Independent Variable Robotics Raises Two Consecutive Rounds of Hundreds of Millions of Yuan, with Meituan as Sole Investor in Series A | Unity Ventures Portfolio News

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The company has completed seven funding rounds, raising more than one billion yuan in total.

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Unity Ventures portfolio company Independent Variable Robotics announced today that it has completed a Series A funding round of several hundred million yuan.

Independent Variable Robotics focuses on developing a "general-purpose embodied large model," using real-world data as its primary source to build general-purpose robots with fine manipulation capabilities. It is the earliest company in China to adopt a fully end-to-end approach to achieving general-purpose embodied intelligence large models.

In less than a year and a half since its founding, Independent Variable Robotics has completed seven funding rounds, with cumulative financing exceeding 1 billion yuan.

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Recently, embodied intelligence company Independent Variable Robotics completed a Series A funding round of several hundred million yuan, led by Meituan Strategic Investment with participation from Meituan Longzhu. The proceeds will be used to continue accelerating the synchronous iteration of its fully self-developed end-to-end general-purpose embodied intelligence large model and robot hardware, as well as to support the development and deployment of intelligent solutions for multiple application scenarios.

In addition to the Pre-A++ round of several hundred million yuan led by Luminous Ventures and Legend Capital, disclosed publicly in February this year, Independent Variable Robotics also completed a Pre-A+++ round of several hundred million yuan from Meridian Capital, Yunqi Capital, and GF Xinde Investment Management prior to the Series A. In less than a year and a half since its founding, Independent Variable Robotics has completed seven funding rounds, with cumulative financing exceeding 1 billion yuan.

Independent Variable Robotics (X Square Robot), founded in December 2023, focuses on developing a "general-purpose embodied large model," using real-world data as its primary source to build general-purpose robots with fine manipulation capabilities.

As the earliest company in China to adopt a fully end-to-end approach to achieving general-purpose embodied intelligence large models, Independent Variable Robotics is committed to building an integrated system architecture that unifies perception, planning, and control. The company's self-developed "Great Wall" manipulation large model series includes the "WALL-A" model, which features multimodal information fusion capabilities — integrating different types of perceptual data, natural language instructions, and motion control signals to achieve end-to-end mapping from input to output.

Based on large-scale general knowledge pre-training and multi-task learning mechanisms, the "WALL-A" model has demonstrated zero-shot generalization capabilities in some previously unseen novel task scenarios — broad-scenario zero-shot generalization being one of the key indicators for achieving general-purpose robots.

At the same time, Independent Variable Robotics has built a model-driven data closed-loop system. The company has independently developed dozens of data processing models and multiple generations of data collection equipment to achieve automated quality control and comprehensive improvement of data collection efficiency.

On the hardware side, the company has independently developed and continuously optimized robot hardware compatible with multimodal large model control, better meeting the demands for fine manipulation and stable operation in open environments. Currently, Independent Variable Robotics' hardware has been deployed in multi-step complex task scenarios.

Notably, since late last year, Independent Variable Robotics has achieved breakthroughs in multimodal output and embodied chain-of-thought reasoning, predating Gemini Robotics' March announcement of its chain-of-thought research results.

The company's model architecture is centered on multimodal output, achieving end-to-end information fusion that enables efficient alignment between visual, linguistic, and action information channels in robots, significantly enhancing the model's contextual reasoning and self-feedback capabilities in ultra-long sequence tasks.

The company has also continued to make progress in dynamic environment perception, real-time task planning, and ultra-long-horizon tasks. These breakthroughs and advances have further enhanced robots' autonomous decision-making capabilities and execution efficiency in complex open environments.

Qian Wang, founder and CEO of Independent Variable Robotics, believes that the development of embodied intelligence relies on algorithmic advantages in the short term, data advantages in the medium term, and product excellence as the core long-term differentiator. Independent Variable Robotics has consistently deepened its accumulation across these three directions and has taken the lead in deploying and practicing in open service scenarios in China, exploring service closed loops in different contexts.

The company's core team brings together experts from world-renowned artificial intelligence and robotics laboratories and scholars from top universities at home and abroad, dedicated to advancing innovation and development in embodied intelligence and robotics technology. Core team members include researchers who were among the earliest globally to propose the Attention mechanism (the core of Transformer architecture), experts from top international robotics laboratories, technical leads behind China's first trillion-parameter large models, and seasoned experts in robot hardware.