Chinese humanoid robot startup X Square Robot has announced a significant funding round of approximately $100 million led by Alibaba Cloud, marking its eighth funding since December 2023, with total investments reaching around 2 billion yuan ($280 million).

The company plans to prepare for an IPO next year and is already generating revenue from sales to institutions such as schools, hotels, and retirement homes, while exploring markets in Japan and Singapore.

Additional investors include CAS Investment, China Development Bank Capital, HongShan Capital Group, Meituan, and Legend Capital.

X Square Robot has developed a fully self-designed wheeled humanoid robot that balances performance in load capacity, movement, speed, and control accuracy, featuring a five-finger dexterous hand with 20 degrees of freedom and pressure sensing.

The company recently unveiled the Quanta X2, a practical humanoid robot with wheels and pressure-sensitive hands, priced at around $80,000, with plans to reduce costs to approximately $10,000 within 3-5 years.

Founded at the end of 2023, X Square Robot aims to create autonomous robots capable of operating in diverse environments like homes, hotels, and industrial settings, emphasizing hardware and software integration.

Yang Qian, COO of X Square Robot, emphasized that AI is crucial for expanding robotic capabilities beyond simple object manipulation, with the goal of developing household-ready humanoids that can perform complex, autonomous tasks.

The company plans to use its recent funding to enhance training of its embodied intelligence foundation models and accelerate hardware development, competing in the global household robotics market driven by AI.

X Square Robot has open-sourced its Wall-OSS, an embodied AI foundation model designed for robotics, which features shared attention and expert routing, aiming to accelerate industry adoption and research.

Wall-OSS is a multimodal, open-source model that generalizes across various robot forms, addressing challenges like catastrophic forgetting and modal decoupling, and is intended to foster further development in embodied AI.

While acknowledging that AI for robots currently lags behind generative AI like ChatGPT, Alibaba's COO Yang Qian estimates that achieving ChatGPT 3.5-like capabilities in robots may take at least 12 months, due to the lack of clear benchmarks.

Founder Wang Qian envisions humanoid robots becoming integrated helpers in daily life, with the potential to serve as robotic butlers within five years, highlighting China's rising influence in the global humanoid robotics industry.

Wang Qian, who previously founded a U.S.-based quantitative fund and holds degrees from Tsinghua University and USC, emphasizes the importance of integrating hardware and software innovations and advancing AI technology to develop embodied intelligence.