D-Robotics Sunrise chip startup closes $400M Series C as FCC ban redraws humanoid robotics map
D-Robotics, a Chinese fabless chip designer spun out of Horizon Robotics in early 2024, closed a $400 million Series C on September 17, 2026, led by South Korea’s Mirae Asset — the same week the U.S. Federal Communications Commission confirmed it had added humanoid and quadruped robots to its Covered List, effectively banning new imports of products powered by the company’s flagship Sunrise chip. The timing crystallizes a paradox at the heart of physical AI: the capital backing China’s leading humanoid robot silicon is accelerating just as Washington moves to sever that silicon from American supply chains.
D-Robotics designs the D-Robotics Sunrise chip family, a vertically tiered compute platform spanning 5 to 560 TOPS (INT8) that scales from floor-cleaning robots to full-scale bipedal humanoids. The top-end Sunrise S600, launched November 2025, pairs an 18-core ARM Cortex-A78AE CPU — which handles large language model and vision-language-action inference — with a proprietary Nash-architecture BPU optimized for sub-millisecond locomotion control. D-Robotics calls the split the “Brain-Cerebellum” architecture, marketing it as a deterministic real-time control path running parallel to generative AI workloads.
The S600 delivers 560 TOPS at INT8 with one-half sparsity, effective compute that D-Robotics positions directly against NVIDIA’s Jetson Thor, which uses FP4 precision on a Blackwell-derived GPU. The two products reflect competing philosophies: NVIDIA routes everything through a general-purpose GPU, while D-Robotics segregates planning cognition from motor reflexes across heterogeneous cores. Every named S600 customer to date — UBTECH, FOURIER, Booster Robotics, Astribot, TARS, Spirit AI, X Square Robot — is a Chinese humanoid manufacturer.
Mirae Asset led the Series C with participation from Meituan Strategic Investment, Hefei State-owned Investment, Nanshan Strategic Emerging Industry Investment, Cathay Capital, and GF Xinde. Existing backers GL Ventures, 5Y Capital, Linear Capital, and Vertex Growth — Temasek’s growth arm — all increased their positions. Across four disclosed rounds in 26 months, D-Robotics has now raised approximately $770 million: a $100 million Series A in mid-2025, a $120 million Series B1 in March 2026, a $150 million Series B2 in April 2026, and the $400 million Series C. The company reported revenue grew several times year-over-year in the first half of 2026 versus the first half of 2025.
Commercial traction has scaled with the funding. Cumulative Sunrise chip shipments have crossed 8 million units across the product family, and the S600 has been adopted by more than 20 embodied AI customers since its November 2025 launch, with the named humanoid accounts forming the core reference list. D-Robotics declined to disclose unit volumes specific to the S600 but indicated humanoid-class designs account for a rising share of revenue mix.
FCC Covered List ruling exposes Sunrise chip customer base to U.S. market risk
That customer base now sits inside a regulatory blast radius. On July 28, 2026, the FCC added humanoid and quadruped robots to its Covered List under the Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Act, barring new equipment authorizations for products containing covered Chinese components. The Commission wrote that robotic devices collect data that could be “leveraged by malign actors to surveil Americans, enhance the capabilities of foreign intelligence services, or to remotely commandeer the robots.” The GUARD Act, introduced in June 2026 by Representatives Moolenaar, Obernolte, and McClellan, would formalize FCC authority to conduct risk assessments of Chinese robotics communications equipment — a structural risk for any U.S.-headquartered robot maker sourcing Sunrise silicon.
Mirae Asset’s lead role reflects a broader Asian institutional thesis. The conglomerate’s Global X brand has launched China-focused robotics and humanoid ETFs, and Mirae Asset has publicly projected forming new funds totaling approximately $654 million by year-end 2026, with semiconductors listed as an explicit priority sector. Investors are positioning for the chip layer beneath physical AI, regardless of which national supply chain ultimately wins the humanoid race.
The market opportunity Mirae Asset is underwriting is large enough to justify the geopolitical friction. Morgan Stanley projects the humanoid robot semiconductor market will reach $305 billion by 2045, with AI processors expanding from roughly 67 percent of total humanoid bill-of-materials cost today to approximately 93 percent by 2045 as actuators and batteries commoditize. Chips, not mechanics, will become the value capture point. The D-Robotics Sunrise chip deal therefore stands as the moment the embodied-AI capital cycle became a geopolitically contested asset class, and the D-Robotics Sunrise chip financing will be referenced as the high-water mark for Asia-led physical-AI investment through the end of the year.
For D-Robotics, the Sunrise chip roadmap faces a bifurcated future: continued dominance inside China, where Article 7 of the National Intelligence Law requires all organizations to support national intelligence work on demand, set against a closed U.S. market and an uncertain European response. The Series C gives D-Robotics the capital to deepen its Brain-Cerebellum architecture and court non-U.S. humanoid OEMs — but the same $400 million underscores how quickly a chip layer beneath physical AI can become the next front in U.S.-China decoupling, with the Sunrise chip and its Sunrise chip roadmap now squarely in Washington’s crosshairs.
D-Robotics Sunrise chip slots into a $305 billion humanoid semiconductor market by 2045
Morgan Stanley projects the humanoid semiconductor market alone will reach $305 billion by 2045, representing roughly half of the entire global chip market in today’s dollars. The bank’s analysis shows the bill of materials for a humanoid robot collapsing from roughly $131,000 today to approximately $23,000 by 2045 as manufacturing scales, but semiconductor content rising from 4 to 6 percent of BOM cost today to 24 percent by 2045. AI processors specifically are forecast to grow from approximately 67 percent of total semiconductor costs inside humanoids today to roughly 93 percent by 2045 — meaning the D-Robotics Sunrise chip roadmap is positioning the company for the segment where the most value will accrue. TrendForce separately projects the humanoid chip market will surpass $48 million by 2028, with NVIDIA’s Jetson Thor adoption by Agility Robotics, Boston Dynamics, and Amazon among the near-term volume drivers. The D-Robotics Sunrise chip portfolio now sits in the same buyer-side evaluation set for any humanoid program, which is precisely the strategic position Mirae Asset and its co-investors paid $400 million to underwrite.
D-Robotics Sunrise chip slots into a $305 billion humanoid semiconductor market by 2045
Morgan Stanley projects the humanoid semiconductor market alone will reach $305 billion by 2045, representing roughly half of the entire global chip market in today’s dollars. The bank’s analysis shows the bill of materials for a humanoid robot collapsing from roughly $131,000 today to approximately $23,000 by 2045 as manufacturing scales, but semiconductor content rising from 4 to 6 percent of BOM cost today to 24 percent by 2045. AI processors specifically are forecast to grow from approximately 67 percent of total semiconductor costs inside humanoids today to roughly 93 percent by 2045 — meaning the D-Robotics Sunrise chip roadmap is positioning the company for the segment where the most value will accrue. TrendForce separately projects the humanoid chip market will surpass $48 million by 2028, with NVIDIA’s Jetson Thor adoption by Agility Robotics, Boston Dynamics, and Amazon among the near-term volume drivers. The D-Robotics Sunrise chip portfolio now sits in the same buyer-side evaluation set for any humanoid program, which is precisely the strategic position Mirae Asset and its co-investors paid $400 million to underwrite.
Source: TechTimes