The dark horse chip startup that has completed 7 rounds of financing is about to launch its IPO.

The robot chip supplier of Agibot is going to launch an IPO on the A-share market.

Recently, Beijing Huixi Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Huixi Technology") completed the registration for listing tutoring filing with the Beijing Securities Regulatory Bureau, officially kicking off its A-share IPO process.

The company was founded in April 2022. Four years ago, it positioned itself as a developer of intelligent driving chips: its first 7nm chip Guangzhi R1 was benchmarked against NVIDIA's Orin-X, with mass production and vehicle deployment scheduled for 2025. Four years later, no mass-produced vehicle models have been launched, but this chip has delivered an impressive performance record in robot factories. Data shows that in the first half of 2026, Huixi Technology's shipment volume accounted for about one fifth of the global high-computing-power robot chip market, ranking second in the world, second only to NVIDIA.

It has been accompanied by a dense list of shareholders over the past four years: in the early stage, it received investments from Shunwei Capital under Lei Jun and Xiaomi Group, and NIO Capital under Li Bin. In 2026, right before its sprint for IPO, the National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund, two industrial funds under the Beijing municipal government, and Agibot joined in as strategic investors. This year, Huixi Technology has obtained more than 2.5 billion yuan in equity financing.

Tsinghua-origin Core Team Starting with Automotive-grade Chips

Among chip startups, Huixi's founding team is at the top tier of the industry.

Founder Xu Ningyi completed his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in the Department of Electronic Engineering of Tsinghua University. After graduation, he joined Microsoft Research Asia and served as the head of the Hardware Computing Group, leading the customized acceleration system that was deployed in ultra-large-scale data centers for the first time. Around 2017, he joined Baidu as the chief architect and chairman of the Technical Committee of the Intelligent Chip Department, leading the design of Kunlun, China's first cloud AI chip that supports both training and inference, and promoting its first large-scale application in the industrial field. Before starting his own business, he also ran Zhenliang Intelligence and served as a tenured professor at the Qingyuan Research Institute of Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Zhang Jianyong, one of the co-founders, also graduated from Tsinghua University. He used to serve as the vice president of Autonomous Driving of NIO, leading the world's first mass production of EyeQ4 functions and Orin platform. He is one of the few people who have personally put intelligent driving chips into mass-produced vehicles. Another co-founder He Guanghui is a professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, who has long been engaged in research on high-efficiency digital system chips. The two co-founders have filled in two critical missing parts of the business puzzle respectively.

In April 2022, the company was founded, starting its operation in Hefei and moving to Yizhuang, Beijing the next year. With such a strong team, the company barely went through a cold start period in financing. After the capital was in place, its products were launched soon.

In October 2024, Huixi Technology released its first automotive-grade chip Guangzhi R1 at the Beijing World Intelligent Connected Vehicles Conference: it adopts 7nm process, integrates 45 billion transistors, uses 8-core SIMT architecture, and has a deep learning computing power of more than 500 TOPS, which is twice that of NVIDIA Orin-X. At the press conference, Xu Ningyi set the goal for this chip: to make Guangzhi R1 the large-computing-power intelligent driving chip with the fastest mass production and vehicle deployment speed in China, and the most user-friendly intelligent driving chip in the industry.

Public reports said that the company planned to cooperate with an international automotive brand in 2025 to launch mass-produced vehicles equipped with Guangzhi R1. However, 2025 has passed, and no official announcement of the mass production of that vehicle has been released through public channels. In the subsequent rounds of financing disclosures, this cooperation case was never mentioned again.

Objectively speaking, this is not a dilemma faced by Huixi Technology alone. Industry survey data shows that in the intelligent driving chip market for self-owned brand passenger vehicles in the first half of 2026, Horizon accounted for 31.94% and NVIDIA accounted for 29.38%, with the two accounting for about 60% in total; in the urban NOA high-end track, NVIDIA, Huawei and Horizon together account for about 90%. Under the existing market pattern, it is very difficult for new enterprises to squeeze in and get a share of the market.

What is more subtle is that the two industrial investors who invested in Huixi Technology in the early stage have blocked the road by coincidence: NIO chose to develop its own intelligent driving chips, and Xiaomi adopted NVIDIA's solution, neither of which reserved a definite mass production position for the company they invested in.

The market window has narrowed, and the automotive deployment path is temporarily blocked.

Agibot's Chip Supplier, Second Only to NVIDIA

The strategic shift took place between 2025 and 2026.

The computing power architecture of Guangzhi R1, which is natively adapted to Transformer large models, was re-applied to the robot scenario. In the fourth quarter of 2025, the RISE computing platform based on this chip completed its first mass production delivery on Agibot's G2 humanoid robot.

Xu Ningyi said in an interview during the 2026 World Robot Conference: Making a workable Demo and making a set of stably mass-producible computing platforms are two completely different things. In his view, when embodied intelligence truly enters the physical world, it requires not only larger models, but also a set of computing platforms that can support the closed loop of perception, reasoning, decision-making and control.

At the World Robot Conference in August 2026, Huixi Technology released the Huixi Embodied computing power product series for embodied intelligence. The R1 MAX has a computing power of 500 TOPS, targeting open scenarios and long-range generalized tasks; the R1 PRO has a computing power of 375 TOPS, integrating CPU, NPU, GPU and real-time interfaces into a single chip, realizing the closed loop from perception to motion control on the chip. The supporting RCM core modules and development kits were also unveiled at the same time, and a number of partners including Jingwei Hirain, Leju Robotics and Arm China joined Huixi Technology to launch the Embodied Intelligent Computing Ecology Alliance.

The company's customer list has also expanded. The Guangzhi R1 series has received thousands of domain controller orders in the embodied intelligence track, and has been deployed in Agibot G2, factory production line robots of Leju Kuafu, L4 unmanned logistics vehicles of Jiushi Intelligence, and its application scenarios are also extending to mines and industrial inspection.

The market is also growing rapidly. Data from third-party research institutions shows that the global market sales of special chips for humanoid robots reached about 858 million US dollars in 2025, and is expected to reach 4.007 billion US dollars by 2032. The most attractive part of the market is the price difference brought by domestic substitution: after NVIDIA Jetson Thor is mass produced, the industry estimates that the price of a single chip is 2500 to 3000 US dollars, while domestic similar solutions can reduce the price to 300 to 500 US dollars in the same scenario.

At present, Huixi Technology ranks second in the global market, but this position is not very stable for the time being. Agibot is both its strategic shareholder and its first large-scale customer, leading to a high concentration of orders. In the high-end robot SoC market, NVIDIA's share still reached about 69% in 2025.

7 Rounds of Financing from VC to National Team

The transformation of Huixi Technology's business direction has also brought changes to its capital structure.

In the angel round in June 2022, Yuansheng Capital and NIO Capital led the investment. At that time, intelligent driving chips were still the hottest track, and the two institutions invested in the complete resume of Xu Ningyi's team from cloud chips to automotive-grade chips. In February 2023, Shunwei Capital and Xiaomi Group jointly led the angel+ round. Xiaomi's bet on intelligent driving computing power made this round of financing more industry-oriented than financially oriented. After that, the Pre-A round and A round were completed successively in 2023 and 2025.

A notable detail is that Yuansheng Capital has been accompanying the company since it led the angel round, while Shunwei and Cathay Capital followed in from the angel+ round and kept increasing their investment until the B round. However, NIO Capital, one of the lead investors of the angel round, no longer appears in the list of new rounds of financing.

The real change of pace took place in 2026.

In February, Huixi Technology completed a Pre-B round of financing of more than 800 million yuan. The investors included industrial guidance funds such as Liangxi Digital FOF and Jingguorui Fund, as well as a number of embodied intelligent robot enterprises and industrial CVCs. Agibot joined the company as a strategic investor at this time.

On October 22, Huixi Technology announced that the total financing of the Pre-B+ round and B round, which amounted to about 1.7 billion yuan, was completed. The financing was led by Beijing Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund, participated by the National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund, Beijing Robot Industry Development Investment Fund, Yinshan Capital, Zhengxin Gu Capital and other institutions. Old shareholders including Shunwei Capital, Yuansheng Capital, Cathay Capital, SenseTime Guoxiang Capital, 37 Interactive Entertainment and Starlink Capital all increased their investment. Adding the two rounds together, Huixi Technology has obtained more than 2.5 billion yuan in equity financing in 2026.

On the whole, the first half of the journey before IPO was led by market-oriented VCs and industrial capitals, and the second half was taken over by national state-owned funds, which is also a typical financing rhythm for hard technology enterprises: market-oriented institutions are responsible for judging the value of technical assets, and national teams support the valuation and order imagination after the business narrative is switched.

At present, among external shareholders, Yizhuang State Investment holds 11.03% of the shares, making it the largest external shareholder; Yuansheng Capital holds 7.79%, Xiaomi Group holds 2.79%, SenseTime Guoxiang Capital and SenseTime Group hold about 2.5% in total, and Agibot holds 0.0744%.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Dongsi Shitiao Capital" (ID: DsstCapital), written by Li Man, edited by Wang Qingwu, and authorized for release by 36Kr.