XPeng's robotics division has raised more than $900 million in its first outside funding round, the electric-vehicle maker said Monday, valuing the unit at upward of $6.3 billion in what several industry trackers describe as the largest single private financing yet for a Chinese humanoid-robot company.
IDG Capital led the round, with Gaorong Ventures also participating and Alibaba Group and Tencent Holdings joining as strategic investors, according to XPeng's official announcement. XPeng itself contributed to the round alongside the outside investors, and the company said the proceeds will fund research on its "physical AI" models, expand data-generation efforts, build out mass-production facilities, and support the robot's commercial rollout in China and overseas.
A humanoid robot with 76 degrees of freedom
The money is earmarked chiefly for IRON, the humanoid robot XPeng unveiled in more polished form late last year. The company says IRON has 76 degrees of freedom across its body and 21 in each hand, is built around a flexible "lattice" structure meant to mimic human musculature, and runs on three of XPeng's own Turing AI chips delivering a combined 2,250 TOPS of computing power. XPeng has said it expects IRON to enter mass production by the end of 2026, with early units deployed inside its own stores and campuses before wider commercial deliveries begin in 2027.
XPeng CEO He Xiaopeng framed the robot as central to the company's next act beyond cars.
IRON brings together a highly human-like design, advanced AI intelligence, built to the highest standards of safety and quality.
He Xiaopeng, XPeng chairman and CEO
The $6.3 billion valuation puts XPeng's robotics arm well ahead of most rivals in China's crowded humanoid field, though still behind the loftiest private marks fetched by U.S. players. It also arrives as XPeng posted a wider quarterly loss even as vehicle deliveries grew, according to reporting from the South China Morning Post — underscoring how much of the company's near-term investor enthusiasm is now tied to robotics and "physical AI" rather than its automotive business alone.
China's robotics funding boom
The raise lands amid a broader surge of capital into Chinese humanoid-robot makers, as Beijing pushes "embodied intelligence" as a strategic industry and domestic tech giants look for a foothold beyond generative-AI software. Tencent and Alibaba's participation gives XPeng's robotics arm backing from two of the country's largest cloud and AI infrastructure operators, potentially easing its path to compute and distribution as it scales production.
Coverage of the deal, including from Electrek, noted that the financing is structured around XPeng's robotics unit rather than the parent EV company, an increasingly common approach among Chinese carmakers spinning out robotics bets to attract dedicated capital without complicating their auto-business balance sheets. Rivals including Xiaomi and Unitree have pursued similar strategies with their own humanoid programs this year.
The funding also lands roughly a week after Unitree, XPeng's chief domestic humanoid rival, made its own splashy debut: the Hangzhou-based robot maker's Shanghai IPO priced at around a $9 billion valuation on August 6, then surged as much as 460% on its August 19 trading debut, closing with a market value near $51 billion, according to CNBC. That rally has set an unusually high bar for how public and private markets are now pricing China's humanoid-robot makers, even though most of them, Unitree included, still generate only modest revenue — about 1.7 billion yuan, or $252 million, last year in Unitree's case.
Skeptics note that humanoid robotics remains commercially unproven at scale: no company has yet shipped humanoid robots into general-purpose commercial roles in large volumes, and XPeng's own mass-production target would still mean only a limited initial deployment footprint — inside its own retail stores and campuses — before wider deliveries in 2027. Still, the size of the round and the caliber of its backers make it one of the clearest signals yet that China's largest tech and automotive companies are willing to commit significant capital to humanoid robotics well before the technology has proven itself commercially. XPeng has not disclosed a specific target for how many IRON units it expects to build in the initial 2026 production run, nor detailed pricing for eventual commercial buyers.
