BeingBeyond Wins First Prize at HICOOL for Advances in Embodied Foundation Models

The HICOOL 2026 Global Entrepreneur Summit opened in Beijing on the evening of August 26 under the theme From the Source of Innovation to the Forefront of Industry. The winners of the HICOOL 2026 Global Entrepreneurship Competition were announced at the 

opening ceremony. BeingBeyond stood out among 10,209 entries to win first prize for its original innovation and technical advances in embodied foundation models. Founder Zongqing Lu accepted the trophy at the event.

Founded in 2020, the HICOOL Global Entrepreneurship Competition has grown from a single contest into a comprehensive ecosystem supporting the full innovation journey. It has become a primary gateway for entrepreneurs worldwide to discover Beijing and establish a presence in the city. This year's competition brought together leading ventures from around the world in fields including artificial intelligence, quantum information and advanced equipment. Projects combining technical depth with commercialization capabilities advanced to the finals. The final judging panel comprised senior partners from leading investment firms, industry specialists and technical experts, who assessed entries across technical innovation, team capabilities and commercial prospects.

The first prize recognizes BeingBeyond's capacity for technical innovation in embodied AI and reflects strong industry endorsement of its technical approach, research and development capabilities, commercialization potential and business value.

Founded in May 2025, BeingBeyond focuses on developing and applying general-purpose embodied foundation models. It was among the first companies in China to propose pretraining on large-scale egocentric videos, and the first AI startup in China to launch Latent World-Action Models. In just over a year, the company has reached several key industry milestones in large-scale egocentric video pretraining, releasing successive embodied foundation models pretrained on thousands, more than 10,000, 200,000 and 500,000 hours of egocentric videos.

In July 2026, BeingBeyond released Being-H0.8, a general-purpose foundation model for dexterous manipulation. As the world's first latent tactile world-action model, Being-H0.8 brings touch into large-scale model pretraining and unifies vision, touch, actions and future state changes in a shared latent space. This enables robots to understand not only what they see, do and touch, but also how the world changes as a result, supporting a more complete understanding and prediction of physical interactions.

BeingBeyond has now built a full infrastructure stack spanning data pipelines, model pretraining, post-training, evaluation and on-device deployment. This infrastructure supports the continuous accumulation of data at scale and ongoing improvements in model capabilities, helping robots operate in increasingly open and complex real-world environments.

BeingBeyond founder Zongqing Lu is a tenured associate professor in the School of Computer Science at Peking University, a recipient of national recognition for outstanding young talent, and a Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) Scholar. He has long served as senior area chair for top conferences including ICML, NeurIPS and ICLR. The company's core team comes from top universities worldwide, with deep expertise in reinforcement learning, multimodal foundation models and large-scale pretraining for embodied AI.

BeingBeyond is building BeingEco through broad, multilevel strategic partnerships across the value chain. By working with data service providers, chip companies, robot hardware and platform manufacturers, and application integrators, the company is advancing joint innovation across models, data, hardware and real-world environments to accelerate the use of embodied AI at scale.

The Being-H series is already being deeply integrated with platforms from several leading robotics companies, supporting perception, decision-making and manipulation in complex environments. BeingBeyond is also working with industry leaders on technical validation and joint innovation across industrial manufacturing and other fields, laying the groundwork for embodied AI to move from technical validation to commercial deployment at scale.

BeingBeyond founder Zongqing Lu accepts the award

"Winning first prize at the HICOOL 2026 is a strong endorsement of the BeingBeyond team's technical exploration and its work with industry," said Lu. "We will maintain a rapid pace of model iteration and continue to innovate in embodied foundation models. At the same time, we will focus on scalable real-world deployment, working with industry partners on flagship projects that can serve as examples for the sector and advance both the commercial and social value of embodied AI."

About BeingBeyond

BeingBeyond focuses on developing and applying general-purpose embodied foundation models. It was among the first companies in China to propose a general-purpose model framework trained on large-scale human video data, and the first AI startup in China to introduce a natively latent-space world model. With a mission to bring humanoid robots out of the laboratory and into everyday life, BeingBeyond is committed to solving the core technical challenges of embodied AI and leading the transformation of humanoid robotics.