Light Origins 亮源新创
Shenzhen physical-AI startup founded in late 2024 by ex-OpenAI researcher Roger Jiang, building the Light-O1 embodied foundation model and a bipedal humanoid.
Light Origins is a Chinese physical-AI company that develops foundation models for robots and its own humanoid hardware. It was founded in late 2024 and lists locations in Beijing, Shenzhen and Singapore; its funding announcement was datelined Shenzhen.
Founder. Founder and CEO Roger Jiang previously worked at OpenAI from 2019, contributing to pre-training, alignment, optimisation and infrastructure for InstructGPT, ChatGPT and GPT-4, and is credited eight times in the GPT-4 Technical Report. He holds a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Maryland.
Technical approach. The company describes its roadmap as three scaling paradigms for physical AI: scalable pre-training, scalable alignment and scalable deployment, with deployed robots generating data that feeds back into model training.
Published work. Light-O1 (September 2026) is described as its first general embodied foundation model. It is pretrained on human actions captured in videos to learn a transferable human action prior that connects language, vision and whole-body action; a preview playground is hosted on Hugging Face. Light REACT (September 2026) is a transformer-based whole-body in-context learning controller that lets humanoids adapt to external forces, hardware impairments and environmental constraints, recover from falls and fall back to crawling when upright locomotion is not feasible. LightNav-0 (September 2026) is a general-purpose navigation model built with a Real2Sim2Real data engine that converts more than 2,000 real-world scenes into more than 4,000 hours of simulated navigation experience, demonstrated zero-shot across several robot embodiments. LightParkour (August 2026) is a method that grows humanoid parkour and locomotion skills from short human-motion clips and distils them into one onboard depth-based policy.
Hardware. The research robot Lightbot 0 is a custom humanoid 90 cm tall, weighing 18.9 kg, with 21 actuated joints; its parkour policy runs onboard at 50 Hz from a chest-mounted depth camera. The company's product page announces a full-size bipedal humanoid as "coming soon".
Team and funding. As of August 2026 Light Origins had more than 100 employees, over 90% in R&D, with hardware engineers from companies including Huawei and DJI. On 14 August 2026 it announced a Pre-A round of several hundred million yuan led by CAS Investment, with participation from China Merchants Venture Capital and Xiang He Capital, to fund model training, multimodal data infrastructure and full-stack hardware and software development.
Primary type & automation activities this supplier delivers:
Light-O1
- Model: Light-O1
- Launch Year: 2026
General embodied foundation model pretrained on human actions from video for whole-body robot intelligence.
LightNav-0
- Model: LightNav-0
- Launch Year: 2026
General-purpose robot navigation model trained via Real2Sim2Real, generalising zero-shot across embodiments.
Lightbot 0
Custom small research humanoid used to deploy the company's onboard whole-body and parkour policies.
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Contact Light Origins
WEBSITE
https://www.lightorigins.comHEADQUARTERS
China
Company Facts
Founded
2024
Primary Role
Software/Algorithm
Company Size
-
Primary Region
Asia-Pacific
Annual Sales
-
Funding Stage
Early-Stage VC
Funding Total
-
