X Square Robot, a general-purpose embodied intelligence startup, said on Tuesday that it raised nearly 2 billion yuan ($276 million) in a Series B funding led by Xiaomi's strategic investment arm.

Its earlier investors include Chinese tech giants Alibaba, ByteDance and Meituan.

Founder and CEO Wang Qian made the announcement at a company event, where he said that a next-generation robot, powered by self-developed foundation model WALL-B, is set to do household chores starting from late May.

WALL-B, based on what the company calls a World Unified Model architecture, represents a shift from the prevailing Vision-Language-Action framework toward a native multimodal fusion model, laying the technical groundwork for robots to handle complex home scenarios.

Wang said that no existing robot can independently perform daily tidying tasks without remote control, given the random, fragmented and constantly changing home environments.

Unlike stage-performing or industrial robots that rely on preset programmes, the company's model is trained on real-world data collected from hundreds of households.

The company has partnered with life services platform 58.com to deploy robots powered by the WALL-AS model into people's homes.

Working alongside human cleaners, these robots achieved the world's first entry into household environments and the first large-scale deployment in complex consumer settings, the company said.

Wang noted that WALL-B is still at an "intern" stage, prone to mistakes such as putting slippers in the kitchen or pausing mid-task while wiping a table, requiring remote assistance at times. However, he said the model can operate 24/7 and becomes smarter each day as it learns from new data.