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Cornerstone Robotics Raises over US$70 million Funding to Forge Accessibility in Robotic Surgery

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Funding from leading investors to accelerate R&D and international expansion to make robotic surgery solutions accessible to more

HONG KONG, Jan. 13, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Cornerstone Robotics (the “Company”), a leading global innovator in surgical robotics, today announced that it has successfully raised over US$70 million in Series C financing led by EQT with participation from Qiming Venture Partners, Alpha JWC Ventures, the Innovation and Technology Venture Fund, eGarden Ventures, CTS Funds, K2VC, Long-Z Capital, etc.

This funding will accelerate the Company’s efforts in advancing the commercialization process, developing new surgical robotics products, conducting clinical trials, obtaining regulatory approvals, and promoting global adoption of advanced robotic surgical solutions.

In addition to receiving funding from a group of prominent investors, the Company headquartered in Hong Kong and the Greater Bay Area, also received investment from the Innovation and Technology Venture Fund under the Innovation and Technology Commission of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government. The endorsement underscores confidence for Cornerstone Robotics’ product innovation and global commercialization capabilities. This backing will further enable the Company to expand into key geographies, including countries in Europe, Southeast Asia and across global markets.

Since its establishment in September 2019, Cornerstone Robotics has aimed to revolutionize healthcare by making advanced surgical systems accessible globally. Through in-house R&D and vertical supply chain integration, Cornerstone Robotics delivers high-quality performance at competitive prices, enabling partnerships with leading medical centers in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Europe, including the Faculty of Medicine of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and Chinese University of Hong Kong-Shenzhen Medicine. The Company’s successful clinical trials in multiple specialties – including urology, general surgery, gynecology and thoracic surgeries – have built a solid foundation for international expansion.

In September 2024, Cornerstone Robotics achieved a significant milestone when it obtained the National Medical Products Administration (NMPA) approval in China for “Sentire”, its pioneering Endoscopic Surgical System. Additionally in 2024, Cornerstone Robotics established a site in the UK. This collaboration aims to foster cutting-edge innovation, support advanced research, and enhance the Company’s ability to serve patients in Europe and across global markets.

Professor Samuel Au, founder and CEO of Cornerstone Robotics, stated, “Cornerstone Robotics experienced several pivotal milestones over the past year. We are deeply grateful to our shareholders for their trust and support. This milestone is not only a recognition of our team’s efforts in translating surgical robotics innovations into practical applications but also a testament to our commitment to long-term, high-quality development. ‘Building the cornerstone of surgical robotics industry’ has been our aspiration since we began in 2019. After five years of efforts, we have achieved independent R&D and manufacturing, also received recognition from the NMPA in 2024. Moving forward, our team will continue to innovate, expand global markets, advance international certifications, and collaborate with more partners to create value for the intelligent healthcare industry and contribute to a better future for humanity.”

Excerpts from Investment Institutions’ Remarks

[EQT]

Clara Ho and Gordon Shaw, Partners in the EQT Private Capital Asia advisory team, said, “Globally, there is an urgent need to make high-quality robot-assisted surgical care accessible to patients, yet few companies have the capability to deliver the level of safety, precision, and rigor required for these critical procedures. Cornerstone Robotics stands out as a leader in this space, combining cutting-edge medical robotics with a focus on expanding access to care. EQT is proud to support Cornerstone Robotics by leveraging our deep expertise in healthcare, technology, and life sciences to help advance their mission of providing innovative and cost-effective surgical solutions to patients worldwide.”

[Qiming Venture Partners]

William Hu, Managing Partner of Qiming Venture Partners, said, “The development and clinical application of surgical robots continue to drive improved treatment outcomes. Since Qiming Venture Partners’ investment in Cornerstone Robotics, we have observed steady enhancements in the company’s product performance and the continuous growth of its team. We believe Cornerstone Robotics is well-positioned to deliver increasingly competitive products and greater clinical value to customers worldwide. We are delighted to continue our investment and support as we work together toward new milestones.”

[Alpha JWC Ventures]

Jefrey Joe, General Partner Alpha JWC Ventures, said, “Alpha JWC Ventures is excited to partner with Cornerstone Robotics in their journey to expand into Southeast Asia. We believe their innovative approach to surgical robotics aligns with the growing needs and opportunities in the healthcare sector. We are committed to supporting their growth and success to bring the highest standards of healthcare in the region.”

The financial advisor to the Company is UBS.

About Cornerstone Robotics

Cornerstone Robotics (CSR) is dedicated to delivering accessible surgical systems that allow patients around the world to benefit from the highest standards of care. Our first-generation Endoscopic Surgical System is developed entirely in-house and has received approval by China’s National Medical Products Administration (NMPA). With multiple manufacturing facilities established in Greater Bay Area and corresponding supply chain support, we offer safe and accessible surgical robots to the world.

To find out more information, please visit our website at https://www.csrbtx.com/en/ .

About EQT

EQT is a purpose-driven global investment organization with EUR 246 billion in total assets under management (EUR 134 billion in fee-generating assets under management), divided into two business segments: Private Capital and Real Assets. EQT owns portfolio companies and assets in Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Americas and supports them in achieving sustainable growth, operational excellence, and market leadership.

More info: www.eqtgroup.com

Follow EQT on LinkedIn, X, YouTube and Instagram

About Qiming Venture Partners

Qiming Venture Partners was founded in 2006. Currently, Qiming Venture Partners manages eleven US Dollar funds and seven RMB funds with $9.5 billion in capital raised. Since our establishment, we have invested in outstanding companies in the Technology and Consumer (T&C) and Healthcare industries at the early and growth stages.

Since our debut, we have backed over 580 fast-growing and innovative companies. Over 210 of our portfolio companies have achieved exits through IPOs at the NYSE, NASDAQ, HKEX, Shanghai Stock Exchange, or Shenzhen Stock Exchange, or through M&A or other means. There are also over 80 portfolio companies that have achieved unicorn or super unicorn status.

About Alpha JWC Ventures

Alpha JWC Ventures is an early to growth-stage Southeast Asian venture capital firm. Its debut fund was launched in 2015 as Indonesia’s first independent and institutional early-stage venture capital fund. Over the years, Alpha JWC has established a strong reputation and clear positioning in the market as the leading venture capital firm with one of the region’s largest on-the-ground teams and a global network. The firm currently manages around US$ 650 million AUM – the largest early-stage fund in Southeast Asia – and 80+ active portfolio companies across Southeast Asia.

For more information, please visit https://www.alphajwc.com.

About Innovation and Technology Venture Fund

Innovation and Technology Venture Fund (ITVF), under the Innovation and Technology Commission of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government, co-invests with venture capital funds selected as ITVF’s co-investment partners (CPs) at a matching ratio of approximately 1 (ITVF): 2 (CP) in eligible local innovation and technology (I&T) start-ups to enrich the local I&T ecosystem.  The ITVF enhanced scheme has been also launched to invest in start-ups of strategic industries.

To find out more information, please visit the website at https://www.itf.gov.hk/l-eng/ITVF.asp

About eGarden Ventures

eGarden Ventures is a venture capital firm specializing in early growth-stage companies within emerging sectors. We are committed to supporting dedicated startup founders, providing not only financial investment but also strategic resources and guidance to help businesses thrive post-investment.

About CTS Capital

CTS Capital is a multi-stage healthcare and life sciences investment institution. Managed by a team of seasoned professionals with deep insights into the healthcare industry and extensive expertise in private equity, CTS Capital is committed to partnering with exceptional entrepreneurs and scientists, and actively engaging in the growth of its portfolio companies to drive technological and commercial innovations in China’s healthcare sector and the global market.

Guided by a research-driven investment strategy, CTS Capital’s investment focus spans biotechnology, innovative therapeutics, innovative medical devices, precision diagnosis, healthcare services, and other cutting-edge technologies within the broader healthcare landscape.

Since its inception, CTS Capital has invested in several leading companies in their respective sectors, many of which have achieved successful public listing, including United Imaging (688271.SH), SinoCellTech (688520.SH), SinoBiological (301047.SZ), Giant Biogene (02367.HK), and Recbio (02179.HK).

About KV2C

Founded in 2010, K2VC is an early-stage venture capital firm devoted to promoting technology advancement, indutrial upgrade, business model innovation and consumer lifestyle revolution. K2VC manages both RMB and USD funds, with AUM over 10 billion RMB and 700 portfolios companies year to date.

The English name of K2VC, comes from the abbreviation of Mount chhogo ri. K2 is the second highest mountain in the world and known for being the most difficult to climb, which symbolizes the great pursuit of entrepreneurs to surpass themselves and challenge their limits. K2 wishes to be a mountain guide for the entrepreneurs, accompany them in every step of the climb, overcome the difficult and reach the peak.

K2VC manages two funds, K2 Angel Partners and K2 Venture Partners. Besides venture capital investment, K2 also promotes social progress by funding Non-for-profit organizations and social enterprises.

About Long-Z Capital

Founded in 2017, Long-Z Investments focuses on investment in the consumer and technology industries and strives to become an important supporter of top entrepreneurs in these two industries. Rooted in Meituan ecosystem, we boost unique and rich industrial resources and advantages. At present, we have managed three RMB funds and one USD fund, with funds under management exceeding 13 billion yuan. The investors include government-guided funds, the world’s top sovereign funds, pension funds, well-known FOFs, leading enterprises in the consumer industry, internet companies, alumni donation funds and well-known professional institutions. Since establishment eight years ago, we have invested in dozens of member enterprises, including Li Auto, Cornerstone Robotics, ProfoundBio, MIXUE Ice Cream & Tea, Good Me, HEYTEA, Manner Coffee, Moonshot AI, Unitree Robotics, Del Technology, RongSemi, Axera, EcoFlow and SICHAIN, etc.

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SOURCE Cornerstone Robotics

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BinBase Expands 2026 BIN Dataset with Instant Payout Intelligence for iGaming, Gambling, and Cross-Border Transfers

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July 24, 2026

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BinBase updates its 2026 dataset with specialized Fast Funds, Visa Direct, and Mastercard MoneySend indicators to help iGaming operators and payout platforms execute seamless, instant card disbursements.

MIAMI, July 23, 2026 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ — BinBase, a global provider of payment routing intelligence and card issuing data, has introduced specialized instant payout indicators as part of its upgraded 2026 BIN Database. Tailored for iGaming operators, online gambling platforms, crypto-to-fiat ramps, and payout aggregators, the updated dataset helps platform engineers streamline real-time card disbursements and Push-to-Card (P2C) transactions.

In high-velocity sectors such as online betting and gaming, instantaneous player payouts are a primary driver of customer retention. However, executing Push-to-Card transactions through protocols like Visa Direct and Mastercard MoneySend requires knowing whether the receiving card issuer supports Fast Funds for specific merchant category codes (MCCs). Attempting instant payouts on non-eligible cards leads to declined transactions, elevated processing fees, and poor user experiences.

The 2026 BinBase release solves this operational bottleneck by delivering dedicated attributes for real-time fund disbursements:

Fast Funds Eligibility: Granular indicators identifying domestic and cross-border Fast Funds support across global Visa and Mastercard ranges.Online Gambling Fast Funds (OG FF): Dedicated flags specifically identifying card ranges authorized to receive real-time gambling and betting payouts.Mastercard MoneySend & Visa Direct Indicators: Precise protocol compatibility markers (MS Ind & MT Ind) ensuring push transactions are routed only to eligible recipient cards.Direct Debit & Pull-Funds Support: Indicators for recurring collections and account-funding transactions.

“Player payouts in iGaming cannot wait for standard 2-to-3-day ACH settlements,” said a spokesperson for Damiko Inc. “By embedding our Fast Funds and Gambling FF flags into their payment engines, operators can instantly validate recipient cards before initiating a transfer, guaranteeing high success rates and instant liquidity for their users.”

Fintech engineers and payout architects can examine the full 29-field database schema and access a free 2026 sample dataset on GitHub.

To explore commercial licensing, bulk database downloads, or custom data feeds, visit BinBase at https://binbase.com.

About Damiko Inc

Damiko Inc is a US-based fintech data provider specializing in card issuer analytics, payment routing data, and global BIN database solutions. Operating through its flagship product, BinBase.com, the company supplies high-precision transaction intelligence to help merchants and payment facilitators worldwide optimize approval rates and mitigate processing fees.

Media Contact
Fedor Lavrikoff, BinBase, 1 7866133334, sales@binbase.com, www.binbase.com 

View original content:https://www.prweb.com/releases/binbase-expands-2026-bin-dataset-with-instant-payout-intelligence-for-igaming-gambling-and-cross-border-transfers-302829344.html

SOURCE BinBase

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Walnut Coding’s Young Coders Serve as ‘Instructors’ at Huawei Cloud Developer Training Camp

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8 minutes ago

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July 24, 2026

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Ages 8 and 15, students showcase AI-era project-building skills from concept to working application

BEIJING, July 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Walnut Coding (the “Company”), a leading online platform for youth coding education, said two of its students – ages 8 and 15 – have joined the “instructor” lineup at Huawei Cloud Developer Training Camp, making them among the youngest “instructors” in the program’s history. The Company cites the pair as a prime example of how young learners can combine coding fundamentals with AI tools to turn ideas into working applications.

The two students, Bolin Du, 8, and Peiqi Gao, 15, built working applications using Huawei Cloud CodeArts, an AI coding assistant, then presented the projects to the training camp themselves – walking the audience through their design choices, technical builds, and debugging process.

The move lands at a moment when AI coding tools are forcing a rethink across the education sector. Tools that can generate functioning code from a plain-language prompt have undercut the traditional argument for teaching children to program – that they need the skill to build things themselves. Walnut Coding’s answer is that the more valuable skill now is judgment – knowing what problem to solve, breaking it into parts, and determining whether an AI’s output actually works.

Gao built a travel-planning application that generates routes, itineraries, and recommendations based on user input, handling the project end to end, from requirements and design through coding and debugging. Du, the younger of the two, built an interactive calendar application, using HTML for page structure, CSS for visual design, and JavaScript for interactive features. Both students then took on an instructor’s role at the camp, presenting their project goals and technical implementation to the audience – a step Walnut Coding says separated the work from a typical classroom assignment.

These were not classroom exercises but working projects, built and presented inside a professional developer-training environment. The experience demanded more from both students than simply producing something functional – they needed to articulate their reasoning, defend technical choices, and refine the final result under scrutiny. Their participation signals a broader shift underway in what youth coding education can deliver.

AI is making code generation easier, but it is also redrawing which skills actually matter. A student who relies only on one-click generation may get a rough prototype quickly, but still struggle to spot logical flaws, judge whether the output is reliable, or turn an abstract idea into a product that actually works. Students with programming foundations, by contrast, are better positioned to define requirements, evaluate what the AI produces, correct its errors, and treat the technology as a tool rather than a shortcut to lean on.

“AI can help children generate code faster, but it cannot decide for them what problem they should solve, nor can it make the final judgment about whether the result is truly effective,” said Pengxuan Zeng, founder and CEO of Walnut Coding. “What these two students demonstrated is not just coding technique, but the ability to define needs, break down tasks, verify outcomes, and turn an idea into a working product. That is why we believe young people still need to learn programming in the AI era.”

Walnut Coding structures its courses around that thesis, pairing student-led project work with teaching-assistant guidance and AI-assisted support. According to the Company, this data is continuously fed back into its systems to refine the personalization of AI-assisted feedback — a closed-loop process linking teaching, practice, feedback, and curriculum development.

The Company frames the payoffs less around producing professional software engineers than around a broader form of literacy. As AI continues to reshape how tasks get done, the ability to understand the technology, structure problems clearly and collaborate effectively with intelligent tools may prove one of the most durable skills a young learner can develop.

Walnut Coding says it plans to keep expanding opportunities for students to build practical projects, partner with industry technology platforms such as Huawei Cloud, and develop the core capabilities needed to build with technology in the AI era.

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/walnut-codings-young-coders-serve-as-instructors-at-huawei-cloud-developer-training-camp-302833884.html

SOURCE Walnut Coding

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MOREH Showcases High-Performance LLM Inference on AMD GPUs at AMD Advancing AI 2026

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8 minutes ago

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July 24, 2026

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SAN FRANCISCO, July 23, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Moreh, an AI infrastructure software company, led by CEO Gangwon Jo, participated in AMD Advancing AI 2026, AMD’s flagship annual AI event held in San Francisco on July 22–23 (local time), where it demonstrated its distributed inference solution, the MoAI Inference Framework, running on AMD GPUs.

At the event, Moreh presented a live demonstration of the GLM-5.1 large language model (LLM) powered by the MoAI Inference Framework on a system equipped with 32 AMD Instinct™ MI300X GPUs across four nodes. Visitors experienced the chatbot firsthand, evaluating its response speed and service quality while observing performance across a range of real-world use cases.

Unlike conventional demonstrations that simply run an AI model, Moreh’s showcase displayed key inference service metrics in real time, including GPU utilization, Tokens Per Second (TPS), Time To First Token (TTFT), and Time Per Output Token (TPOT). This enabled attendees to directly verify both inference performance and GPU resource efficiency in a production-like service environment.

Global AI industry leaders and enterprise customers attending the event expressed strong interest in the system’s fast response times and stable performance. In particular, the live deployment of the computationally demanding GLM-5.1 model on AMD GPUs at production-grade service levels received positive feedback from visitors.

Moreh’s MoAI Inference Framework is widely recognized as the world’s first commercially deployed distributed inference solution built for the AMD ecosystem. Its distributed inference and heterogeneous computing technologies are designed to dramatically reduce AI service costs, enabling broader adoption of AI worldwide. The technology addresses one of the industry’s biggest challenges-the rapidly rising infrastructure and service costs caused by increasingly larger AI models-by delivering a more efficient inference infrastructure.

Moreh CEO Gangwon Jo stated, “This event provided an opportunity for global customers to verify firsthand that top-tier inference performance can be achieved on AMD GPU environments,” and added “We will continue advancing our AI infrastructure software so enterprises can operate AI services as efficiently as possible, regardless of the underlying GPU platform.”

Moreh develops its own AI infrastructure engine and has expanded its end-to-end AI capabilities through its foundation LLM subsidiary, Motif Technologies, covering both AI infrastructure and foundation models. The company is also strengthening its presence in the global AI market through strategic partnerships with leading technology companies, including AMD and Tenstorrent.

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SOURCE Moreh

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