D-Robotics closes a USD 400 million Series C as Horizon’s robotics arm bets on the compute floor
China’s robotics builders are about to get a great deal more silicon underneath them, and the capital is arriving from Seoul and the Gulf as much as from Shenzhen. On 17 September, D-Robotics, the robotics-computing arm spun out of Horizon Robotics, said it had closed a USD 400 million Series C.
Mirae Asset led a pool of nearly 30 backers that spans internet giants, government investment platforms and market funds. Meituan’s investment arm returned, alongside Temasek’s Vertex Growth, Prosperity7, Hillhouse, 5Y Capital and a long list of provincial and municipal vehicles. Mirae Asset, a Korean financial group that also co-led AgiBot’s strategic round and backed MiniMax, came in as a more independent lead this time, betting on the infrastructure beneath robots rather than a single body.
This is the firm’s second raise in 2026. A USD 270 million Series B landed in April, only five months earlier. Across twelve months D-Robotics has taken more than USD 600 million, a sum that sits at the top of China’s embodied-AI financing table. The money is earmarked to widen the Sunrise chip family across the full compute range and to build a software platform that carries data collection, model training, simulation and inference in one loop.
The commercial signal is the part Western observers should watch. D-Robotics says first-half revenue rose several-fold year on year, that Sunrise chips have now shipped past 8 million units, and that its customer coverage in China’s embodied-AI field has crossed 50 per cent. More than 20 leading names, including UBTECH, PaXini, a Beijing humanoid centre and a Shanghai humanoid company, already build on the platform.
Chief executive Wang Cong has framed the strategy plainly: every moat is only a relative moat. D-Robotics’ edge, he argues, is earlier co-development with customers, supply-chain muscle and software accumulated from real deployments. The industry is not near a white-hot fight yet, he says, and the question of how much compute a robot needs has no standard answer, only the discipline of answering the customer’s actual landing needs.
The pitch is not a faster robot. It is the floor every robot stands on: chips plus a stack that moves data, training, simulation and inference from mature categories into general humanoids. As embodied-AI moves from prototype to volume, the firm positioning itself as the substrate is the one foreign capital just backed hardest.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original OFweek report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience. The full original (in Chinese) is at https://robot.ofweek.com/2026-09/ART-8321206-12005-30703578.html.
Translated and adapted from OFweek (link).