The race to take China’s leading humanoid robotics startups public is accelerating rapidly, with another major player quietly initiating the listing process. X Square Robot Technology, a highly valued startup focused on embodied artificial intelligence, has submitted a confidential filing for an initial public offering in Hong Kong.
According to reports from the South China Morning Post and financial data platform CaproAsia, the move follows a massive influx of private capital that pushed the company’s valuation to $2.9 billion (approximately 20 billion yuan) during a funding round in June 2026. The confidential filing indicates that X Square is eager to tap public markets to fund the immense computational and manufacturing costs required to commercialize general-purpose humanoid robots.
The decision to pursue a Hong Kong listing aligns with a broader trend among Chinese technology unicorns seeking to avoid the geopolitical complexities of a US IPO while still accessing international capital. X Square joins a growing cohort of domestic robotics firms, including EngineAI, AgiBot, and Galbot, that have recently filed confidentially for the Hong Kong exchange. The move comes just as rival Unitree Robotics formally prices its own highly anticipated IPO on the mainland Shanghai STAR Market.
The timing is deliberate: Hong Kong’s IPO market hit a five-year high in the first half of 2026, with total funds raised reaching HK$210 billion ($26.8 billion), up 92 percent year-on-year, and the number of new listings nearly doubling to 87, according to PwC Hong Kong. This sudden wave of robotics listings suggests that the sector is transitioning from an era of venture-backed prototyping into a phase of aggressive commercial scaling, where access to deep pools of public capital will determine which companies survive the brutal competition.
The scale of the Chinese robotics industry’s ambitions is underscored by a striking data point: Chinese companies accounted for more than 80 percent of all humanoid robots installed globally last year, according to Counterpoint Research.
(Related: Unitree Robotics Opens IPO Book-Building on August 5 in First-Ever Humanoid Robot A-Share Listing)
A Meteoric Rise Backed by Tech Giants
The trajectory of X Square Robot is remarkable even by the hyper-accelerated standards of the Chinese tech sector. Founded in December 2023 by Wang Qian and headquartered in Shenzhen, the company achieved unicorn status in less than three years by focusing exclusively on the development of a “General Embodied Foundation Model.” For the Hong Kong listing, the company has tapped Huatai Securities and Morgan Stanley as sponsors, according to the SCMP.
Unlike traditional robotics companies that prioritize mechanical engineering, X Square’s primary focus is on the software layer, building AI models that leverage real-world data to give robots advanced manipulation capabilities and spatial reasoning. The company claims to be one of the first in China to realize a fully end-to-end general embodied foundation model, a critical milestone in the pursuit of autonomous machines.
This software-first approach has attracted an extraordinary roster of investors, effectively turning X Square into a proxy for the AI ambitions of China’s largest tech conglomerates. The company’s capitalization table reads like a who’s who of the domestic tech ecosystem, featuring investments from Alibaba, Meituan, and ByteDance, alongside prominent venture firms such as HongShan (formerly Sequoia China), Legend Star, Legend Capital, and INCE Capital. This relentless fundraising has been highly structured: the company raised $140 million in a Series A+ round in September 2025, followed rapidly by a $143 million Series A++ round in January 2026, and a massive $293 million Series B round in April 2026, culminating in the $2.9 billion valuation achieved in June.
Navigating the Benchmark Controversy
Despite its impressive financial backing, X Square Robot’s path to an IPO is not entirely without friction. The company recently found itself entangled in a controversy surrounding the evaluation of physical AI models. As the embodied intelligence sector matures, startups are increasingly relying on global benchmarks to validate their technological claims. However, the integrity of these rankings has recently been called into question.
X Square Robot’s foundation model had previously ranked fourth on RoboArena, a prominent global benchmark co-developed by Nvidia and researchers from Stanford and UC Berkeley. However, as reported in a separate incident involving fellow Chinese startup Spirit AI, the creators of RoboArena recently overhauled their evaluation methodology and purged several models from the leaderboard citing evidence of “benchmark manipulation.”
X Square’s model was among those quietly removed from the official rankings during the overhaul. While no specific allegations of deliberate manipulation were leveled against the company, the incident highlights the intense pressure these startups face to demonstrate measurable superiority as they prepare to face the scrutiny of public market investors.
The Capital Intensity of Embodied AI
The aggressive push toward a public listing underscores the brutal capital intensity required to build general-purpose robots. Developing the mechanical hardware is only a fraction of the challenge; training the embodied foundation models requires massive clusters of advanced GPUs, extensive data collection facilities where humans physically demonstrate tasks, and prolonged periods of trial and error in real-world environments.
For X Square Robot, the $2.9 billion private valuation is a testament to its early progress, but a successful Hong Kong IPO will provide the sustained financial runway necessary to transition its foundation models from the laboratory to the factory floor and, ultimately, into consumer homes.
As the company navigates the confidential filing process, the broader market will be watching closely. A successful debut for X Square Robot in Hong Kong would not only validate the company’s specific approach to embodied intelligence but would also signal that global investors are ready to underwrite the next phase of China’s AI revolution, despite the looming shadow of US technology export controls and intensifying geopolitical friction.