Digua Robotics, a spinoff of Hong Kong-listed Chinese autonomous driving developer Horizon Robotics, has raised $100 million in a Series A funding round from a dozen investors, including Hillhouse Investment.
5Y Capital, Linear Capital, Hermitage Capital, Unity Ventures, Vertex Growth, Monolith Management, Dunhong Capital Management, AlphaX Partners, Plum Ventures, and Huangpu River Capital participated in the deal, Dighua Robotics announced on Wednesday.
The new funding is expected to help accelerate the startup’s new product expansion in the humanoid robotics space, an area that has gained tremendous traction in China thanks to the viral dance performance at the Spring Festival Gala by Unitree’s H1 humanoid robots and tech giant Huawei Technologies’ move to build a global innovation centre for embodied intelligence.
Digua Robotics, which offers full-stack development infrastructure for both consumer and industrial robots, is set to officially launch a new development kit, “SDK S100”, targeting humanoid robots this June, said the company.
The Seres A round comes as the company celebrates its first anniversary of independent operation from Horizon Robotics, a Chinese supplier of autonomous and intelligent driving solutions to automakers like BYD, Geely, and Volkswagen.
Digua Robotics was founded by its CEO Wang Cong, who joined Horizon Robotics in 2018 and started leading the company’s AIoT (Artificial Intelligence of Things) team in early 2020. Under his leadership, the AIoT team pivoted to robotics development later in the same year.
The decision to build the robotics team into an independent company was made just one year earlier, following internal discussions among Horizon Robotics’ executives, who saw great potential to grow the robotics business and attract investors’ support amid the evolution of large language models (LLMs) in China.
Digua Robotics said it aspires to become “the Wintel of the robotics era,” powering the development of more intelligent robots through its full-stack development infrastructure covering software, hardware, cloud, chips, algorithms, and terminal devices. Its platform can enable the development of wheel-legged robots, companion robots, and autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) that perform automated handling tasks within warehouses, logistics centres, and manufacturing environments.
The company’s Xuri-series intelligent computing chips have powered robot vacuum cleaners and robot mowers developed by in-home robotic appliance brands like Ecovacs Robotics and Narwal. As of today, it has shipped over five million Xuri-series chips to clients globally.
