Unity Ventures early-stage portfolio company Independent Variable Robotics raises hundreds of millions of yuan in new funding within a month
Becoming the highest-valued Embodied Artificial Intelligence company to announce funding this year
Unity Ventures portfolio company Independent Variable Robotics has recently raised hundreds of millions of RMB in new funding, led by industrial investors SAIC Financial Holdings and CICC-SAIC Fund, with follow-on participation from existing shareholders Meituan Longzhu, HSG, Beijing Information Industry Development Fund, China Development Bank Capital, Qifu Capital, Zhence Capital, and GF Xinde Investment Management.
This marks another funding round completed within a month for Independent Variable, following its January announcement of a one-billion-yuan A++ round involving ByteDance, HSG, and other institutions.
With this new round, Independent Variable has become the highest-valued embodied AI company to announce funding in 2026. It is also the only domestic embodied AI enterprise backed by all three major tech giants — Meituan, Alibaba, and ByteDance.
Founded in December 2023, Independent Variable is dedicated to developing a general-purpose embodied AI foundation model. Using real-world data as its primary source, the company builds general robots with fine manipulation capabilities, making it one of the earliest Chinese companies to pursue a fully end-to-end approach to general embodied AI.
The company has developed its proprietary WALL-A model, whose core architecture pioneers a system paradigm that deeply integrates VLA with world models. It is the first to achieve embodied multimodal chain-of-thought reasoning, significantly improving robots' zero-shot generalization for mobile manipulation tasks in unstructured environments.
Since its founding, Independent Variable has also adhered to a closed-loop iteration of hardware, data, and models. As one of the earliest companies in China to scale real-robot data collection, it has independently developed various data collection devices including master-slave teleoperation systems, exoskeletons, and body-free setups, building a model-driven data pipeline that continuously generates large-scale, high-quality data.
The continuous evolution of its models has given Independent Variable's robots remarkable adaptability in real-world scenarios, unlocking the potential of high-DOF dexterous hands. The robots have autonomously mastered human-like skills such as in-hand reorientation, conquering the final centimeter of fine manipulation in embodied AI.
Independent Variable maintains full-stack in-house development of both software and hardware. It has designed and released two high-performance robot bodies, "Quantum One" and "Quantum Two," while achieving complete self-development of core components including robotic arms, joint modules, motor drivers, and main controllers, with deep algorithmic optimization. This has driven substantial reductions in overall system cost, laying a solid foundation for the scaled manufacturing and commercial deployment of embodied intelligent robots.
The company has gradually entered multiple high-value sectors including industrial manufacturing, logistics, and eldercare, precisely addressing real market demand through its capabilities for high generalization and low-cost deployment.
With the addition of industrial investors such as SAIC, the parties plan to deepen synergistic collaboration to jointly advance the deployment of embodied AI in automotive and other scenarios, while continuously expanding the autonomous adaptation and manipulation capabilities of embodied AI foundation models in complex environments.
