EagleEye Smart Wing Completes Third Round in Three Months: SJTU Post-2000 PhD Team Builds Embodied AI Flapping-Wing Robot

Bot Telegraph, July 11 — Embodied AI bio-inspired flapping-wing robotics company EagleEye Smart Wing (Yingkan Zhiyi) has recently closed a Series A round of tens of millions of yuan — its third financing round within three months. The round was led by Yuanhe PuHua, with Futeng Capital and Houxue Capital participating. Funds will support mass production preparation and market expansion for its first consumer product, team growth, and R&D for next-generation embodied intelligent flapping-wing robots and fluid simulation engines.

Founded in Shenzhen in March 2025, EagleEye Smart Wing is among the world’s earliest companies focused on embodied AI flapping-wing robots. Founder Chen Hao is a direct doctoral student in mechanical engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU). The R&D team accounts for over 75% of headcount, with core members from SJTU, DJI, Huawei, and ByteDance.

Unlike traditional rotor drones that fight against airflow, flapping-wing flight utilizes airflow. EagleEye Smart Wing pursues two technical tracks: the first consumer product, “Eagle X,” achieves a hybrid mode of gliding and flapping through its wing structure, leveraging airflow for efficient flight. It has completed over 3,000 cumulative hours of flight testing, entered mass production, and is slated to launch on Kickstarter in Q3 2026.

The second industrial-grade product evolves from “passive assistance” to “active mastery,” featuring approximately 15 degrees of freedom. Its wings can independently adjust angle, twist, and fold, enabling active airflow sensing and utilization. The technical foundation is the company’s proprietary Vortrix fluid simulation engine, which uses reinforcement learning to complete millions of iterations in virtual environments before zero-shot transfer to physical prototypes.

Founder Chen Hao explained that the core challenge of flapping-wing flight lies in nonlinear, unsteady aerodynamic modeling. The traditional approach relies on repeated wind tunnel testing — slow and costly. Vortrix first combines real wind tunnel data with particle-method modeling, then trains in simulation using reinforcement learning, enabling the robotic bird to autonomously learn optimal wing angles and flapping frequencies across different airflow conditions.

For market entry, EagleEye Smart Wing is targeting overseas consumer markets first, aimed at the global maker and enthusiast community. The product emphasizes openness and playability, with multiple reserved interfaces for users to design and swap wings, flash custom programs, and mount cameras.

Lead investor Yuanhe PuHua noted that while ground-based humanoid and quadruped robot tracks are becoming increasingly crowded, bio-inspired flying robots remain in the nascent stages — offering high technical barriers, a vast consumer market, and long-term industrial extensibility.