Independent Variable Robotics Raises Nearly 1 Billion Yuan in Series A+ Round, Open-Sources End-to-End Embodied AI Foundation Model WALL-OSS
Alibaba Cloud Makes Its First Move Into Embodied Artificial Intelligence
Unity Ventures portfolio company Independent Variable Robotics recently closed a nearly RMB 1 billion Series A+ round. The round was led by Alibaba Cloud and CASID, with participation from China Development Bank Capital, HSG, and Zhence Capital. Existing investor Meituan Strategic Investment made an additional investment above its pro-rata share, while Legend Star and Legend Capital continued their follow-on investments.
This marks Alibaba Cloud's first investment in an embodied AI company. Alibaba Cloud has expressed strong recognition of Independent Variable's technology and will provide multi-dimensional support to the company. The funds will be used for continued training of Independent Variable's fully self-developed general-purpose embodied AI foundation model and R&D iteration of hardware products.
Since its founding in late 2023, Independent Variable has established a technical path toward general embodied AI through end-to-end unified large models, and recently released its fully self-developed wheeled dual-arm humanoid robot controlled by multimodal large models — Quanta X2. The company's integrated software-hardware development approach, along with its forward-looking technical vision and achievements, has gained recognition from national investment platforms, top-tier domestic and international investment institutions, and industrial capital.
As the earliest company in China to achieve end-to-end embodied AI large models, Independent Variable independently developed the "WALL-A" series of VLA (Vision-Language-Action) manipulation large models, constructing a unified cognition and action framework. In a unified representation space, the model simultaneously processes perception, reasoning, and action, directly performing cross-modal causal reasoning and action decision-making — enabling robots to ultimately think and work like humans. Currently, the "WALL-A" model has demonstrated zero-shot generalization capabilities on certain entirely novel task types that it was never trained on.
Additionally, the company is the first to achieve an end-to-end embodied chain-of-thought reasoning framework, performing deep reasoning based on multimodal input and generating multimodal output, forming a complete closed loop of autonomous decision-making, execution, exploration, and reflection. The model tightly integrates language understanding, visual perception, and action execution, forming a reasoning process closer to human thinking. This successfully breaks through bottlenecks in multi-step long-sequence tasks, substantially improving task completion rates and greatly expanding the boundaries of robots' ability to handle complex real-world scenarios.
By mid-this year, the company became the first to achieve complex manipulation using an embodied AI large model to control a high-DOF dexterous hand. Previously, Independent Variable released a video demonstrating its self-developed large model controlling a high-DOF dexterous hand to delicately pick up and distribute playing cards — a type of elastic, deformable object.
Currently, to advance research and application of embodied AI large models, Independent Variable has open-sourced its developer-facing embodied foundation model "Wall-OSS," along with releasing the relevant training code, enabling global developers to quickly fine-tune and practically deploy it on their own robot platforms.
Wall-OSS features strong generalization and reasoning capabilities, outperforming other foundation models on long-horizon manipulation tasks. As a multimodal base model, it also demonstrates strong causal reasoning, spatial understanding, and reflection capabilities.
Wall-OSS is an open-source embodied foundation model trained on large-scale real-world data. In terms of model architecture, it innovatively designs a "shared attention + expert routing (FFN)" architecture, enabling lossless knowledge transfer from VLM to manipulation models and achieving deep coupling of language and action. In terms of training methodology, it pioneers a three-stage training paradigm of "first discrete, then continuous, then joint", ensuring that VLM's cognitive capabilities are stably and losslessly transferred and extended to physical actions. Furthermore, unified cross-level chain-of-thought enables forward arbitrary mapping across levels of abstraction, allowing the model to seamlessly switch between high-level decision-making and low-level execution within a single differentiable framework.
On the hardware side, in August this year, Independent Variable released its fully self-developed wheeled dual-arm humanoid robot "Quanta X2." In less than six months, the company achieved full-stack self-development of robot bodies, high-DOF dexterous hands, and exoskeleton teleoperation data collection devices.
Quanta X2 is a model-native general-purpose robot body. Its design not only accounts for model training and complex manipulation task requirements, but also achieves comprehensive balance and optimization across core metrics including payload capacity, operational workspace, movement speed, and control precision.
Quanta X2's five-finger dexterous hand employs biomimetic structural design, with 20 degrees of freedom per hand and the ability to sense subtle pressure changes. Meanwhile, based on integrated arm-hand exoskeleton technology, Independent Variable has pioneered an industry-leading integrated whole-body teleoperation solution combining "humanoid robotic arm + high-DOF dexterous hand." Quanta X2 can not only collect high-quality data to feed back into model training, but will also be deeply integrated with self-developed models to truly enter real-world scenarios for practical deployment.
As its integrated software-hardware capabilities continue to improve, Independent Variable's robots have already established partnerships with leading service and industrial clients, and are being deployed across multiple scenarios. Going forward, Independent Variable will also work with clients to co-build an open ecosystem around models and hardware, driving further advancement in embodied AI.
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