"D-Robotics Closes $100 Million Series A to Accelerate Embodied Intelligence Ecosystem Build-Out | Linear Portfolio"

Today, D-Robotics announced the completion of a $100 million Series A funding round, with participation from 10 domestic and international investors including Linear Capital.

D-Robotics CEO Cong Wang previously served as head of Horizon Robotics' AIoT and Robotics Business Unit. As Horizon Robotics' earliest investor, Linear Capital once again threw its support behind D-Robotics when it spun out independently, helping the company accelerate its vision for an embodied intelligence ecosystem.

On May 28, marking its first anniversary of independent operations, D-Robotics, a subsidiary of Horizon Robotics-W (9660.HK), announced the completion of a $100 million Series A round. The round drew strong interest from numerous investment institutions at home and abroad, with participation from Hillhouse, 5Y Capital, Linear Capital, Herun Capital, Unity Ventures, Vertex Growth, Lishi Capital, Dunhong Asset, Feidian Capital, Plum Ventures, and Huangpu River Capital, injecting powerful momentum into D-Robotics' mission to build out its embodied intelligence ecosystem.

Since its founding, D-Robotics has held fast to its founding vision of "becoming the Wintel of the robotics era," dedicated to building full-stack development infrastructure that integrates hardware and software with edge-cloud collaboration, making the development of smarter robots simpler. Commercially, it has achieved horizontal expansion from scaled deployment in consumer robotics to incubating diverse categories of emerging intelligent robots, and on to collaborative innovation with leading embodied intelligence enterprises — all driving the intelligent evolution and scaled deployment of robotics.

Linear Capital's story with D-Robotics began with Horizon Robotics.

D-Robotics CEO Cong Wang joined Horizon Robotics in 2018 and took over its AIoT team in early 2020. After a period of exploration and reflection, by late 2020 Wang's team at Horizon's AIoT division had firmly committed to building robots, with that team essentially forming D-Robotics' founding team today.

With the rapid advancement of large models and growing capital attention toward robotics, Horizon Robotics' internal assessment concluded that spinning out the robotics business unit as an independent company could enable faster growth, allowing the new entity to adopt a fresher brand image and hiring model better suited to the sector's commercial expansion and talent dynamics. At the same time, building on Horizon's accumulated expertise, D-Robotics started with numerous distinctive resource advantages.

Wang has long believed in a principle of Kai Yu's — "compete where no one else is competing." In his view, the robotics market is booming with enormous future potential and real technological moats. Rather than doing me-too products, D-Robotics chose to focus on building a "Wintel ecosystem" for the robotics industry, aiming to become the underlying hardware and software infrastructure company in this massive market, embracing openness to help expand the entire industry.

Harry Wang, founder and CEO of Linear Capital, recalled, "We're bullish on embodied intelligence, and D-Robotics' focused approach addresses real pain points in robot development today. Kai Yu introduced me to the team, and after due diligence we were impressed — we didn't hesitate to back their exploration."

Drawing on years of technical accumulation and industry experience, D-Robotics has built a complete product portfolio spanning chips, algorithms, and software. Addressing the rapidly emerging and increasingly segmented scenario-specific demands of intelligent robots from consumer to industrial applications, it has established full product coverage across compute tiers from 5 to 500 TOPS, comprehensively meeting edge computing needs for humanoid robots, wheeled-legged robots, quadruped robotic dogs, service and companion robots, logistics AMRs, and more.

To accelerate the deployment of embodied intelligent robots, D-Robotics will officially launch the RDK S100 robotics development kit for embodied intelligence in June. Featuring hundred-TOPS-class compute power and a powerful heterogeneous architecture design, it is the industry's first single-SoC compute-and-control integrated platform, enabling collaborative computation for robot perception and motion control. The platform has already secured early adoption from several top industry partners including Leju Robotics, LimX Dynamics, RealMan, Tsinghua University Institute for AI Industry Research, Qizhi Technology, and Guoxunxinwei.

In the home consumer robotics market with the largest user bases — robotic vacuums, robotic lawn mowers, and the like — D-Robotics' Sunrise 3 and Sunrise 5 intelligent compute chips have been fully deployed across bestselling products from industry leaders such as ECOVACS and Narwal. To date, cumulative shipments of the Sunrise series have exceeded 5 million units, growing by millions annually to bring intelligent innovation to users worldwide.

While deepening its presence in consumer markets, D-Robotics has actively cultivated its developer ecosystem, empowering over 200 small and medium makers to date and incubating nearly 100 emerging categories of intelligent robots, spanning golf robots, pool robots, tennis robots, home companion robots, and other innovative form factors. It has nearly 100,000 developer users, growing at 100% annually, spread across more than 20 countries including Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Spain, and China.

In university ecosystem building, D-Robotics has constructed a complete talent development pipeline for embodied intelligence spanning graduate education, undergraduate programs, vocational training, and K-12 education, expanding its university partnerships from 20 to over 200 institutions, including top schools such as Tsinghua University, Nanjing University, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, gathering momentum for cultivating future professionals in robotics through comprehensive enablement support.

Note: * Effective TOPS with 1/2 Sparsity, TPP (Total Processing Performance) < 4800