Xpeng’s robotics unit has closed a funding round of more than $900 million, which the Chinese EV maker describes as the largest single private round to date in the country’s embodied AI sector.
The New York and Hong Kong-listed company said it signed share purchase agreements with several investors, and put the unit’s post-money valuation above $6.3 billion. IDG Capital led the round, with Gaorong Ventures also participating. Tencent and Alibaba came in as strategic investors.
Xpeng keeps a controlling stake in the business once the deal closes, and the unit will continue to be consolidated into the group’s financial statements. The round puts a market price on the robotics arm for the first time while leaving it inside the parent company.
The capital is earmarked for hardware and software development, training and iterating the company’s physical AI models, generating high-quality training data, building out manufacturing capacity, and international expansion. Xpeng also cited long-term equity programs aimed at retaining senior executives and key staff in a market where robotics talent is fiercely contested.
At the center of the effort sits IRON, the humanoid robot Xpeng unveiled in a new generation recently. The machine has 76 degrees of freedom across the body and 21 in each hand, wrapped in a fully enclosed flexible lattice structure. Three proprietary Turing AI chips deliver what the company says is up to 2,250 TOPS of effective computing power.
