AI Robots Get $2.8 Billion Boost in China

X Square Robot, a Shenzhen-based embodied AI company, announced the successful completion of four consecutive financing rounds, culminating in a Series C. This achievement has pushed the company's valuation to over US$2.8 billion (RMB 20 billion), positioning it among China's most valuable embodied AI startups. The company has secured lead-round investment from all four of China's leading technology giants: Meituan, Alibaba, ByteDance, and Xiaomi.

The substantial funding will be directed towards enhancing core technologies and foundational research in embodied intelligence. X Square Robot aims to advance its pursuit of general-purpose embodied AI, designed to bridge the physical and digital worlds. Their approach integrates foundation models, robotics hardware, and a proprietary data pipeline system, enabling robots to adapt and generalize across diverse tasks without relying on traditional rule-based automation.

Key to their advancement is the WALL-B foundation model, launched in April 2026, which unifies perception, language, and action within a single network for superior multimodal understanding and continual learning. The company has also open-sourced WALL-OSS-0.5 for robot manipulation and WALL-WM for world modeling, demonstrating significant progress in autonomous task completion and cross-modal learning.

X Square Robot is actively deploying its AI and hardware solutions in household, industrial, and logistics sectors. Partnerships include an AI-powered cleaning service with 58.com in Shenzhen and Beijing, and the 'X Family Member Program,' where robots serve as household companions. These real-world deployments are creating a vital feedback loop, using operational data to continuously improve model performance and accelerate progress toward truly general-purpose embodied intelligence.