Chinese chipmaker Sunrise has raised nearly RMB 3 billion (USD 420 million) in funding over the past year, according to China Venture. The report did not specify whether the capital was raised in a single round or across multiple financings.
The investor base spans multiple categories. Industrial and strategic backers include Sany Group’s HX Capital, 4Paradigm, CP Robotics, and GCL Technology. Venture capital and private equity firms participating include IDG Capital, Gaorong Ventures, Infini Capital, CICC Capital, Puhua Capital, Green Pine Capital Partners, and Soul Capital. Financial institutions include E Fund Management and ICBC Investment, while state-affiliated capital includes CCT Mixed Reform Fund.
Sunrise will use the funding primarily to develop its next generation of artificial intelligence chips, expand large-scale production, and build the software tools and partner ecosystem required to deploy its technology commercially.
Founded in 2020, Sunrise designs chips for AI inference, the process of running trained AI models to generate outputs such as answers, images, or text. Unlike model training, which occurs intermittently, inference takes place every time an AI system is used. As a result, inference has become a growing cost center for companies operating AI services, with chip efficiency increasingly shaping margins and user experience as usage scales.
Rather than developing general-purpose processors that handle both training and inference, Sunrise has focused exclusively on inference workloads. The company believes this narrower approach allows it to optimize for lower power consumption and lower cost per AI response, priorities for data centers and enterprise customers deploying large models at scale.
The company was spun out of SenseTime, which spent several years developing chip technology internally before separating the business.
Sunrise is led by two co-CEOs with long industry backgrounds. Wang Yong has more than two decades of experience in chip design, including roles at AMD and Baidu’s Kunlun chip unit. Wang Zhan, a founding member of Baidu, oversees commercialization and fundraising. The company is estimated to have a headcount of about 300 people.
Sunrise has already brought two chips into mass production. Its first product, S1, targets image and video recognition tasks. A second chip, S2, supports large model inference and is compatible with Nvidia’s CUDA ecosystem, which lowers switching costs for customers. The company plans to release a third chip, S3, in 2026. Sunrise has reportedly said the chip will focus on reducing the cost and energy required to run large AI models, with support for FP8 and FP4 low-precision inference.
Despite its short operating history, Sunrise has notably attracted backing from industrial players, venture firms, financial institutions, and state-linked funds. The fundraising reflects investor interest in both the company’s leadership and a broader push to lower the cost of running AI models in an increasingly competitive inference chip market.