XPENG said on Monday that its robotics business has raised more than $900M in what the company described as its first funding round, a substantial sum for a unit that has yet to sell a single robot commercially.
The timing is deliberate, since the Chinese carmaker has committed to putting its IRON humanoid into mass production before the end of this year and is running out of calendar to do it in.
IRON was unveiled at XPENG’s AI Day in November 2025 and runs on the same Turing chips the company designed for its own electric vehicles. That shared silicon is the core of the pitch, alongside more than 60 joints, a spine with five degrees of freedom, and a layer of what XPENG calls bionic muscle fascia intended to soften the machine’s movement.
The robot demonstrated publicly is a seventh-generation prototype, with an eighth generation earmarked as the production model. Moreover, the company has said it wants full capability integrated before the production line starts, which is a considerable amount of engineering to compress into the remaining months of the year.
Deployment plans start close to home. The first units are expected to work as showroom assistants and tour guides, patrol XPENG campuses, and take positions on the company’s own factory floors, with commercial deliveries in China and abroad following in 2027.
