Chinese Robot-Chip Maker D-Robotics Raises $400 Million as US Import Ban Blocks Its Biggest Customers

D-Robotics, the Chinese chipmaker that builds the silicon running inside a growing share of the world's humanoid and industrial robots, closed a $400 million Series C funding round on September 17, 2026, according to the company's own announcement and confirmed independently by Dealroom, TechNode, and Gasgoo's autonews. The round is the largest robotics Series C in China over the past four years, according to Dealroom, which ranks it in the top 1% by size among 52 comparable deals.

That money is chasing a market the United States has already started closing off. The FCC placed Chinese-made humanoid robots on its Covered List in July 2026, according to Tech Times, barring new imports of exactly the class of machine D-Robotics' chips are designed to power. Tech Times notes the timing: investors just handed D-Robotics one of the largest robotics checks ever written in the same stretch when its end customers got locked out of the US market.

Who's actually funding this

Reports diverge on who led the round. Tech Times names South Korean conglomerate Mirae Asset as lead investor. Dealroom names "Future Asset" as the lead, with Meituan and Hefei Guotou also participating. Mirae Asset's Chinese-language name translates literally to "Future Asset," so these are almost certainly the same investor described two different ways in translation, not two competing claims. Three other outlets covering the round, AI Insider, Pulse 2, and ventureburn, decline to name a lead at all, describing only "a strategic investment from an unnamed global internet company" plus unnamed institutional investors. Ventureburn adds that "Chinese media reports point to a major platform company that is expanding into embodied AI," without naming it. No source in this set independently confirms which claim is complete.

The business case behind the check

D-Robotics was spun out of Horizon Robotics, a Hong Kong-listed maker of automotive driver-assistance chips, in early 2024. Its pitch: humanoid robots can't route split-second motor-control decisions through a cloud server, so the chip has to do real-time inference on the robot itself, on a power budget of tens of watts rather than kilowatts.

The company's Sunrise chip line, called Xuri in some Chinese-language coverage, spans 5 to 560 TOPS at INT8 precision, according to Tech Times, covering everything from home-cleaning robots to full humanoids. Cumulative shipments of the Sunrise line passed 8 million units, and D-Robotics says revenue grew several-fold year over year in the first half of 2026, according to TechNode, Gasgoo, and Pulse 2, all citing the company's own disclosures.

The flagship Sunrise S600, launched in November 2025, has been adopted by more than 20 customers in six months, including TARS, UBTECH, Fourier, Astribot, and Booster Robotics, according to AI Insider and Gasgoo. D-Robotics claims that gives it customer coverage across more than half of China's embodied-AI sector, and that most of those deployments have already moved into mass production.

This is the company's third capital raise in 2026. Gasgoo reports D-Robotics pulled in $120 million in a Series B1 round in March and another $150 million in Series B2 funding in April, putting total 2026 fundraising near 4.5 billion yuan before the Series C even closed.

The stakes for Washington's ban

D-Robotics' Gravity Program says it now supports more than 500 robotics developers, 500 universities, and 100,000 individual developers across more than 20 countries, per Gasgoo and AI Insider's identical figures pulled from the company's own blog post. That's a real infrastructure play. If the majority of China's humanoid-robot builders standardize on the same chip and software stack, it locks in a supplier position that's hard to dislodge later.

The case for the FCC's Covered List move is straightforward: humanoid robots built on foreign silicon and shipped into US homes, warehouses, or factories create a data and supply-chain exposure that national-security officials don't want to bet on, the same logic that's driven telecom equipment bans on Huawei and ZTE for years. The counterargument, which none of these sources directly quote but which follows from the funding numbers, is that walling off the US market doesn't slow Chinese robotics investment, it just means American robotics firms lose access to a chip platform that 20-plus companies and over half the embodied-AI sector are already standardizing on. Whether US regulators expand the Covered List further, or whether American robot builders find a domestic alternative to Sunrise-class silicon, remains unresolved.