Products and solutions
Natura-1 (released Oct 13, 2026): a 50B-parameter mixture-of-experts physical foundation model. It was pre-trained on more than 1M hours of egocentric human video and jointly models language, images, video and action. It drives a 20-DoF dexterous hand in a 100 ms control loop, with zero-shot instruction following and multi-minute long-horizon execution. A technical report accompanied the release.
Unique value
Unifies language understanding, visual world modeling and action generation in one sequence model. Pre-training on human egocentric video means it does not depend on scarce, expensive robot teleoperation data.
Target customer
Robot makers and embodied-AI application developers, including industrial, household/service and dexterous-manipulation use cases. No commercial customers have been disclosed.
Industries served
Robotics / embodied AI, dexterous manipulation, industrial and service robotics (general-purpose, no specific verticals disclosed)
Technology advantage
Modality-agnostic, serialized joint modeling of language, video and action using flow matching and joint denoising. Video and hand-action data are treated as two projections of one physical state, so human data without action labels still gives supervision. The team has strong academic and open-source credentials (OpenBMB, PRIME, TTRL).
How they differentiate
Focuses on dexterous hands and learning from massive egocentric human video, rather than robot-collected data or full-body humanoid hardware. Natura-1 is a single unified language-video-action model, not a VLM planner plus a separate action policy.
Main competitors
Physical Intelligence (π0.5), Skild AI, Zhipingfang (智平方) / Qianxun Intelligence (千寻智能)
Major milestones
2026-01-08: Beijing Nature Will Technology Co., Ltd. incorporated. 2026-04: angel round from IDG, Fengrui and ZhenFund at a ¥4B valuation reported. 2026-07: Ant Group, CATL, HongShan, Kinzon, 5Y Capital and Huakong Dianke join, Tianyancha lists this as an A round with an undisclosed amount. 2026-10-13: Natura-1 and its technical report released. 2026-11-09: Robotics & Automation News press release quotes Ning Ding as CEO of Nature Will.
Growth metrics
Valuation of about ¥4B reported at the angel stage. Founded January 2026. No revenue or commercial deployments disclosed.
Market positioning
Frontier 'embodied brain' foundation-model lab. Valued at about ¥4B (about $550M) at the angel stage, within six months of founding. The company's own materials say it is working toward physical AGI.
Geographic focus
China-based, global ambitions. Press coverage is in both English and Chinese.
About Ning Ding (丁宁)
Assistant Professor and doctoral supervisor, Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University (joined 2025); core contributor to the OpenBMB open-source community; BEng, Huazhong University of Science and Technology; PhD in Computer Science, Tsinghua (from 2018), advised by Haitao Zheng and Zhiyuan Liu; postdoc at Tsinghua with Bowen Zhou. Over 7,000 Google Scholar citations; 2023 Nature Machine Intelligence cover paper (delta tuning); led the Ultra-series alignment work, Implicit PRM / PRIME and TTRL reinforcement learning.
Latest news about Nature Will
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Official website: https://www.naturewill.ai