Independent Variable Robotics has completed nearly 1 billion yuan in Series A+ financing, with investments from Alibaba Cloud, China National Science Investment, China Development Bank Capital, Sequoia Capital, and Yingze Ventures.

Independent Variable Robotics recently completed a nearly 1 billion yuan Series A+ round of financing. This round was jointly led by Alibaba Cloud and Guoke Investment, with follow - on investments from China Development Financial, Sequoia China, and Yingce Capital. Existing shareholder Meituan Strategic Investment made an over - subscribed follow - on investment, while Legend Star and Junlian Capital continued to increase their stakes.

This is Alibaba Cloud's first investment in an embodied intelligence company. Alibaba Cloud highly recognizes Independent Variable's technology and will provide multi - dimensional support. The funds will be used for the continuous training of Independent Variable's fully self - developed general embodied intelligence foundation model and the R & D iteration of hardware products.

Since its establishment at the end of 2023, Independent Variable has established the ultimate technical path of achieving general embodied intelligence through an end - to - end unified large model. Recently, it released the fully self - developed wheeled dual - arm humanoid robot, Quanta X2, which is adapted to multi - modal large model control. The company's technical route of simultaneous development of software and hardware, as well as its forward - looking technical concepts and achievements, have also been recognized by national - level investment platforms, top domestic and international investment institutions, and industrial capital.

As one of the earliest domestic companies to achieve an end - to - end embodied intelligence large model, Independent Variable has independently developed the "WALL - A" series of VLA (Vision - Language - Action) operation large models, constructing a unified cognitive and action framework. In the unified representation space, the model simultaneously processes perception, reasoning, and action, directly conducts cross - modal causal reasoning and action decision - making, enabling the robot to ultimately think and work like a human. Currently, the "WALL - A" model has demonstrated zero - shot generalization ability in some new task types that have not been trained at all.

Meanwhile, the company was the first to achieve an end - to - end embodied thinking chain reasoning framework, which conducts in - depth reasoning based on multi - modal input and generates multi - modal output, forming a complete closed - loop of the model's autonomous decision - making, execution, exploration, and reflection. The model can closely combine language understanding, visual perception, and action execution, forming a reasoning process closer to human thinking. It has successfully broken through the bottleneck of multi - step long - sequence tasks, significantly improving the task completion rate and greatly expanding the boundary of the robot's ability to handle complex real - world scenarios.

In the middle of this year, the company first achieved the control of a high - degree - of - freedom dexterous hand by an embodied intelligence large model for complex operations. Previously, Independent Variable released a video of its self - developed large model controlling a high - degree - of - freedom dexterous hand to delicately pick up and distribute elastic and deformable objects like playing cards.

Currently, to promote the research and application of embodied intelligence large models, Independent Variable has open - sourced its embodied foundation model for developers, "Wall - OSS", and made the relevant training codes public, facilitating global developers to quickly fine - tune and apply it on their own platforms.

Wall - OSS has strong generalization and reasoning abilities, outperforming other foundation models in long - range operation tasks. As a multi - modal base, the model also has good causal reasoning, spatial understanding, and reflection abilities.

Wall - OSS is an open - source embodied foundation model trained on a large - scale real - world dataset. In terms of model architecture,

it innovatively designs a "shared attention + expert routing (FFN)" architecture, enabling the lossless transfer of VLM pre - training knowledge to the operation model. Information such as language, vision, and action is processed in the same representation space. In terms of training methods, it pioneered a three - stage training paradigm of "discrete first, continuous second, and then joint", which retains the language and visual understanding abilities of VLM and also has fine - grained action execution capabilities. In addition, the unified cross - level thinking chain realizes arbitrary forward mapping at the cross - level abstraction level, allowing the model to seamlessly switch between high - level decision - making and low - level execution within a single differentiable framework.

In terms of hardware, in August this year, Independent Variable released the fully self - developed wheeled dual - arm humanoid robot, "Quanta X2". In less than half a year, the company has achieved full - stack self - development of the robot body, high - degree - of - freedom dexterous hand, and exoskeleton remote - operation data acquisition equipment.

Quanta X2 is a model - native general robot body. In its design, not only are the needs of model training and complex operation tasks considered, but also a comprehensive balance and optimization are achieved in core indicators such as load capacity, operation space, movement speed, and control accuracy.

The five - finger dexterous hand of Quanta X2 adopts a bionic structure design, with 20 degrees of freedom per hand and the ability to sense subtle pressure changes. At the same time, based on the arm - hand integrated exoskeleton technology, Independent Variable pioneered an integrated whole - body remote - operation solution of "humanoid mechanical arm + high - degree - of - freedom dexterous hand". Quanta X2 can not only collect high - quality data to feed back into model training but also be deeply integrated with the self - developed model and truly enter real - world scenarios for application.

With the improvement of the comprehensive software - hardware integration ability, Independent Variable's robots have currently reached cooperation agreements with leading service and industrial customers and have been put into use in multiple scenarios. In the future, Independent Variable will also build an open ecosystem with customers around the model and hardware to promote the further development of embodied intelligence.