The domestic embodied AI sector has witnessed its first major funding round of 2026, which has remarkably brought about a capital convergence of the three internet giants.

On January 12, X Square Robot officially announced the completion of a Series A++ funding round totaling 1 billion yuan. This round was jointly led by ByteDance and Sequoia China, with a prestigious lineup of co-investors including state-backed institutions such as the Beijing Information Industry Development Fund, Shenzhen Capital Group, Nanshan Strategic Emerging Industries Investment, and Wuxi Capital Group.

Notably, this represents the very first investment made by Shenzhen Capital Group's AI fund since its inception. Consequently, X Square Robot, established just over two years ago, has become one of the very few embodied AI companies in China to have secured strategic investment concurrently from all three internet giants: Alibaba, Meituan, and ByteDance.

Throughout the past year, major internet companies have typically pursued distinct strategic priorities within the embodied AI space, rarely reaching a consensus on the same investment target. The funding journey of X Square Robot, however, has broken this pattern.

In May 2025, it received a strategic investment from Meituan (Series A). In September 2025, it secured a round led by Alibaba Cloud (Series A+). In January 2026, it obtained a round led by ByteDance (Series A++).

The collective interest from the three giants in X Square stems from the company's alignment with a key common denominator in their respective businesses: a generalizable physical world model. Meituan focuses on complex operations for last-mile delivery, Alibaba concentrates on creating automated loops for warehouse logistics, while ByteDance aims to extend its multi-modal algorithm advantages to physical endpoints. The generalization capabilities demonstrated by X Square make it a strategic pivot that none of the players wish to miss.

Diverging from the industry's mainstream approach of "building the body first, then adding the brain," X Square Robot has consistently adhered to a "model-defined hardware" philosophy. Founder and CEO Wang Qian believes that the next phase of competition in embodied AI is fundamentally about "the competition in building foundational models based on data closed-loops and the evolutionary capability of the models themselves."

Recently, Wang Qian explicitly stated, "Embodied AI models are foundational models for the physical world; they are independent of and parallel to language models. We should not merely install large models into robots; instead, we must redesign the robot's body specifically for large models."

Guided by this principle, X Square has not blindly pursued robotic athleticism like some peers, but has instead focused on solving intricate manipulation challenges in unstructured environments. Its self-developed Wall-OSS operating system is regarded as a nascent "Android" for the embodied AI field, aiming to level hardware disparities through software capabilities via an open-source foundation.

Furthermore, X Square has developed its proprietary WALL-A model, a pioneering system paradigm that deeply integrates VLA (Vision-Language-Action) with world models. This model is the first to achieve "embodied multi-modal chain-of-thought," enabling it to utilize world models for spatiotemporal state prediction and internalize physical commonsense from data.

This technical architecture endows the robots with remarkable generalization capabilities: in recent tests involving food delivery and cardboard box recycling, even when faced with strong wind interference or visual obstructions, the robots could "mentally simulate" the complete scenario and autonomously correct errors like a human, requiring no manual intervention. Additionally, model evolution has unlocked highly complex fine motor skills, with robots now capable of autonomously performing actions demanding extremely precise fingertip force control, such as in-hand reorientation and dealing cards.

To support the evolution of this "brain," X Square has also established a tightly-knit closed loop encompassing both data and hardware.

On the data front, the company was an early mover in scaling real-machine data collection, constructing a model-driven data pipeline utilizing devices like master-slave teleoperation systems and exoskeletons.

On the hardware front, X Square has launched two high-performance robotic platforms: "Quantum One" and "Quantum Two." Through the comprehensive in-house development and algorithmic optimization of core components like robotic arms and joint modules, the company has significantly reduced overall unit costs.

Currently, X Square's robots are progressively entering various high-value sectors, including industrial manufacturing, logistics, and elderly care. When faced with chaotically stacked logistics parcels, the robots, leveraging their zero-shot generalization ability, can accurately identify irregular items and rapidly adapt to the work rhythm.

According to official disclosures, the 1 billion yuan raised in this round will be primarily allocated to the training and iteration of its next-generation unified, general-purpose large model for embodied AI.

With 2026 widely regarded within the industry as the "first year of large-scale implementation" for embodied AI, the battle for dominance over the gateway to the physical world is entering a critical phase. X Square Robot's consolidation of capital and application scenarios from all three giants undoubtedly adds another formidable contender to this competitive landscape.