X Square Robot announced on June 29 that it has closed four consecutive financing rounds, the latest a Series C led by IDG, bringing the company's valuation past $2.8 billion (RMB 20 billion). HongShan and Xiaomi backed multiple rounds. With prior lead investments from Meituan, Alibaba, and ByteDance, the company is the only embodied-AI startup in China to hold lead-round backing from all four of the country's leading technology giants.
The company is building a full-stack embodied AI system — foundation models, robotics hardware, a proprietary data pipeline, and real-world deployment — rather than just hardware or just software. In April it introduced WALL-B, a general-purpose embodied AI foundation model built on its World Unified Model architecture, designed to let robots perceive, reason about, and act in physical environments without task-specific retraining.
China's embodied-AI sector is consolidating quickly. Beijing this month tagged humanoid robotics and embodied AI as nationwide industrial priorities, and X Square's funding pattern mirrors what happened with Chinese EV makers in 2018–2019 — strategic capital from BAT-class buyers concentrating in a small number of survivors. Western counterparts (Figure, Boston Dynamics, Agility) are pursuing the same problem with more fragmented investor bases and slower hardware production ramps.
Takeaway for learners: embodied AI is the next benchmark frontier after coding agents, and the foundation-model approach — one model that generalizes across hardware — is becoming the dominant bet on both sides of the Pacific. If you're choosing what to learn next, robotics simulation environments (Isaac Sim, MuJoCo) and visual-language-action models are where the 2027 hiring market is most likely to compound.