In the last week of October, three Chinese startups working on AI infrastructure and hardware raised about $450 million between them. Approaching.AI in Beijing, Micronano Core in Hangzhou and NeuroXess in Shanghai each closed rounds of more than RMB 700 million. All three plan to spend much of the money on production capacity.
Approaching.AI: about $195M Series B
Approaching.AI, based in Beijing’s Haidian district, completed a Series B of more than RMB 1.3 billion (about $195 million). That brings its 2026 fundraising to RMB 2.4 billion. Six investors co-led the round: Zhecai Innovation, Xiaoshan Capital, ICBC Investment, Zhongguancun Science City, Xinglian Capital and Qianjiang Century City. SenseTime and Wangsu Technology were among the follow-on investors.
The company sells AI inference as “token production”, running large models on Chinese-made chips. The money will go to expanding token capacity, upgrading its ATaaS platform, inference R&D and its delivery operations. One named project is a 10,000-card “AI token factory” with Xiaoshan Capital. That kind of build needs servers, power, cooling, networking and data-centre operations.
Micronano Core: about $150M Series C2
Hangzhou-based Micronano Core announced on 28 October that it had closed a Series C2 of more than RMB 1 billion (about $150 million, per Crunchbase), led by Jiantou Investment, with Hangzhou Capital and others participating. Together with a RMB 1 billion C1 round in September, the company says it has raised more than RMB 2 billion in two months and RMB 3 billion in six months.
Micronano Core designs 3D compute-in-memory AI inference chips. Its first three chips have taped out, and it expects to start customer sampling and volume supply in early 2027. The money will go to further tape-outs, accelerator cards and servers, software toolchains, and stockpiling memory and packaging supply.
NeuroXess: RMB 700M (about $105M) Series B
Shanghai-based NeuroXess announced a RMB 700 million Series B on 28 October, co-led by SDIC Unity Capital, Shenzhen Capital Group and Triwise Capital, with IDG Capital among the co-investors. NeuroXess makes a fully implanted, wireless brain-computer interface. A registered clinical trial for the device started in July across nearly 20 hospitals. The company is also building a 14,300-square-metre factory with planned capacity in the tens of thousands of units a year. The money will go to clinical trials and approvals, the factory, and next-generation speech and visual BCI products.
What sellers should take from it
None of these rounds is mainly about headcount. Approaching.AI is buying compute and data-centre capacity. Micronano Core is buying fab, memory and packaging capacity ahead of 2027 volume. NeuroXess is paying for clinical operations and a medical-device factory. For suppliers of servers and components, EDA and test, contract manufacturing, clinical research services and regulatory consulting, all three now have funded buying plans for 2027.
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Sources: BigGo Finance and Zhongguancun Science City (Approaching.AI); Micronano Core and PEdaily; NeuroXess, 28 October 2026; Crunchbase. USD figures are approximate. Featured image: Shanghai Lujiazui skyline at night, by Larry Qian, Wikimedia Commons, CC0.