Four consecutive rounds of financing, with a constellation of star investors, Ziliang's valuation exceeds 20 billion.

At the end of April this year, Independent Variable Robotics publicly announced the completion of its Series B financing, led by Xiaomi's strategic investment arm. At that time, the company, which had been established for only two and a half years, already had a valuation exceeding 10 billion yuan.

However, for Independent Variable and the swarming investors, this is far from the end but the beginning of another chapter.

IFanr has learned that in the following two months, Independent Variable quietly completed three consecutive rounds of financing, namely Series B+, Series B++, and Series C, and all the transactions were successfully completed. As of now, the post - investment valuation of the company has exceeded 20 billion yuan, making it the first and only embodied intelligence company in the Guangdong - Hong Kong - Macao Greater Bay Area to cross this threshold.

This pace is not uncommon in today's primary market. Embodied intelligence is actually the least capital - starved sector in 2026. What's rare is the list of investors in these rounds.

Money Flows into One Company

According to IFanr, Independent Variable has become the only domestic embodied intelligence company to be led by four major Internet companies in different rounds of financing. The leading investors in the previous Series A, Series A+, Series A++, and Series B were Meituan, Alibaba, ByteDance, and Xiaomi respectively.

When major Internet companies invest in hard - tech, the technological quality is the key consideration. Four companies that are usually competitors on the business stage have rarely reached a consensus on the same startup. Moreover, they have not only invested once but also increased their stakes in multiple rounds. For example, Xiaomi's strategic investment arm alone has invested in three consecutive rounds, forming a certain judgment on Independent Variable Robotics.

In the recent Series B+ to Series C financing rounds, the list of investors has become even more extensive and impressive.

The most important new trend is the entry of state - backed investors. The National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund, SDIC Innovation, China Insurance Investment, Shenzhen Investment Holdings, Jiangsu High - tech Investment Group, and Bao'an District Guidance Fund are all on the list. Old shareholders such as Guokai Innovation and Guoke Investment have continued to increase their stakes, and China Mobile has invested in two consecutive rounds.

Meanwhile, industrial capital has also been deeply involved in Independent Variable's recent financing rounds. Companies like Honor, Chery, Shenyang Automobile, 58 Group, and Hongxin Electronics, which are mainly from the automotive, consumer electronics, and local - life sectors, are among the investors. Their investment motives are not just for financial returns but more specific: to integrate embodied intelligence into their industrial chains. For example, for 58 Home Service, it's about robots that can do housework; for automobile manufacturers, it's about robots that can work on the production line.

Independent Variable Robotics' venture - capital supporters also include top - tier institutions such as Sequoia Capital China, IDG Capital, Source Code Capital, Fortune Capital, CICC Capital, and Yida Capital.

Internet giants, state - backed investors, industrial capital, and top - tier VCs have very different investment characteristics and rarely sit at the same table in the primary market. This time, they have all come together to invest in the same company.

Money Flows into the "Most Powerful Brain" of the Embodied Industry

The embodied intelligence sector in 2026 is booming. In the first quarter of this year alone, more than 50 financing deals were disclosed in the domestic embodied intelligence field, and more than 30 startups completed financing, a nearly 60% year - on - year increase. It was the hottest quarter on record.

How hot is it? If your valuation is below 10 billion yuan, you may no longer be considered a "top - tier" player.

Although the sector is bustling and there is a lot of capital, the money is starting to concentrate in the accounts of a few teams. In the past six months, the number of companies that have crossed the 10 - billion - yuan or even 20 - billion - yuan valuation mark can be counted on one hand: Unitree, Galaxy Universal, Zhipu AI, Xinghai Graph, and now Independent Variable.

The Matthew effect, where the strong get stronger, is already evident.

Moreover, the development paths of these companies are quite different.

Unitree is a hardware - oriented company. It sells robotic dogs and humanoid robots and was able to achieve large - scale production in 2025. It passed the IPO review in June this year and is the closest to the secondary market among these companies. Its valuation is supported by real - world sales volume and cash flow.

Independent Variable, on the other hand, is a "brain - oriented" company at the opposite end of the spectrum. From the day it was founded, it has focused on one difficult task: self - developing an embodied large - scale model and taking a fully end - to - end approach. Although it is also involved in robot hardware and data collection, these are mainly for the purpose of training and validating the model.

Why are investors now willing to value a "brain - company" at 20 billion yuan? Because the bottleneck has shifted, and a new consensus is forming in the industry:

The hardware technology of robots has reached its limit, and the gap between different players at the hardware level is narrowing. What really determines whether a robot can perform tasks and how many types of tasks it can perform is its "brain." The hardware determines the robot's physical movements, while the "brain" determines which actions it should take.

Investors' focus has shifted from spreading bets on hardware to targeting a few model leaders. The fact that multiple top - tier investors have flocked to Independent Variable in just two months is a side - proof of this industry trend.

Wang Qian, the CEO of Independent Variable, graduated from Tsinghua University with a bachelor's and master's degree. He is one of the earliest researchers in the world on the attention mechanism of neural networks and conducted embodied learning research at a top - tier robotics laboratory in the United States during his Ph.D. studies. Wang Hao, the CTO, is a Ph.D. in computational physics from Peking University and previously led the Fengshenbang large - scale model team at the IDEA Research Institute. One has a background in robotics, and the other in large - scale models. This company is "model - first" in its DNA.

The company has indeed delivered results along this path. Recently, Independent Variable released the world model WALL - WM, which the company claims is the world's first world model capable of "event - level" prediction. While other world models divide the picture at fixed time intervals, WALL - WM uses "events" to align the picture, language, and actions and outperforms similar models such as DreamZero in multiple evaluations.

In April this year, Independent Variable released WALL - B, the world's first embodied large - scale model based on the "World Unified Model (WUM)" architecture. It jointly trains vision, language, action, and physical prediction from scratch in the same network, rather than piecing together several existing modules like the mainstream VLA models.

Not long ago, Independent Variable also open - sourced WALL - OSS - 0.5. According to the official data, in 17 real - robot tasks, without post - training, it achieved an autonomous completion rate of over 80% in 4 tasks, leading mainstream open - source models such as Pi 0.5 in operation and reasoning tasks.

It has also built its own data collection factory and self - developed a data pipeline. The XR Zero data collection solution it released is claimed to reduce the cost of training data collection to one - twentieth of the original.

These tasks are arduous. However, the most scarce resource in the field of embodied intelligence at present is real - world interaction data. The company with a more efficient data pipeline will have a faster model iteration speed, and this is a difficult but inevitable path.

From a more critical perspective, it may not be fair to place a model company whose main business is still in the pilot stage in the same valuation range as Unitree, which has achieved mass production, profitability, and is about to go public. Independent Variable does not have the same sales volume and cash flow as Unitree.

However, this is exactly what makes these financing rounds intriguing. High - quality top - tier investors are willing to jointly support Independent Variable Robotics to a valuation of 20 billion yuan, and they are not betting on simple figures such as robot sales volume.

They are betting on whether this "brain" can continue to grow from single scenarios such as housework and production lines and eventually be generalized to various industries it has not yet entered.

This article is from the WeChat official account “IFanr” (ID: ifanr), written by the discoverer of tomorrow's products and published by 36Kr with authorization.