Shanghai (Gasgoo)- X Square Robot has closed a 1 billion yuan A++ round, according to a Jan. 12 announcement.
The round was co-led by ByteDance, Sequoia China, the Beijing Information Industry Development Fund, alongside other top-tier investors and local platforms. It is also the first investment by Shenzhen Capital Group's AI Fund since its inception.
Notably, beyond ByteDance, X Square Robot previously received backing from Meituan and Alibaba — making it the only embodied-intelligence company in China invested in by all three internet giants.
Image: X Square Robot
Embodied intelligence has kept drawing attention over the past two years, with robots' motion and control — their "bodies" — making clear strides. The competitive focus is now shifting from limbs to the "brain": how to build an intelligent core that understands the physical world, can manipulate objects, and adapts to complex, changing scenarios so robots can truly handle diverse real-world tasks.
An embodied foundation model is the physical-world counterpart to virtual-world base models such as large language and multimodal models — independent of, yet parallel to them. The crux is breaking bottlenecks in generalization and general-purpose capability. The complexity of physical reality demands robots that can process unstructured, dynamic and stochastic tasks in real time.
X Square Robot's embodied foundation model ingests all robotic sensory inputs — vision, touch, voice and more — and directly outputs the robot's actions, visual predictions and language.
"The next phase of competition in embodied intelligence, at its core, is still about foundation models built on closed-loop data and the models' ability to evolve," said Wang Qian, founder and CEO of X Square Robot.
Wang has repeatedly argued that in this frontier track, companies should strive to lead, not follow. X Square Robot continues to focus on three pillars — model iteration, data pipelines and robotic hardware — leveraging deep technical reserves and full-stack in-house development to push past current limits. Looking ahead, the company aims to use leading model capabilities as a fulcrum to unlock deeper shifts in embodied systems, translate the technology's value into industrial applications, and scale model-driven embodied intelligence across sectors — adding fresh momentum to industrial upgrading and productivity gains.
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