The gold rush in Chinese robotics has a familiar problem: everybody wants to build the star humanoid (人形机器人), and almost nobody wants to make the brains it runs on.
DiGua Robot (地瓜机器人) took the opposite wager, and investors just handed it $150 million to prove the bet.
Call it the picks-and-shovels play — sell the shovels, skip the gold mine.
The round at a glance
DiGua closed a $150 million B2 round (about RMB 1.08 billion / HK$1.17 billion) in April 2026, only weeks after a $120 million B1 tranche. Together the B stage reached $270 million (about RMB 1.85 billion / HK$2.0 billion), and with a $100 million A round in 2025 (about RMB 6.8 billion-equivalent RMB 680 million / HK$738 million) the company's disclosed total tops $370 million (about RMB 2.53 billion / HK$2.74 billion).
The post-money valuation landed at $1.5 billion (about RMB 10.8 billion / HK$11.7 billion), earning DiGua a seat in the "RMB 10 billion club" of China's robotics independents.
The roster is notable for its global spread:
- Prosperity7, the venture arm of Saudi Aramco, led the B2.
- Returning backers included Hillhouse (高瓴创投), Temasek's Vertex Growth, Didi (滴滴), and 5Y Capital (五源资本).
- New strategics ranged from a retail-and-supply-chain giant to Envision Group (远景科技) and Yunfeng (云锋基金).
Why "no body, just the brain"
DiGua was carved out of Horizon (地平线), the autonomous-driving chip designer, in January 2024. Its self-declared identity is a base-layer company (底座型公司): it builds the compute chips, algorithm stacks, and developer kits that other firms bolt their robots onto. It does not manufacture a robot body.
The core products are the Sunrise (旭日) intelligent compute chips and the RDK developer kits, spanning 5 to 128 TOPS across use cases — humanoids, quadrupeds, logistics AMRs, and even robot vacuums. Its flagship S600 platform (560 TOPS) is built to host billion-parameter embodied models and is native-compatible with Horizon's open HoloBrain / HoloMotion base models.
The pitch is one brain, many bodies (一脑多形): a single software base that drives a humanoid, a dog, a wheeled platform, or an arm. In a field where every startup reinvents its own stack, DiGua is selling the shared operating layer — the Silicon and the OS, not the chassis.
Who is already standing on the base
DiGua says its compute platforms sit inside products from more than 100 robot makers. Named references from reporting include Ecovacs (科沃斯) and Narwal (云鲸) on the consumer side and Fourier (傅利叶) in rehabilitation robotics, alongside quadruped and humanoid (人形机器人) builders. That breadth is the whole point: a base-layer vendor's revenue is not tied to any single robot form winning, so a stumble in the humanoid (人形机器人) hype cycle does not sink the supplier.
The ecosystem is deliberately wide. DiGua's "地心引力" (Gravity) accelerator has served 500+ small teams and helped 200+ ship a product, a funnel that compounds the lock-in of its toolchain. The more developers build on RDK kits, the harder it becomes to leave — exactly the dynamic Nvidia rides in GPUs, and the one DiGua is copying on the robot side.
The capital rotation underneath
DiGua's raise is really a signal about where money is moving. Through early 2026, humanoid (人形机器人) valuations hit lofty heights even as investors grew nervous about bodies that burn cash and miss shipment dates. The response was a quiet rotation upstream, toward chips, toolchains, and base models — the parts that get used no matter which robot wins.
DiGua fits that mood precisely. The company says 2025 shipments rose 180% year on year and its customer count grew 200%, with 400+ enterprise clients and a developer base above 100,000 across 20+ countries. Those are the kind of "we already ship" metrics that reassure investors who have grown tired of render-reel promises.
Horizon's (地平线) backing matters here too. Even after dilution, Horizon remains the largest single shareholder and shares core technology, giving DiGua a credibility and supply chain that a pure startup lacks — the same "mother ecosystem" (母生态) logic Horizon uses in cars, extended to everything with actuators.
What readers can do now
- Follow the upstream, not just the headlines. When capital shifts from robot bodies to chips and base models, the safer long-term exposure is often the "shovel" supplier.
- Check customer count over valuation. DiGua's 400+ enterprise clients and 100k developers are a more useful health signal than its $1.5B tag.
- Watch the Horizon (地平线) linkage. A spinout's durability usually tracks the parent's roadmap; treat DiGua's fortunes as partially tandem with Horizon's.
Honest limitations
Funding amounts, the lead investor, and the valuation are reported by Chinese outlets (International Finance News / 国际金融报, National Business Daily / 每日经济新闻, and Tianyancha / 天眼查), sourced to the company's announcement; no Western wire (Reuters/Bloomberg) independently confirmed them. RMB-to-USD/HKD conversions use an approximate 7.2 RMB-per-dollar rate and may differ from the company's books. The "400+ clients" and "100k developers" figures are company-disclosed and unaudited by us. DiGua's separation from Horizon (地平线) is partial — Horizon remains the largest shareholder — so governance and technology dependence are closer than the "spinout" label might suggest.