Yitai Intelligent, a Chinese maker of high speed interconnect chips, said on 2 November that it closed a Series A of more than RMB 200 million. The A3 tranche was led by Wuxi Venture Capital, with Jintou Zhiyuan and Hongshan Capital following. The money goes into volume delivery of its edge switching silicon and into hiring.
The company’s pitch rests on a comparison that rarely appears in robotics coverage. A single humanoid robot contains roughly 156 internal communication interfaces. A smart car has a few dozen ethernet nodes. Per unit, the density of interconnect silicon is roughly five times what a car carries, and it climbs with every joint added.
What is already shipping
Yitai’s first automotive grade switching chip, the ETLX610, is in volume production across multiple vehicle platforms at a major Chinese OEM, with more than 100,000 vehicles on the road carrying it, and further OEMs moving through qualification. Its first industrial grade part, the ETLX810, is deployed in national key projects and in grid, high speed rail and aviation customers.
Both are TSN switches, meaning time sensitive networking: deterministic delivery of data with bounded latency. That property is what makes a robot joint controllable on a shared bus, and it is why the same silicon travels from cars to machines.
The Infineon comparison sets the floor
Infineon paid USD 2.5 billion for Marvell’s automotive ethernet business in 2025, and its own statement said the deal created opportunities in physical AI, naming humanoids. Texas Instruments has been pushing single pair ethernet into humanoid designs. Automotive suppliers have concluded that the robot body is a network problem before it is a mechanical one.
That framing matters for Chinese suppliers. Automotive ethernet silicon is one of the few categories where domestic qualification cycles, originally built to serve carmakers under cost pressure, give local vendors a credible claim on the robot market. The reliability bar is inherited from the car, and the volume bar comes from the robot.
What the round does not settle is timing. Humanoid production in China is still measured in tens of thousands of units a year, so interconnect revenue will lean on vehicles and industrial systems for some time. Yitai is also extending into eVTOL, a category with the same determinism requirement and the same regulatory uncertainty. The bet is that whoever owns deterministic edge networking in cars inherits the robot, and does not have to win a new design cycle to get there.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original Gasgoo report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience. The full original (in Chinese) is at https://www.gasgoo.com/apps/e060bad9eca91db7f01403fc7120041f/robot/news/70476605-seeds-%E5%A5%95%E6%B3%B0%E6%99%BA%E8%83%BD%E5%AE%8C%E6%88%90/.