D-Robotics raises $400M Series C to expand its Sunrise robot chips

D-Robotics, the Horizon Robotics spin-out that designs Sunrise chips for robots, said on September 17, 2026 that it has closed a $400 million Series C round led by an unnamed “leading global internet company”. No valuation was disclosed.

Existing shareholders and other institutional investors joined the round, according to the company’s release, which did not name them. Gasgoo, citing the company, put the round at about 2.68 billion yuan and reported that it follows a $120 million Series B1 in March and a $150 million Series B2 in April, bringing D-Robotics’ 2026 fundraising to roughly $670 million across three rounds.

What does D-Robotics make?

D-Robotics sells the Sunrise line of system-on-chips and a software toolchain for robot builders. Gasgoo describes it as a spin-out incubated by Horizon Robotics, the Chinese driver-assistance chip company, with close ties to its parent in robotics. The company says cumulative Sunrise-series shipments passed 8 million units as of the first half of 2026 — a figure that spans its earlier, lower-power parts as well as the new flagship.

That flagship, the Sunrise S600, launched in November 2025 as a single-chip compute platform for humanoids and other embodied systems. D-Robotics says more than 20 customers adopted it within six months, naming TARS, Spirit AI, X Square Robot, UBTech, PaXini Tech, Astribot, Fourier and Booster Robotics. It also claims more than 500 universities and 100,000 developers in over 20 countries use its platform, and says its D-Robotics Gravity Program backs more than 500 robotics developers across 10 product categories.

Gasgoo reports that the S600 is being designed into humanoids, industrial wheeled vehicles and 3C (consumer electronics) manufacturing equipment, with a pitch built on single-chip full-stack compute, high-reliability hardware and an edge-to-cloud toolchain. That breadth matters for a chip vendor: humanoid volumes remain small, and wheeled and fixed industrial robots are where unit counts come from today.

How will D-Robotics use the $400 million?

The company says the money will broaden the Sunrise portfolio across compute tiers and build out a software platform covering the full robot development chain: data collection, model training, simulation, inference and deployment. The pitch is a combined hardware and software base that different categories of robot can share, rather than a chip sold on its own.

Why does it matter for China’s robot makers?

The on-robot “brain” is the slot Nvidia targets with Jetson Thor, and several Chinese humanoid makers have publicly adopted Nvidia’s module. D-Robotics’ customer list shows the same companies are also qualifying a domestic alternative — part of the broader shift toward domestic chips in Chinese robots. The revenue claim is relative only, so the round’s size is the clearest signal of how investors rate that shift.

Why it matters: the round funds a domestic chip supplier that already names many of China’s best-known humanoid makers as customers, at a moment when those makers are weighing it against Nvidia.