Xilect, a Chinese chip startup jointly founded by GPU designer MetaX and humanoid robot maker UBTech, has raised RMB 500 million (about $70.4 million) in an angel round, valuing the company at RMB 4 billion, according to TechNode. The round was co-led by GGV Capital and Matrix Partners China. Xilect was only incorporated in Wuxi in late May 2026, meaning the funding landed roughly five months after the company's formation.
MetaX and UBTech each hold 35.01% of Xilect, with a third backer, Fenglong, holding 4.7%. The startup is building a system-on-chip that combines multimodal perception, decision-making and motion control in a single processor — what the company calls a "large-and-small-brain" architecture for robots.
Why two very different companies built a chip startup together
The MetaX-UBTech pairing is unusual because it fuses a GPU designer with a humanoid robot maker, rather than a chip company selling to robot makers as customers. That structure lets Xilect co-design silicon directly against UBTech's own humanoid hardware and software stack, instead of guessing at third-party robot requirements the way general-purpose chipmakers do.
It also signals how tightly China's robotics and semiconductor industries are now intertwining. Rather than wait for Nvidia or Qualcomm to tune chips for humanoid workloads, Chinese robot makers are funding bespoke silicon from the ground up, with government-linked sources inside the RMB 4 billion valuation reflecting investor appetite for domestic alternatives to US hardware.
A long runway before the chip actually ships
Xilect's own timeline is the catch: development platforms aren't due until 2027, and the first production SoC isn't expected until 2028. That is a multi-year gap during which Nvidia's Thor — the chip Xilect explicitly wants to beat — keeps shipping and accumulating developer tools, partner integrations and real-world deployment data.
The RMB 500 million will fund four things: core chip and computing-platform R&D, software tooling to help robot makers run existing AI models on Xilect's future hardware, team expansion, and joint validation work with robot manufacturers and industrial customers. That software layer matters as much as the silicon — a chip nobody can easily program is a chip nobody adopts, regardless of its raw specs.
Xilect joins a growing list of Chinese robot-chip hopefuls, including Xixuan Chuangzhi and Amicro's pivot upstream, all racing to reduce China's robotics supply chain's dependence on US silicon. Whether Xilect's backing from an actual robot maker gives it an edge in getting real-world validation faster than rivals will be the thing to watch as 2027 approaches.