D-Robotics raised $400 million to expand the chip powering China's humanoid-robot boom -- and won't say what it's worth

D-Robotics, the robotics-chip business Horizon Robotics spun off in 2023, closed a $400 million Series C this week, led by Mirae Asset with Meituan, Hefei State-owned Capital Investment, GL Ventures, 5Y Capital and Temasek-backed Vertex Growth among the strategic and follow-on investors. The company says the money goes toward expanding its Sunrise chip lineup "across all computing levels" and building a software platform spanning what it calls the entire robot development chain -- data collection, model training, simulation and inference deployment.

The parent company gives the round a real number to sit next to, even though the round itself has none. Horizon Robotics -- the automotive ADAS and autonomous-driving chipmaker D-Robotics was carved out of -- went public in Hong Kong in October 2024 at a roughly $6.8 billion valuation, raising $696 million in that IPO. D-Robotics itself has now raised at least four rounds since its 2023 spinout: a $100 million Series A, a Series B that reached $270 million across multiple tranches, and now this $400 million Series C -- by a wide margin its largest, though the company has disclosed no post-money valuation for it.

The S600 itself is pitched as a purpose-built departure from the rest of the Sunrise line, which traces back to Horizon Robotics' automotive and camera-vision chips. Where those parts were designed around driver-assistance workloads -- lane detection, object tracking, fixed-camera inference -- D-Robotics describes the S600 as built from the ground up for what the industry calls embodied AI: a robot that has to perceive, plan and move in real time, with a very different mix of compute, power draw and latency requirements than a car's advanced-driver-assistance stack. Whether that distinction holds up under independent benchmarking is untested in public so far -- the company hasn't published comparative figures against Nvidia's Jetson Thor or Orin lines, the parts most humanoid-robot developers outside China default to.

The headline adoption numbers are all the company's own. D-Robotics says its Sunrise-series chips have shipped more than 8 million units cumulatively, and that the S600 has been adopted within six months of its November 2025 launch by more than 20 customers building humanoid, quadruped, logistics and other robots. Eight of those are named directly: TARS, Spirit AI, X Square Robot, UBTECH, PaXini Tech, Astribot, FOURIER and Booster Robotics. The company also says first-half 2026 revenue "grew several times" year-over-year -- a real-sounding claim with no percentage, dollar figure, or comparison base attached to it, and its Gravity developer program says it now reaches more than 500 universities and 100,000 developers across 20-plus countries.

The timing sits inside a broader pattern: Chinese robotics makers building on domestic silicon rather than Nvidia's Jetson line, the default embodied-AI compute choice almost everywhere else. Export controls make that partly a necessity rather than a preference, but D-Robotics' pitch -- a chip designed specifically for humanoid and legged robots from the start, rather than adapted from an automotive or edge-AI part -- targets a gap Nvidia hasn't fully closed either. Whether "8 million units shipped" mostly reflects that specific bet, or mostly reflects years of older, cheaper Sunrise chips sold into driver-assistance and camera products before the 2023 spinout, is exactly the distinction the company's own announcement doesn't draw.

It's also part of a wider pattern this year of money chasing AI compute *outside* Nvidia's core GPU business specifically. Two days earlier, Dutch startup Euclyd closed a $231 million Series A -- Europe's largest AI-inference-chip round of 2026 -- to build memory-centric chips aimed at the same general problem from a different angle: cutting the cost of running AI models rather than training them. Neither company competes directly with the other, but both rounds are bets that the next scarce resource in AI isn't raw GPU supply, it's compute shaped for a specific job -- inference at the edge, in Euclyd's case; a robot's body, in D-Robotics'.

None of that makes the growth claims false. D-Robotics' prior rounds are independently documented, and its parent's public listing gives outside analysts at least one real, audited number to anchor against. It does mean that "8 million chips" and revenue that "grew several times" are, for now, exactly what the company says they are: real-sounding figures nobody outside D-Robotics has independently confirmed. ("Embodied AI" is industry shorthand for AI that controls a physical body -- a robot, not a chatbot -- rather than just generating text or images.) A funded, purpose-built chip business is still a different thing from a verified one, and this round settles only the first. The clearest test won't be the next funding announcement; it will be the first of D-Robotics' named customers to disclose actual unit sales of a robot running the S600, rather than a partnership.