Nio autonomous driving chief Ren Shaoqing reportedly founds embodied robotics startup

• Ren has reportedly founded an embodied robotics company that may have already secured funding.
• Following former autonomous driving chiefs at Xpeng and Li Auto, Ren's reported latest move shows talent continuing to flow from autonomous driving into embodied AI.

Nio Inc (NYSE: NIO) autonomous driving chief Ren Shaoqing has reportedly founded an embodied robotics company, becoming the latest senior Chinese autonomous driving executive to move into embodied AI.

Red Probe, a media outlet focused on the automotive and autonomous driving sectors, reported on Friday that Ren's new company may have already secured funding.

The report did not disclose the company's name or the size of the potential funding, nor did it say whether Ren's role at Nio would change.

Ren is a senior vice president at Nio and oversees the company's autonomous driving research and development. He joined Nio in 2020 as chief expert and assistant vice president, was promoted to vice president in 2023, and became senior vice president in 2026.

Before joining Nio, Ren was already a prominent researcher in computer vision. He earned his doctorate through a joint program between the University of Science and Technology of China and Microsoft Research Asia, and contributed to major computer vision research including ResNet and Faster R-CNN.

The paper on ResNet was published at CVPR 2016 and won the Best Paper award, later becoming one of the most-cited papers in computer vision.

After earning his doctorate in 2016, Ren co-founded autonomous driving company Momenta (HKEX: 6880) with Cao Xudong and others, serving as its R&D director.

He left Momenta in 2020 and subsequently joined Nio to lead the development of its in-house autonomous driving technology. Momenta went public in Hong Kong last month.

During his time at Nio, Ren has pushed the development and production deployment of world-model technology. Nio unveiled the Nio World Model (NWM) in 2024 and has continued expanding its capabilities through software iterations, with the system now evolving to NWM 2.5.

Ren's latest move also extends a trend of key autonomous driving talent in China shifting toward embodied AI, Red Probe noted.

Former Xpeng (NYSE: XPEV) autonomous driving chief Li Liyun joined robotics startup EngineAI Robotics earlier this year. Li stepped down as Xpeng's autonomous driving chief in October 2025, after previously overseeing the company's smart driving solutions.

Former Li Auto (NASDAQ: LI) smart driving chief Lang Xianpeng left the company earlier this year and teamed up with former Huawei executive Ren Geng to establish Kunlunxing Robotics.

That means the current or former autonomous driving chiefs of China's 3 major EV startups — Nio, Xpeng and Li Auto — have all become involved in embodied AI to varying degrees.

Autonomous driving and embodied robotics share significant overlap in their technology stacks, including visual perception, world models, motion planning, reinforcement learning and large-scale data closed loops.

That has made autonomous driving executives with mass-production experience highly sought-after talent in the robotics industry.

In September 2025, Ren also joined an AI laboratory at the University of Science and Technology of China while retaining his position at Nio. He said at the time that the arrangement would not affect his work at Nio.

If the report that Ren has founded a robotics company is confirmed, he would be simultaneously involved in automotive autonomous driving, AI research and embodied robotics, further highlighting the accelerating flow of talent and technology between the autonomous driving and robotics industries.