(Yicai) Sept. 9 -- X Square Robot, a Chinese startup developing general-purpose embodied intelligence models, has bagged nearly CNY1 billion (USD140.3 million) in a Series A+ financing round and launched its self-developed open-source embodied foundation model.

The latest fundraiser was led by Alibaba Group Holdings' cloud computing arm Alibaba Cloud, Shenzhen-based X Square announced yesterday. Institutional investors, including Guoke Investment and China Development Bank Financial, as well as industrial ones, such as Meituan and Lenovo, also participated.

X Square bagged hundreds of millions of Chinese yuan, equivalent to tens of millions of US dollars, in a Series A funding round led by Meituan earlier this year. The latest round was the first time internet giants Alibaba and Meituan took part in the same fundraiser for a humanoid robot maker, and it was also Alibaba Cloud's first investment in the sector.

X Square has shortened the iteration cycle of its embodied intelligence model to a new version every two to three months, founder and Chief Executive Wang Qian told Yicai. In addition to providing funds, industrial investors have also brought in real application scenarios, he said, adding that the firm's products are still in the proof of concept phase.

The open-source Wall-OSS foundation model includes complete model parameters, training and inference code, optimization solutions, and supporting toolchains, according to X Square.

"We hope that the open-sourced model will become an out-of-the-box 'brain' for more developers, enabling them to put it into use," Wang noted, adding that it should serve as a catalyst to accelerate the maturity of the industrial ecosystem. "Only when the open-sourced model becomes a widely applicable tool can the industry truly embrace the era of general-purpose embodied intelligence."

Since establishing a research and development team, X Square has used a lot of real data for model training and has built its own large-scale data collection factory to address data quality, scale, and other issues, Wang said. High-quality proprietary data has also facilitated the update and iteration of its embodied intelligence model, he pointed out.

Regarding X Square's entry into the hardware business, Wang said that the company "hopes to define hardware from the perspective of model training to achieve closer coupling between software and hardware."

X Square has launched the Quanta X2 humanoid robot and a self-developed dexterous hand with 20 degrees of freedom so far, aiming to achieve small-scale shipments by the end of this year, Wang pointed out.

Alibaba Cloud participated in the fundraiser because it is optimistic about X Square's model iteration pace and technical path and its ability to transform iterative capabilities into industry influence, a source close to the Hangzhou-based firm said to Yicai. "There are also precedents overseas where robot makers ally with cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure," the person added.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Martin Kadiev