Chinese tech and automotive company Xpeng has raised over US$900m for its robotics business, achieving a post-money valuation of over US$6.3bn.
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Xpeng claimed it was the largest single-round private financing ever recorded in China’s embodied AI industry. The company also claims that its ‘Iron’ humanoid robot has reached multiple R&D milestones and is about to release capability previews.
XPeng said that share purchase agreements were entered with multiple investors, led by IDG Capital and joined by Gaorong Ventures. Tencent and Alibaba also participated as strategic investors.
IDG Capital said: “The embodied AI industry stands at a pivotal juncture, transitioning from technical breakthroughs to scalable manufacturing and commercial deployment.
“Xpeng’s humanoid robot exemplifies the current standard of excellence in China’s humanoid robotics industry and possesses the competitive strength to succeed in global markets.
“Xpeng has established a comprehensive, integrated full-stack capability across edge AI processors, Physical AI foundation models, and complete robotic systems, underpinned by industry-leading on-device compute, training compute, and a robust high-quality data flywheel.”
In 2027, Xpeng Iron will officially launch and begin ‘large-scale deliveries in China and overseas to external customers in the retail and service sectors’. Monthly production capacity can be rapidly ramped up to several thousand units by 2027 in response to market demand, the company says.
Xpeng says The robot features 76 degrees of freedom (DoF) across its body, including 21 DoF per hand, and is equipped with three Turing AI chips delivering an effective computing power of 2,250 TOPS. It supports on-device deployment of physical AI large models and can autonomously perform complex tasks. The proceeds from the financing will be used for hardware and software R&D, iterative training of physical AI models, high-quality data collection, construction of end-to-end mass production facilities, and global commercial expansion.
The apparent success of the robotics funding round will raise questions about the future strategic direction of the company – will the emphasis be on robotics or automotive or both?
Xpeng has said it is leveraging its capabilities from intelligent electric vehicle (EV) research and manufacturing to bring automotive-grade quality standards and mass production capacity to robotics.
Xpeng also reported Q2 revenues totalled RMB19.74 billion. Quarterly gross margin reached 20.7%.
Overseas automotive deliveries surpassed 20,000 units in Q2, with overseas markets contributing 25% of H1 revenue.
