Independent Variable Robotics announced the completion of nearly 1 billion yuan in A+ round financing on Sunday morning. The round was co-led by Alibaba Cloud and National Science & Technology Investment Corporation (NCIG), with participation from China Development Bank Financial, Sequoia China, and Yingce Capital. Existing investor Meituan's strategic investment arm provided additional follow-on investment, while Lenovo Star and Legend Capital continued their investment support.

This marks Alibaba Cloud's first investment in an embodied intelligence company, demonstrating the cloud computing giant's strong recognition of Independent Variable's technology capabilities. Alibaba Cloud will provide multi-dimensional support to the company going forward.

The funding will be allocated toward the continued training of Independent Variable's fully self-developed general embodied intelligence foundation model and the research and development iteration of hardware products.