According to media reports, X Square Robot recently completed nearly 1 billion yuan in Series A+ funding. This round was co-led by Alibaba Cloud and Guoke Investment, with participation from renowned institutions such as China Development Bank Financial, Sequoia Capital, and Insight Capital. Existing shareholders Meituan, Lenovo Star, and Legend Capital continued to increase their investment. Notably, this is Alibaba Cloud's first investment in an embodied intelligence company. Alibaba Group has previously established a broad presence in this sector through investments in companies such as Zhuji Power and Yushu Robotics.
Founded in December 2023, X Square Robot, despite being less than two years old, has already completed seven rounds of financing, totaling over 1 billion yuan. The company is dedicated to developing a general-purpose large-scale model for embodied intelligence. Its technical goal is to enable general-purpose robots to autonomously perform tasks through human-like interaction, perception, and action, while also possessing efficient generalization and transfer capabilities. This vision aligns closely with Alibaba Cloud's strategic layout in the AI infrastructure sector. Industry insiders reveal that after its investment in the large-scale model company, Alibaba has prioritized embodied intelligence, "investing in virtually every embodied intelligence company."
The company's founder, Wang Qian, also has a notable background. This Tsinghua University graduate, who received his bachelor's and master's degrees, is one of the first researchers in the world to propose the attention mechanism in neural networks. His doctoral research experience at a top US robotics laboratory spans a wide range of fields, from robotics manipulation to home service robots. With the completion of this round of financing, Arbitrary Robotics will accelerate the development of its general-purpose large-scale models. The addition of Alibaba Cloud not only provides financial support for the startup but also potentially fosters deep synergy between cloud computing resources and industry application scenarios.
