D-Robotics Raises $400 Million to Build the Compute Backbone for the Robotics Industry

Shenzhen-based D-Robotics closed a $400 million Series C round to build compute and software infrastructure for the robotics industry, the largest startup funding announcement AngelLinx Intelligence tracked on September 17. The company's own release did not name individual investors beyond describing a strategic investment from a major global internet company alongside institutional and returning shareholders, while separate reporting identifies Mirae Asset as lead investor, joined by Meituan, Hefei State-owned Capital Investment, Nanshan Zhixin Investment and other government-backed and institutional participants.

D-Robotics is not trying to build a single humanoid robot to win the category outright. Instead, the company supplies Sunrise computing chips and a development platform, spanning data collection, model training, simulation, verification and deployment, that other robotics companies build on top of. That picks-and-shovels positioning gives D-Robotics exposure across humanoids, industrial machines, logistics robots and consumer systems simultaneously, rather than betting on which hardware category ultimately wins.

The commercial numbers behind the raise are notable. D-Robotics says cumulative shipments of its Sunrise chip family have passed 8 million units, and its newer S600 embodied-AI processor, released in November 2025, has already been adopted by more than 20 robotics customers including UBTECH, Fourier and Astribot. The company also reports first-half 2026 revenue grew several times year over year. Those figures are company-reported rather than independently audited, but they indicate investors are financing existing commercial traction rather than a purely pre-revenue robotics thesis.

The new capital will expand D-Robotics' chip family across additional performance tiers and continue building out the software stack that lets robotics developers move from prototype to mass production without each company independently solving compute, simulation and deployment from scratch. That strategy mirrors a broader pattern in physical AI investing this year: rather than picking a single robot maker, investors are increasingly backing the shared infrastructure layer that many different robot categories depend on regardless of which specific hardware companies ultimately scale.

D-Robotics' raise was, by a wide margin, the largest of the startup funding announcements AngelLinx Intelligence tracked on September 17, roughly three-quarters of the combined headline value across the day's most notable rounds. That scale gap is itself informative: investors are still willing to write extremely large checks for physical AI, but overwhelmingly for companies that can demonstrate an infrastructure position spanning many downstream customers and categories, rather than for a single product bet. The involvement of Meituan and multiple government-backed Chinese investment vehicles alongside Mirae Asset also underscores how central robotics compute has become to Chinese industrial policy, positioning D-Robotics as strategically significant well beyond its immediate commercial metrics.

For founders building infrastructure rather than end-user products, D-Robotics' raise is a useful data point on how investors are currently pricing picks-and-shovels positioning within physical AI: real revenue, broad multi-customer adoption, and a chip and software platform that scales horizontally across an entire industry rather than one vertical use case.

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