China’s DiDi leads Series A+ round of Xiaoyu Bot and 38 deals worth almost $570m

Xiaoyu Bot, which develops large language models for industrial robotics, has snapped 100 million yuan ($14.5 million) in a Series A+ round led by Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi Global. 

The extended Series A round saw participation from the 10-billion yuan ($1.4 billion) Beijing Information Industry Development Investment Fund, which targets to invest in opportunities across the information technology sector in Beijing, according to a company release. 

Founded in 2023 by Chinese smartphone and EV maker Xiaomi’s founding team members Qiao Zhongliang and Wang Wenlin, Xiaoyu Bot aims to develop a full-stack embodied AI platform from software to hardware that serves the industrial setting. 

The Beijing-based firm snapped seed funding from Xiaomi and Wang Tianmiao, professor and PHD supervisor in the Mechanical Engineering and Automation of Beijing-based Beihang University. 

The Series A+ investment comes nine months after the firm closed its Series A round in  November 2024. 

Xiaoyu Bot’s deal comes as China’s embodied AI sector welcomed an influx of funding amid the AI frenzy. The first five months of 2025 saw a total of 114 deals in the embodied intelligence and robotics sector, up 48.1% from the 77 deals recorded in the full year of 2024, per Chinese data provider IT Juzi. 

These startups collectively raised 23.2 billion yuan ($3.2 billion) in January-May, up 11% from the 20.9 billion yuan ($2.9 billion) recorded for the full year of 2024.

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DealStreetAsia has also compiled a table listing all prominent venture capital transactions in Greater China from July 7 – 13, 2025.

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*The company did not provide the specific size of the deal, but only a range. In such cases, we adopt the smallest number in the range, which will be “10 million yuan ($1.5 million)” if the company has announced raising “tens of millions of Chinese yuan”.