The Chinese Chip Stack Beneath Embodied AI Is Coming for Europe's Robotics Founders

D-Robotics just closed a $120 million B1 round, bringing total funding to $220 million, and showed up at embedded world in Nuremberg with a vertically integrated chip-to-software platform purpose-built for embodied AI. European robotics founders building on NVIDIA Jetson or Qualcomm silicon should understand what that combination actually means for their competitive position — before their customers do.

What happened in China In March 2026, D-Robotics announced the completion of a $120 million B1 financing round, bringing the company's total funding across its A and B rounds to $220 million. The B1 close came less than a year after D-Robotics wrapped up a USD100 million Series A in 2025 — a round backed by GL Ventures (the investment arm of Hillhouse), 5Y Capital, Linear Venture, Hermitage Capital, and Vertex Growth, an investment arm of Singapore's Temasek. That Series A investor base alone signals something important: this is not a speculative deep-tech bet. It is a conviction play by some of Asia's most sophisticated institutional capital. D-Robotics was spun off from Horizon Robotics' robotics division in early 2024 — itself a company carrying a $12.5 billion market value at the time of D-Robotics' Series A. The spinoff inherited Horizon Robotics' proprietary BPU (Brain Processing Unit) intelligent computing architecture…

The Chinese Chip Stack Beneath Embodied AI Is Coming for Europe's Robotics Founders

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