Muxi-UBTECH chip venture raises $74.9M angel round
What's the deal? Xixuan Chuangzhi, a chip joint venture founded by Chinese GPU maker MuxiDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → and robot maker UBTECHDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, has raised US$68.8M in an angel round. Jiyuan Capital and Matrix Partners co-led the financing.
What's the endgame? Established in May 2026, Xixuan Chuangzhi is building what it calls an autonomous and controllable computing platform for embodied intelligence — the chips robots need to process perception and control locally. It uses a domestic GPGPU architecture and aims to compete with Nvidia and its Thor platform.
Why now? The humanoid robot industry still leans on foreign general-purpose chips, which keep costs high and fall short on performance. Those chips can account for a third or more of a robot's bill of materials, and they are not optimised for the low latency and low power demands of embodied AI.
The venture plans to achieve tape-out in the second half of 2027 and mass production in 2028. Funds will go toward core chip R&D, software toolchains, team expansion, and joint testing with robot makers.
What could go wrong? The money deepens an existing partnership — Muxi and UBTECH each hold 35.01% of the venture — but the key test is production. Investment enthusiasm does not establish commercial traction, and the venture must deliver chips into real robots while easing reliance on constrained advanced-chip supplies.
The signal: The raise lands amid a Chinese embodied-AI funding surge, with Reuters reporting US$12.9B across 322 deals in the first half of 2026. Capital is increasingly chasing the compute behind robots — and localising a strategic bottleneck.
Read more: coinmeta.com
Image credit: IBM Research
