D-Robotics raises US$400 million to sell its Sunrise chips as the compute layer for China's robot makers

D-Robotics has shipped more than 8 million Sunrise chips, yet the company that just raised US$400 million for them would not say who wrote the cheques. In a release dated 17 September 2026 from Hong Kong, the robot compute supplier said it had closed a US$400 million Series C with strategic money from what it called a leading global internet company, alongside top-tier investment institutions and follow-on investment from existing shareholders. No investor name, valuation or revenue figure was disclosed.

The round is the largest robotics financing in the ROBOTNESS database for September 2026, ahead of General Intuition's US$220 million and SiMa.ai's US$150 million. What it buys is a bet that robot makers will rent their brains from a merchant chip supplier rather than build them. The numbers below show how far D-Robotics has got with that bet, and why its former parent no longer wants it on its books.

Eight million chips, twenty S600 customers and no named investor

D-Robotics said the money will widen its Sunrise chip range across compute tiers and build a software platform covering the whole robot development chain, so that it can sell hardware and software as one piece of infrastructure. Cumulative Sunrise shipments passed 8 million units by the first half of 2026, the company said, and revenue in that half grew several times year on year. It gave no absolute revenue number.

The newest part, the Sunrise S600, launched in November 2025 and was adopted by more than 20 customers within six months, according to the release. The customers it named are TARS, Spirit AI, X Square Robot, UBTECH, PaXini Tech, Astribot, Fourier and Booster Robotics, a list that covers much of China's humanoid field. The company also claims more than 500 universities and over 100,000 developers in more than 20 countries use its tools, and says its D-Robotics Gravity Program backs more than 500 robotics teams across 10 product categories.

A Horizon spin-out that Horizon no longer controls

The anonymity of the investors makes more sense against Horizon Robotics' own filing. In its 2025 annual results, published on HKEX on 19 March 2026, Horizon said D-Robotics had been registered as its subsidiary in September 2023 and that its holding had been passively diluted from nearly 70% at Horizon's listing to about 40%. D-Robotics' employee share platform, D-GUA Brother LP, intended to end its acting-in-concert agreement with Horizon and the founders planned to withdraw a board-appointment power of attorney, after which Horizon would treat D-Robotics as an associate while remaining its largest shareholder. Horizon gave two reasons that matter here: D-Robotics' gross margin was significantly lower than Horizon's main business, and D-Robotics needed continuous external financing for research and growth. Six months later that financing arrived.

The merchant brain competes with NVIDIA and with its own customers

The obvious rival is NVIDIA, whose Jetson Thor module sits inside the reference humanoid NVIDIA set with Unitree and Sharpa in June and runs its Cosmos 3 Edge world model, according to earlier ROBOTNESS reporting. In the US, SiMa.ai raised US$150 million at a US$1.45 billion valuation on 28 September to sell edge AI chips to humanoid, automotive and drone makers. D-Robotics competes on a different axis. It sells a ladder of development kits on its website, from the RDK X3 at 5 TOPS and the RDK X5 at 10 TOPS to the RDK S100 at more than 80 TOPS, so a robot startup can prototype on a cheap board and move up without changing software.

TOPS, trillions of operations per second, is the headline measure of how much neural-network arithmetic a chip can do. The S600 release footnotes its figure as effective TOPS with half sparsity, meaning the number assumes half the model's weights are zeros the chip can skip, and states a total processing performance below 4,800. Buyers should read the headline compute as a best case for pruned models.

For the global industry, the round gives China's humanoid makers a well-funded domestic supplier of the part that is hardest to replace. Several of the named customers, including UBTECH, Fourier and Booster Robotics, already appear in ROBOTNESS coverage as volume humanoid makers, and each S600 design win ties a robot generation to D-Robotics' software stack for years.

The open questions are large. The investors, valuation and revenue are all undisclosed. The 8 million figure is cumulative across every Sunrise generation, including parts sold before the S600, so it says little about humanoid demand. A supplier whose customers are also building their own chips can lose its biggest accounts the moment they succeed.