X Square Robot raises $143.4M Series A

The round was led by ByteDance and HongShan Capital Group. Other participants included the Beijing Information Industry Development Fund and Shenzhen Capital Group, whose new AI fund made its first investment in the deal. The company labels the round Series A++. That makes it the only embodied AI company in China with backing from ByteDance, Meituan and Alibaba. The preceding A+ round, in September 2025, raised nearly 1 billion yuan and was led by Alibaba Cloud, its first embodied AI investment. Caixin put total funding at 3 billion yuan. A later report said SAIC Capital and a CICC-SAIC Motor fund led a further raise that Caixin said gave the company the highest disclosed valuation among embodied AI startups that year. Several Chinese robotics startups have raised over 1 billion yuan, and some are preparing IPOs. For founders, the company's pitch is a foundation model for physical tasks, backed by its own data pipeline. It built capture tools including teleoperation, exoskeletons and UMI. Strategic investors are paying for proprietary real-world data and a hardware-to-model feedback loop, not for robots alone. Companies building in physical AI should expect investors to ask who owns that data loop, and whether industrial backers can supply deployment.