Chinese artificial intelligence startup X Square Robot has raised over $100 million in its Series A funding round. The investment was led by Meituan’s strategic investment arm, with additional support from Long-Z Capital, formerly known as Meituan-Dianping Industry Fund.

Founded in December 2023, X Square Robot develops embodied AI models and robotic systems. The company plans to use the funds to enhance its proprietary embodied intelligence models and to expand the application of its technology in various smart service sectors.

In less than 18 months, X Square Robot has completed seven funding rounds, raising over 1 billion yuan (approximately $140 million). Previous investors include Lightspeed China, Legend Capital, Yunqi Partners, and GF Xinde.

The company’s flagship model series, known as Great Wall, integrates multimodal inputs, including sensor data, natural language, and motion commands. Its WALL-A model is pretrained on large datasets and fine-tuned for multitasking. This allows it to generalize to new tasks.

X Square Robot has also developed tools for data acquisition and processing aimed at improving quality control and data collection efficiency. Additionally, the company has designed robotic systems for operation in complex environments, demonstrating multimodal outputs and advanced reasoning capabilities.

The startup’s team includes researchers from early Transformer models and major AI projects in China. CEO Wang Qian emphasized the company’s commitment to advancing model, data, and product capabilities for long-term use in service environments.

🔗 Source: 36Kr

🧠 Food for thought

1️⃣ Embodied AI funding accelerates amid fierce global competition

X Square’s fundraising velocity reflects a broader pattern of large capital investments flowing into embodied AI startups worldwide.

The company has raised approximately $140 million across seven funding rounds in less than 18 months since its December 2023 founding, showing extraordinary investor confidence in early-stage robotics ventures1.

This pattern follows earlier major investments like UBTECH’s $820 million funding round in 2018, which similarly focused on bringing humanoid robots into everyday applications2.

The investment surge occurs against a backdrop of rapidly growing robotics adoption globally, with industrial robot installations increasing 10% year-over-year and professional service robot sales jumping 30% in 2023 according to the International Federation of Robotics3.

Asian companies are dominating robot deployments, with 70% of new industrial robots and 80% of professional service robots being installed in the Asia-Pacific region, highlighting the competitive regional dynamics driving X Square’s growth3.

2️⃣ Zero-shot generalization emerges as the frontier benchmark in robotics AI

X Square’s emphasis on zero-shot generalization capabilities for their WALL-A model reflects a decisive technical battleground in embodied AI development.