In a significant funding development, the company Autonomous Variable has successfully closed four consecutive investment rounds within a span of just over two months, following its announcement of a Series B round led by Xiaomi's strategic investment arm in late April.
These subsequent rounds, identified as B+, B++, and Series C, have all been finalized, propelling the company's post-money valuation to exceed 200 billion yuan.
Autonomous Variable has attracted a consortium of premier investors from various sectors for its recent funding activities. The confirmed list of backers includes over 30 leading institutions, such as China Mobile, the National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund, Sequoia Capital China, IDG Capital, Source Code Capital, Fortune Capital, and CICC Capital, alongside capital from internet giants and industrial and governmental funds.
Notably, Xiaomi's strategic investment division has participated in three of these funding rounds.
Why This Funding Series Stands Out
Based on publicly available information, Autonomous Variable is distinguished within China's embodied AI sector as the only company to have secured lead investment from each of the four major internet giants, all of which have made multiple investments.
Meituan led the Series A round, Alibaba the A+ round, ByteDance the A++ round, and Xiaomi the Series B round.
Technological Backdrop: The WALL-B Model
In April of this year, the company unveiled WALL-B, described as the world's first embodied large language model based on a "World Unified Model" architecture.
According to the launch event, WALL-B integrates capabilities for vision, language, action, and physical prediction within a single network, trained jointly from the ground up, which is designed to eliminate inefficiencies from module boundaries and data transfer.
This approach endows WALL-B with three core advantages: native multimodality, an understanding of physical laws for predictive evolution, and the ability for self-evolution through environmental interaction.
While specific details remain limited, the company has announced a plan to deploy robots powered by the WALL-B model in user homes on a permanent basis.
This initiative is reportedly already underway and serves as a tangible demonstration of the model's generalization capabilities to the wider industry.
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