XPeng’s humanoid robotics arm has raised more than $900 million at a post-money valuation above $6.3 billion, the largest single private financing on record in China’s embodied AI sector and the clearest signal yet that Chinese carmakers intend to convert EV supply chains into robot supply chains.

The round was led by IDG Capital, with Gaorong Ventures participating and Alibaba and Tencent joining as strategic investors. XPeng disclosed it to the Hong Kong exchange as a Series A preferred share subscription in Dogotix Inc., the previously wholly owned subsidiary into which the group is carving its robotics assets. Pre-money valuation was $5 billion. XPeng retains about 81.97 percent of Dogotix at closing and 68.41 percent fully diluted, and the unit remains a controlled subsidiary consolidated into group accounts — this is a carve-out, not a separation. Executive subscribers also received warrants over 246,688,000 ordinary shares at an aggregate exercise price of $500 million, exercisable before a qualified IPO and excluded from the headline figure.

What the unit builds

Dogotix develops IRON, the general-purpose humanoid XPeng unveiled in November 2025. The robot stands 178 centimetres and weighs 70 kilograms, with 76 degrees of freedom across the body and 21 in each hand, running on three in-house Turing AI chips rated at a combined 2,250 TOPS. It uses solid-state batteries, a second-generation vision-language-action model and a flexible lattice structure under a synthetic skin. The company claims on-board inference without teleoperation — a pointed claim in a field where rival demonstrations are often remotely piloted off-camera. A 110,000-square-metre plant in Guangzhou broke ground in the first quarter of 2026.

The numbers behind the round

The $900 million is not all outside money. Roughly $600 million comes from external investors, $200 million from an XPeng subsidiary and about $100 million from XPeng executives. A further $15 million from an additional investor sits outside the disclosed total. Dogotix had taken no outside capital before this round. For scale, the prior benchmark in Chinese embodied AI was TARS Robotics $455 million pre-A in April 2026. Proceeds are earmarked for hardware and software R and D, physical AI model training, data generation, production capacity and overseas commercialisation, plus long-term incentives for key staff.

Why the timing matters

The capital arrives immediately before the hardest phase. XPeng targets mass production by the end of 2026 and monthly capacity above 1,000 units, with IRON working as a sales assistant in Chinese stores from the first quarter of 2027, overseas locations later that year and household deployment in 2028. Funding a robot programme off vehicle margins was becoming awkward: XPeng delivered 103,295 vehicles in the second quarter, yet net losses widened 179 percent to RMB 1.34 billion on 8 percent revenue growth. Chairman He Xiaopeng took direct charge of robotics in June. Ring-fencing the unit gives it a separate balance sheet, a currency for hiring, and a warrant structure that already names a qualified IPO as the exit — while leaving XPeng in control of the outcome.

Source

South China Morning Post — "EV maker Xpeng set to challenge Tesla in embodied AI after robotics unit raises US$900m"