Analysis
D-Robotics, a Hong Kong-based maker of AI chips and software for robots, closed a $400 million Series C round led by Mirae Asset, with e-commerce giant Meituan and a broad group of strategic, government-backed and financial investors participating, according to PR Newswire. The company said the funding will go toward expanding its Sunrise chip line across all computing tiers and building out a software platform spanning the full robot-development chain, from established robot categories to general-purpose humanoids.
D-Robotics reported revenue increased several times over year over year in the first half of 2026, with cumulative shipments of its Sunrise chips surpassing 8 million units, The AI Insider reported. Its flagship Sunrise S600 chip has been adopted by more than 20 embodied-AI customers, and its Gravity developer program now supports more than 500 robotics companies and roughly 100,000 developers across more than 20 countries -- a distribution footprint that, on developer count alone, starts to rival Nvidia's Jetson ecosystem, even though Jetson still leads decisively on raw compute and software-stack maturity.
“A $400 million Series C is a large bet on that conversion happening before margin compression sets in.”
The round arrives as venture dollars increasingly target the chip-and-software layer underneath the humanoid and embodied-AI boom rather than the robots themselves -- the same week Chinese rival Huawei accelerated its own AI chip roadmap and humanoid-robot makers like Figure and Agility continue raising at billion-dollar-plus marks for the hardware layer D-Robotics' chips are meant to power. D-Robotics' pitch is that it can be the Nvidia-equivalent picks-and-shovels layer for Chinese and emerging-market robotics builders who either can't access, or don't want dependency on, U.S.-controlled compute.
Whether D-Robotics can convert 8 million shipped units and 500 developer partners into the kind of recurring, high-margin licensing business its valuation implies -- rather than commodity chip sales at thin margins -- is the question its next round will have to answer, particularly as U.S. export controls continue to reshape which customers a Hong Kong-based chip supplier can serve. A $400 million Series C is a large bet on that conversion happening before margin compression sets in.