Alibaba Cloud Leads $100M$140M Funding Round For Humanoid Robot Start-Up X Square Robot

September 8, 2025 by Mai Tao

X Square Robot , a Shenzhen-based humanoid robotics developer, has raised the equivalent of between $100 million and $140 million in its latest financing round, according to multiple reports.

Alibaba Cloud, the artificial intelligence and cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group, led the round, which the South China Morning Post reported as a 1 billion yuan (about $140 million) Series A+ investment. CNBC , meanwhile, cited the figure as $100 million.

Other backers include CAS Investment, China Development Bank Capital, HongShan Capital Group, Meituan, and Legend Capital. The deal marks Alibaba Cloud's first direct investment in the field of embodied intelligence.

X Square Robot said the funds will be used to continue training its self-developed embodied intelligence foundation models and to accelerate the iterative development of its humanoid hardware products.

Founded in 2023 by Wang Qian, the company has raised more than 2 billion yuan across eight financing rounds.

Wang, who previously founded a quantitative fund in the United States, holds degrees from Tsinghua University and earned his robotics PhD at the University of Southern California.

The company has released two main products to date: the Qunta X2, a dual-arm wheeled humanoid robot introduced last month, and the Artixon Hand, a dexterous robotic hand.

It has also open-sourced its Wall-OSS-4.2B foundation model, which it describes as capable of enabling robots to understand and act effectively in real-world environments.

Investor interest in embodied intelligence – the development of AI systems with physical robotic form – has been accelerating in China, where humanoid robots have entered mass production this year.

Several Chinese companies, including Unitree Robotics, UBTech Robotics, and LimX Dynamics, have also attracted major funding rounds as Beijing positions itself to build a domestic humanoid robot supply chain.

Alibaba has been expanding its footprint in robotics and embodied AI through investments in Unitree, Corenetic AI, Robotera, LimX Dynamics, and Galaxea. Ant Group, its financial affiliate, has also established a separate venture in Shanghai to pursue embodied intelligence research.

Tencent, another Chinese technology giant, has backed robotics firms such as UBTech Robotics and AgiBot while running its own robotics research operations.

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