Humanoid Robotics:
The Consolidation Map

Tracking the M&A wave reshaping a multi-trillion-dollar industry. Who’s buying whom, who’s funding whom, and where the founders are landing.

$13T

Projected Market

By 2050 (RBC Capital)

M&A Deals >$50M

In 2025 (vs. 4 in 2024)

$8.7B+

2026 Funding YTD

1.8× all of 2025

18,000

Units Shipped 2025

~90% from China · IFR: ~7,000 sold

Latest Changes

2026-10-15Added AgiBot’s new round – ¥1–1.5B (~$140–210M) at about ¥50B (~$7B), and close to done, per Caijing. No investors named. The price is the story: more than three times the ¥15B Astribot got the same day. The catch is the listing. Hong Kong makes a company that raises after filing wait 120 days from the close before it can trade, so one investor says AgiBot won’t list this year. China’s volume leader is taking private money over a place in the IPO queue (Oct 13)
2026-10-15Updated FF EAI Robotics → Faraday Future robotics – the term sheet we logged on Oct 1 is now a definitive agreement, signed Oct 12 and announced Oct 14. Still all-stock, still about $200M for FF’s robot unit, at $2.246 a share, roughly 50% over FFR’s $1.50 close on Oct 12. FF ends up with ~65.7% of FFR and an 18-month lock-up, and an up-to-$10M PIPE comes in at market with no warrants. Shipments are now 817 through September, up from 552 at the end of August. FF’s own forecast is ~$7M of revenue this year and $45M in 2027. Closing is expected by the end of October (Oct 14)
2026-10-15Added Ruoyu Technology (若愈科技) – a Pre-A in the ¥100M range led by Sunwave Communications, the Shenzhen-listed antenna and component maker, with Jinmu, Qindao, Huanghai and Chuangzhong Capital in. Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen) incubated it and still holds shares. It sells Jiutian, a 13B-parameter robot brain, an explosion-proof robot body that runs it, and a data-collection kit. One more listed hardware supplier buying a seat at the brain layer (Oct 15)
2026-10-15AgiBot also launched its Yuansheng ecosystem plan: ¥200M+ to put 1,000 robots into universities, with Peking, Tsinghua and Zhejiang among the 20+ in the first batch, for courses, research and training. Train the engineers on your robots now, hire them later (Oct 14)
2026-10-15Unitree’s Wang Xingxing has pulled his timeline in. In August he gave robotics’ “ChatGPT moment” two to three years at best and a decade at worst. After OpenAI’s GPT-6 he says one or two years, and a GPT-7 next year “could directly crack” embodied intelligence. He runs a listed company trading ~62% under its peak, so read it with that in mind (Oct 12)
2026-10-14Added Astribot (星尘智能) – a ¥1B (~$140M) round at a ¥15B (~$2.1B) valuation, led by Toukong Donghai, the Shenzhen state-owned investment arm, with Hongtai Fund and Shanheng Capital in and existing backer Xianmu following on. It’s the Shenzhen maker’s fourth round in about six months, and the price is up roughly ¥5B since a ¥1B+ round three months ago. Founders Lai Jie and Dai Yuan came out of Tencent Robotics X. The pitch is cable-driven arms and humanoids already in mass production. Local government money is now setting the price for China’s second tier (Oct 13)
2026-10-14Agility’s SPAC has a date. The SEC declared the Form S-4 effective on Oct 13, and Churchill Capital Corp XI shareholders vote on Nov 2, with closing expected in November and Nasdaq trading as AGLT after that. The trust now shows about $424M, so gross proceeds stay above $620M with Foxconn’s $200M PIPE. Agility also put new targets on paper: 30+ potential customers today, about 100 by the end of 2027, and committed sites going from nine to as many as 25 (Oct 13)
2026-10-14South Korea cleared 20 Robros bipedal humanoids to work next to people in four real workplaces: chip packaging at Nepes, car-body parts at Sungwoo Hitech, scaffolding brackets in HD Hyundai Samho’s shipyard and cold-chain packaging at Delivery Lab. The trade ministry’s sandbox committee granted the exemption because Korea’s safety rules still assume a fixed robot behind a fence. The test data will be used to rewrite them. No fences, no single-company carve-out – that’s the regulatory step every humanoid maker in Korea has been waiting for (Oct 13)
2026-10-14Ola Dimensions, a home-robot startup founded in March by Zhou Shunbo – the first hire at Huawei’s embodied-AI lab – closed an angel+ round of “hundreds of millions of yuan”, its fourth raise in about six months, with Tuobang and Hony Capital among the backers. Makers and developers first, households later. Huawei alumni are now one of the deepest founder pools in Chinese embodied AI (Oct 12)
2026-10-14Updated Unitree valuation – closed at ¥436.63 on Oct 13, then fell 3.7% to ¥420.33 in afternoon trade on Oct 14, below the ¥427.80 low of Oct 8. That’s about ¥170.0B (~$24B), roughly 62% under the ¥1,100 peak and ~179% above the ¥150.80 IPO price (Oct 14)
2026-10-13Added Winverse AI – DeepSeek has agreed to lead a seed round of “tens of millions of dollars” in the months-old robot-AI startup at about $400M post-money, per Bloomberg, with Meituan’s Long-Z Investments also in. Founder Hu Han ran Tencent’s vision-language and embodied foundation-model teams and co-wrote Swin Transformer. Nothing is final yet. It’s one of DeepSeek’s largest startup bets since 2023, and its second move into embodied AI after the strategic placement in Unitree’s IPO (Oct 12)
2026-10-13Google DeepMind is building a new robotics lab “in the Cambridge area”, says Aaron Saunders, the former Boston Dynamics CTO who joined as VP of hardware engineering in 2025. An earlier DeepMind job post put hardware roles in Cambridge, Massachusetts – a short drive from Boston Dynamics in Waltham. He’s hiring machinists, engineers and researchers and promises more in 2027. No size, budget or opening date. A machine shop is the tell: Google wants its own hardware, not only Gemini Robotics models running on partners’ robots (Oct 12)
2026-10-13XPeng put dates on IRON at its Paris event: mass production by late 2026, first deliveries in H1 2027, a European rollout in H2 2027. Commercial work comes first – greeting and guiding in XPeng’s own showrooms and offices – with factory and home use left undated. That pushes first deliveries back from the Q4 2026 target XPeng had used. No European price or launch countries yet. The robotics unit raised $900M+ at a $6.3B+ valuation in August (Oct 11)
2026-10-13Renting a humanoid in China is getting cheap, fast. Day rates ran to five figures in yuan in early 2025 and ¥2,000–3,000 at the start of 2026; some offers are now under ¥1,000, and Unitree listings on Xianyu start at ¥289, per STAR Market Daily. What isn’t getting cheaper is the people. AgiBot’s Xiong Yan puts the robot-to-operator ratio at about 3:1, against a target of 10:1. Event rental was the easiest revenue line in the sector, and it’s turning into a price war (Oct 9)
2026-10-13Musk partly reversed the AI5 memory cut we logged on Oct 2: 96GB, not 72GB, because 72GB would have forced the lowest-density LPDDR5 parts. AI6 stays at 144GB. The reason hasn’t changed – enough memory supply for volume Optimus production. AI5 is slated for 2nm volume production at Samsung’s Taylor, Texas fab in 2027, with TSMC as a second source (Oct 11)
2026-10-12Added X Square Robot → Wuxi Jugai Intelligent – the Shenzhen humanoid maker joined a Series A+ of more than ¥100M (~$14M) in the joint-module supplier, led by Huatai Zijin, with Ecovacs reinvesting. Jugai expects 200,000 joint modules of capacity this year and 1M in 2027. Same day X Square also backed Mo Xian Technology, which makes flexible tactile sensors and data gloves. 36Kr counts 20+ Chinese embodied-AI companies with over 100 outside investments between them by September; AgiBot alone has 15 and claims an 8× annualised return. The robot makers are buying into their own supply chain, one minority stake at a time (Oct 10)
2026-10-12IT Juzi now counts 565 embodied-AI funding rounds in China so far in 2026, worth ¥112.6B (~$15.8B), against 379 rounds and ¥39.5B (~$5.5B) for all of 2025, per Securities Daily. It’s a wider cut than the H1 figures we ran yesterday. Same direction, though: nearly three times last year’s money with a quarter still to go (Oct 12)
2026-10-12AgiBot pledged up to RM1B (~$237M) of investment in Malaysia through 2035 and 5,000 jobs, after CEO Deng Taihua met Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim in Hangzhou. It already has 100+ humanoids at i-City in Shah Alam and is working on a 500-home “AI Living” development there, due in 2030. A pledge, not a contract – but it’s China’s volume leader planting a flag abroad while it waits in the IPO queue at home (Oct 5)
2026-10-12Jabil, the contract manufacturer that builds Apptronik’s Apollo, says humanoids are moving into a “tens of thousands” phase and out of hand assembly, with Tesla, 1X, XPeng and UBTech getting ready to ramp. Engineering lead Thomas Brown names edge compute and memory as the cost problem – the same squeeze that made Tesla cut memory on its Optimus chips. Consumer humanoids? “Maybe five-ish years,” he says. Or 20 (Oct 8)
2026-10-11Added Genrobot (简智机器人) – Baidu, through Beijing Baidu Netcom, and a Galbot subsidiary have joined the cap table of the Beijing robot-data startup, business records show. Founded in May 2025 by ex-Momenta algorithm director Chen Jianxing, it sells the DAS kit that records people doing real tasks with no robot in the loop. Seven rounds in a year, from Baidu Ventures, Shunwei, Ant Group, DiDi and Momenta among others – reportedly over $200M in all, though local reports mix up yuan and dollars. A humanoid maker now owns a slice of its own data supplier (Oct 9)
2026-10-11LivSyn Robotics of Beijing raised a Series A of at least ¥100M (~$14M) from financial investors, listed energy-services firm Suwen Electric Energy and an unnamed embodied-AI strategic. Its RUDA platform plugs different robot bodies into the same AI models, and its PhiAgent engine turns videos of people into robot training data. It’s already working on optical-module insertion, battery assembly and electronics inspection (Oct 8)
2026-10-11IT Juzi counts 322 embodied-AI funding rounds in China in H1 2026 – almost all of 2025’s 333 in half the time. The 202 with disclosed amounts add up to ¥93.4B (~$13B), up 350%. Investors quoted by Jiemian expect a shakeout from late 2026 into 2027 that leaves room for perhaps 20–30 companies; one says fewer than ten have real third-party repeat revenue. More than 20 are reported to have filed for Hong Kong IPOs (Oct 10)
2026-10-10Added Ultra – a $50M Series A led by Framework Ventures with Y Combinator in, on top of a $12M seed from YC and NextView, so $62M in all. The Brooklyn company builds packing robots and rents them to warehouses and 3PLs by the month; they’ve packed 500,000+ orders and Ultra has been able to raise prices. Physical Intelligence supplies the brain. Ultra builds the body, and PI gets real-world data in return. CEO Jon Miller Schwartz reckons humanoids are about five years from this kind of scale (Oct 9)
2026-10-10SoftBank is sounding out Gulf investors, the UAE among them, for a fund of up to $100B that would buy companies and run them with AI and robots, per the Financial Times. Roze, SoftBank’s robotics arm, which it plans to list in the US, would supply the machines. Talks are early, nothing is committed and SoftBank declined to comment. If it comes together, it sits on top of ABB Robotics, RAI and the 1X talks – Son would be buying the factories, not just the robots (Oct 9)
2026-10-10Updated Unitree valuation – a small bounce on Oct 9: up 1.0% to ¥432.00, about ¥174.7B (~$25B). Still ~61% under the ¥1,100 peak and ~186% above the ¥150.80 IPO price (Oct 9)
2026-10-10BYD’s first humanoid surfaced in a design patent published by China’s IP office: a full-size biped with articulated fingers. It covers looks only – nothing on performance or production. BYD said in July it would unveil the robot in August at its Di Space venue. It still hasn’t. The stated plan is 2–3 robots in every dealership first, and the dealer network as a sales channel for home robots later (Oct 9)
2026-10-10UBTech and FAW-Volkswagen signed a strategic partnership to develop and test humanoids for factory logistics, moving Walker S from quality inspection at FAW-VW’s Qingdao plant into materials handling. No money or unit numbers disclosed. FAW-VW runs five plants that have built over 30M cars between them. Another carmaker floor for UBTech, next to the Fenglong parts plant it bought (Oct 8)
2026-10-10Safeworld came out of stealth with a $12.2M seed led by Shine Capital and a16z speedrun. It simulates people to stress-test AI-driven robots before they work next to them. Small round, real bottleneck: NVIDIA’s Halos safety layer is already in Agility’s Digit 5, and cage-free humanoids need someone to sign off on them (Oct 5)
2026-10-09NVIDIA is weighing a second $1B cheque for Figure AI, per The Information. Figure wants new money at about $38B pre-money – roughly flat on the $39B post-money of its September 2025 Series C. Nothing is signed. If it lands, the chip vendor already buying Hugging Face takes a bigger slice of the most valuable private humanoid maker as well (Oct 7)
2026-10-09Updated Unitree valuation – Shanghai reopened after Golden Week and Unitree fell 5.0% to close at ¥427.80, a new post-IPO low, for a ~¥173.0B (~$25B) market cap. That’s about 61% under the ¥1,100 peak and roughly 185% above the ¥150.80 IPO price. A-share indices were down 0.3–2.1% on the day, so not all of it is Unitree (Oct 8)
2026-10-09Schneider Electric agreed to buy PTC for about $22.6B in cash, $205 a share – its largest deal ever, set to close in Q3 2027 if PTC shareholders and regulators sign off. PTC makes the design, lifecycle and factory software manufacturers build on. Not a robotics deal. It does put the software that decides what happens on the factory floor under one industrial group, four months after Schneider moved for Cognite (Oct 5)
2026-10-09AWS published the Physical AI Toolchain on GitHub: Terraform templates, reference architectures and sample code for a data–train–validate–deploy loop, built around NVIDIA’s Cosmos world models, Isaac Lab and GR00T. AWS prices a full GR00T training sample at about $79. The clouds want to host robot training, not own the robot (Oct 7)
2026-10-09Tesla’s patent application for thin, flexible touch sensors that wrap a robot hand’s thumb, palm and fingers was published (US 2026/0310299). Crossing printed traces form “pixels” that read force and pressure, and the sheets can be thermoformed to curved shapes. Optimus isn’t named. Still, it targets exactly the part The Information said was holding output back last month: hands with 100+ hand-fitted parts and unreliable touch sensors (Oct 8)
2026-10-09RoboStrategy, the Nasdaq-listed fund (BOT) whose holdings include Figure, Apptronik, Dyna Robotics and Standard Bots, will ring the Nasdaq closing bell on Oct 13 with a Dyna humanoid, after a founders forum with Apptronik, Standard Bots, Dexmate and Maven. For now it’s the main listed route into those private cap tables while Agility and FORT wait on their SPACs (Oct 8)
2026-10-08Added Mecka AI – a $60M Series B led by Sequoia, with NVIDIA and Microsoft’s M12 in. The company, much of it based in Toronto, pays people to film themselves making coffee or fixing cars with body sensors and iPhones, then sells that motion data to robot labs. TechCrunch put the valuation near $500M in September. Another data supplier joins Microagi and iMerit (Oct 7)
2026-10-08Boston Dynamics has a permanent CEO again. Rohit Prasad, who spent 12 years at Amazon running Alexa and then the Nova foundation models, took over on Oct 7 – eight months after Robert Playter stepped down and CFO Amanda McMaster stepped in as interim. Hyundai chose an AI product builder, not a roboticist (Oct 6)
2026-10-08Ashish Kumar, Tesla’s Optimus AI lead until a four-month stint at Meta, has co-founded Intelligent Machines in San Francisco and is reportedly looking for about $100M in seed money. It builds non-humanoid robots for manufacturing and aerospace, trained with reinforcement learning, and has hired several ex-Optimus engineers. No round has closed yet (Oct 7)
2026-10-08Physical Intelligence’s landlord at 2000 Folsom St. in San Francisco has sued to get it out, claiming more than $13,000 a day in holdover damages. The tenant waiting to move in is Anthropic. PI’s rent had nearly tripled to $160,000 a month in May, and it has reportedly lined up 60,000 sq ft on Brannan St. plus a ~233,500 sq ft building in Mountain View. A ~$11B robot brain that has outgrown its lease (Oct 6)
2026-10-07Added Minerva Humanoids – a $10M pre-seed led by General Catalyst, Long Journey Ventures and Credo Ventures, with Hugging Face also in. CEO Sandor Felber worked on Tesla’s Optimus; CTO Maurice Rahme spent six years at Boston Dynamics and led technical work on Stretch. Their robot, Roger, is piloted by a specialist in a VR headset while its own AI handles balance, walking and getting up after a fall. The targets are oil rigs, high-voltage plants and bomb disposal, with paid pilots starting this autumn (Oct 6)
2026-10-07Agility held its Analyst & Investor Day in New York on Oct 6, with Schaeffler, Foxconn and AUVSI on stage. The numbers it led with: $300M+ in multi-year Digit 5 orders and 65,000+ hours of real-world operation. The merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI still needs a shareholder vote and is set to close in Q4, after which the company trades on Nasdaq as AGLT (Oct 6)
2026-10-07RobCo, the Munich maker of modular robot arms and the two-armed mobile robot Alfie, is now valued at over $1B after a $40M round with Sequoia and Lightspeed – double its January price. Most of the shares came from current and former staff, so little of it is new money. Founder Roman Hölzl has moved to San Francisco and RobCo builds in Austin. Another European robot company heading west (Oct 5)
2026-10-07BTIG counts roughly 31,000 humanoids built by the leading makers and finds only 32% are full-size and just 13% walk on two legs. The volume is going to small, cheap robots – Unitree sells from $4,900 – not to the 1.7 m bipeds Tesla, Figure and Agility are building (Oct 3)
2026-10-07Robots & Startups tallies 167 robotics rounds worth about $4.86B in September 2026, level with August’s $4.87B. Three of the month’s biggest moves were acquisitions, not rounds: Qualcomm → PickNik, SoftBank → the Robotics and AI Institute, and Cognex → RealSense (Oct 1)
2026-10-06Added Generalist – 8VC led about $200M more into its Series B, taking the round to $600M and the valuation to $3B, up from $2B in June. Founded in 2024 by ex-DeepMind researchers Pete Florence and Andy Zeng with ex-Boston Dynamics engineer Andrew Barry, it builds one foundation model for many robots; Gen 1.5 picks up a task from 3–12 seconds of video. NVIDIA, Bezos Expeditions and Fei-Fei Li are earlier backers. We missed it in August. Another robot brain priced like a hardware maker (Aug 25)
2026-10-06Japan’s answer to the robot-brain race is a consortium, not a startup. Kawasaki Heavy Industries plans to roll out its Kaleido humanoid around 2030 on Noetra, the physical-AI platform backed by Sony, SoftBank, NEC and Honda plus 44 other investors, Kawasaki among them. Tokyo has earmarked up to ¥1T (~$6.2B) over five years, paid out against milestones, and Noetra plans ~27,500 NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs from 2028. Kaleido starts out part-teleoperated. Full autonomy in messy settings is a 2040 goal (Oct 5)
2026-10-06Panasonic plans to start making humanoids by 2029, for factories and warehouses, and opened a new AI and robotics R&D division on Oct 1. Its pitch is the battery: Chief AI Officer Akira Sakakibara told Nikkei Asia that Panasonic Energy cells haven’t been involved in a serious fire to date. It already sells humanoid parts – tactile pressure sensors, compact motors, power management. Another Japanese giant building rather than buying, after Toyota (Oct 5)
2026-10-06Runway, the AI video company, launched Praxis-1, an open-weight world action model that turns video pretraining into robot control and adapts to bimanual arms and humanoids with little fine-tuning. Noble Machines, Standard Bots and Ultra are testing it; a public release is due in the coming months. Video-model companies now want the robot layer too, next to General Intuition and World Labs (Oct 2)
2026-10-06Teradyne, owner of Universal Robots, made a strategic investment of undisclosed size in Bright Machines, whose 130+ software-defined microfactories build AI and data-centre hardware. Teradyne’s robots and test kit go onto those lines. No humanoids involved, but it’s the same customer Watney is chasing: AI infrastructure (Oct 5)
2026-10-06Boston Dynamics is now selling Atlas on payback – under two years, the bar it says Spot already clears with 500+ customers in 46 countries. The case rests on Hyundai: 25,000 Atlas units across Hyundai and Kia plants and a US robot factory built for 30,000 a year (Sep 30)
2026-10-06Agility CEO Peggy Johnson has joined MITRE’s Project Meridian, a Department of War study of warfare 10–20 years out, co-directed by Newt Gingrich, Palmer Luckey and Elon Musk. She advises on humanoid logistics in a personal capacity. No contract comes with it. It landed the day before Agility’s Analyst & Investor Day (Oct 5)
2026-10-05Agility Robotics and FORT Robotics signed an MoU to build an “Offboard Safety Bridge” that links Digit 5 to a facility’s own safety systems – a pendant, on-robot comms and plant-wide interlocks. FORT already supplied parts of Digit’s safety stack; now it co-develops. No money changed hands, but it ties together two robotics companies heading to Nasdaq through SPACs in the same quarter (Oct 1)
2026-10-05Tesla’s dedicated Optimus plant at Giga Texas – more than 7M sq ft, with a long-run target of about 10M robots a year – is roughly 40% through its steel frame, per drone observer Joe Tegtmeyer. That’s the frame only. Utilities, walls, roofing and tooling are still to come, and limited production isn’t expected before late 2027 (Oct 1)
2026-10-05UBTech CEO Zhou Jian says its 14,000 m² humanoid plant can turn out a robot every 8–10 minutes at full tilt, about 1,500 a month. That’s capacity, not output: UBTech delivered 1,079 Walker-series units in all of 2025. Read it next to the Fenglong deal – UBTech is buying factory floor as fast as it’s building robots (Oct 1)
2026-10-05Tangent Robotics, a Columbia Engineering spinout, raised a $4.5M pre-seed co-led by Fly Ventures and Toyota Ventures for the TR02, a three-finger, 10-DoF hand with optical touch sensors and a palm camera. It pitches itself as the fine-motor layer between a VLA model and the motor controllers – threading, gaskets, connectors. Hands keep pulling in money: Sharpa, AIDIN, Wonik and now Tangent (Sep 30)
2026-10-05Agile Robots and Hitachi partnered to put the Munich company’s Agile ONE humanoid, arms and mobile robots into Hitachi’s HMAX Industry portfolio, running on Hitachi edge-AI chips for vision and touch. No equity or terms disclosed. Agile Robots already works with Google DeepMind on Gemini Robotics and was reported in June to be raising ~$800M with SoftBank in talks (Sep 29)
2026-10-05Galbot priced its ET1 entertainment humanoid at ¥79,000 (~$11,000), ¥139,000 and ¥179,000 across three tiers – a 1.25 m, 32 kg robot for store greetings, theme parks and stage shows. Same week AgiBot put 100 units into ASD stores. China’s volume is going into retail and leisure, not factories (Oct 2)
2026-10-04Added UBTech → Zhejiang Fenglong Electric – the Hong Kong–listed humanoid maker paid about ¥1.6B (~$225M) at ¥17.72 a share for 43.01% of the Shenzhen-listed engine, hydraulics and auto-parts maker, through a 29.99% share transfer plus a 13.02% partial tender offer. Announced Dec 24, 2025 and completed Apr 24, 2026, it gives UBTech its first A-share subsidiary: a mainland listing and a parts plant in one purchase
2026-10-04Added Bear Robotics → Kinisi Robotics – the service-robot maker, with 16,000+ units deployed since 2017, bought the Bristol humanoid startup behind the KR1 for an undisclosed sum. Kinisi founder Brennand Pierce, who co-founded Bear, comes back as chief robotics officer, bringing VLA models and a low-cost data-collection glove (Jun 22)
2026-10-04Eni signed an MoU with Generative Bionics, the Italian IIT spinout behind the GENE.01 humanoid, to test it for inspection and teleoperation at Eni sites, open its HPC to train the robot’s models, and look at Eni facilities for assembly and testing. Eni Next was already an investor in the €70M round of December 2025, alongside AMD Ventures and Tether. An energy major is now both shareholder and test bed (Sep 30)
2026-10-03Added FieldAI – a term sheet for $700M at a $10B valuation, per Business Insider, five times the $2B it was worth after its $405M raise in August 2025. NVentures, Intel Capital, Bezos Expeditions, Gates Frontier, Samsung, Khosla and Temasek are existing backers. CEO Ali Agha’s company sells a hardware-agnostic robot brain that runs on quadrupeds, humanoids, wheeled robots and drones without maps or GPS, and has $135M+ in customer contracts across 30+ construction, energy and public-sector clients. That makes three robot-brain companies valued at $10B or more: Skild AI ($14B), Physical Intelligence (~$11B) and now FieldAI (Oct 2)
2026-10-03Added General Intuition’s new round – $220M at a $6.2B valuation from Valor, Atreides, Seven Seven Six, Point72, Khosla and General Catalyst, under four months after the $320M round at $2.3B. The Medal spinout trains action and world models on gameplay video paired with controller inputs, and has now raised about $674M in a year (Sep 29)
2026-10-03Added Microagi → stealth robotics startup – the robot-training company, which raised a $55M seed earlier this year, bought a startup co-founded by members of Animesh Garg’s Georgia Tech lab for an undisclosed sum. Garg, an ex-NVIDIA researcher and Apptronik’s chief scientific officer in 2024–25, joins as chief research officer with seven of his team. Microagi trains robots on data from people doing physical work, captured with cameras and sensor gloves (Sep 29)
2026-10-03SiMa.ai raised a $150M Series C at a $1.45B valuation, led by Fidelity and Amplify, taking it to $500M raised. Its low-power edge chips name humanoids as a target market, and next-generation silicon is due in H1 2028 – another challenger for the compute socket next to D-Robotics (Sep 28)
2026-10-03Smart Analytics Global counts 19,100 humanoids shipped in H1 2026, up 272%, and puts AgiBot first with ~8,400 units (44%) ahead of Unitree (31%). It forecasts ~60,000 for the full year. Lower than IDC’s ~25,000 for the same half, but both trackers agree China makes almost everything
2026-10-03Corrected Field AI: its $405M across two rounds was raised in August 2025, not August 2026
2026-10-02Boston Dynamics showed a new hand for Atlas – four fingers, not five. It has 13 degrees of freedom (four in the thumb, three in each finger), pressure sensors across the fingertips and palm, and every actuator sealed inside with no cables crossing the joints. It runs drills, grinders, nail guns and welding torches, and was designed for mass production and sim-to-real training. The pinkie went because the extra dexterity wasn’t worth the complexity. Hyundai is building its own hand rather than buying one, as AIDIN, Sharpa and Wonik attract the money (Oct 1)
2026-10-02Tesla has cut memory on the chips going into Optimus to get volume up: AI5 halved to 72GB, AI6 down a third to 144GB. Musk called it “the only way to get enough volume for Optimus production” and said the hit to performance is negligible, because bandwidth matters more than capacity. It came straight after Micron’s CEO said humanoids would each need 200GB+ of memory (Oct 1)
2026-10-02SoftBank put $225M into Autonomous Solutions (ASI) of Mendon, Utah, and set up a joint venture with it for driverless construction fleets on roads, airports, rail and waste sites. ASI’s Mobius software runs mixed fleets of haul trucks, dozers, loaders and compactors from different makers. JV terms weren’t disclosed. It follows SoftBank’s $200M lead in Swiss excavator-autonomy startup Gravis Robotics in August – a construction leg next to ABB Robotics, RAI and the 1X talks (Sep 25)
2026-10-01Added AIxCrypto → Faraday Future robotics – a non-binding term sheet for an all-stock deal valuing FF’s robotics business at about $200M. FF already owns a majority of AIxCrypto, which renamed itself FF EAI Robotics Ecosystem and moved to the FFR ticker on Sep 30. The unit has shipped 552 humanoid and biomimetic robots through August at a ~30.9% Q2 gross margin, and promises its first US-built robot in Q1 2027. Another listed shell turning into a robot stock, after Onconetix → Realbotix and First Hydrogen → Exodus (Sep 28)
2026-10-01IDC counts nearly 25,000 humanoids shipped worldwide in H1 2026, up 432% on a year earlier, with Chinese makers accounting for 77.9% (19,000+ units). It now expects annual shipments to pass 750,000 by 2030. That is already more units in six months than our 18,000 figure for all of 2025 (Sep 29)
2026-09-30Added AMD → World Labs – an $8.2B all-stock deal for Fei-Fei Li’s spatial-intelligence startup, whose world models generate and simulate 3D environments for robot training. Li becomes AMD’s EVP and chief scientist, reporting to Lisa Su. Close is expected by year-end, subject to regulators. It is the third chip vendor in four weeks to buy a software layer of physical AI, after NVIDIA → Hugging Face and Qualcomm → PickNik (Sep 28)
2026-09-30Updated Unitree valuation – the Sep 29 close was ¥451.02 (down 1.9%, ~¥182.4B), not the ¥451.52 we showed intraday. On Sep 30 it edged up ~0.7% to around ¥454.30, a ~¥183.8B (~$26B) market cap, still about 59% under the ¥1,100 peak. That was the last session before Golden Week: Shanghai is shut Oct 1–7 and reopens Oct 8
2026-09-30AgiBot has put 100 Lingxi X2 humanoids into 100 stores run by cookware maker ASD, handling reception, product recommendations and customer handoffs on 10-hour shifts – its second mass retail and leisure rollout in a week, after the 300+ units at Chimelong in Zhuhai (Sep 28)
2026-09-29Added Sharpa – ¥4.5B (~$669M) at a ¥22B (~$3.3B) valuation, its first disclosed round, from Alibaba, Tencent, Meituan, JD.com, Transsion, HongShan and Qiming. The Singapore-based company was co-founded in 2024 by Hesai CEO David Li and builds dexterous hands and general-purpose robots; its machines already run a Dairy Queen in Shanghai unattended. At IROS it launched the D01 robot, the sub-750 g W02 hand and an AE01 haptic glove (Aug 30 / Sep 28)
2026-09-29Added Lyte Series C – $165M at a $1.6B valuation led by Maverick Silicon, taking the ex-Apple Face ID team’s robot-perception company to $272M raised. It builds its own sensing silicon and fuses 4D vision, RGB and inertial data. Same month Cognex bought RealSense: perception is now a funded layer in its own right (Sep 2)
2026-09-29China’s CSRC has set three bars for humanoid IPOs, per CNBC: sustainable revenue and commercial orders, narrowing losses backed by a three-year forecast, and core technology such as robot brains or hands. Few, if any, of the queued companies clear all three (Sep 29)
2026-09-29Updated Unitree valuation – ¥451.52 late in Tuesday’s session (Sep 29), down ~1.8%, for a ~¥182.6B (~$26B) market cap, after a fresh post-IPO low of ¥450.70. That is about 59% under the ¥1,100 peak and roughly 200% above the IPO price. J.P. Morgan started coverage at Underweight with a ¥300 target
2026-09-29NVIDIA → Hugging Face: closing is not expected until the first half of 2027, subject to antitrust clearance
2026-09-28Added HD Hyundai Robotics → AIDIN Robotics – ₩13B (~$9.7M) for an equity stake in the Korean force- and tactile-sensor maker, with Samsung Venture Investment adding $2.2M in a ~$12.1M round. The pair are building a five-finger hand for shipyards and heavy industry. HD Hyundai’s own humanoid is still a prototype, due for tests on its controller assembly line, and Persona AI is working with it on shipyard welding humanoids. Not Hyundai Motor Group – this is the shipbuilding side of the family (Sep 11)
2026-09-28Updated Unitree valuation – down ~4% to ¥466.80 in Monday afternoon trade (Sep 28), a ~¥188.8B (~$27B) market cap, after touching ¥456.25 – a fresh post-IPO low, below the ¥458 floor. That is about 58% under the ¥1,100 debut peak and roughly 210% above the ¥150.80 IPO price
2026-09-28NVIDIA → Hugging Face: it is still unclear whether the deal legally needs EU merger review. MLex reports NVIDIA may ask the European Commission to take the case itself rather than face parallel national reviews (Sep 23)
2026-09-27Added Cognex → RealSense – the machine-vision company agreed to pay $500M in cash for the Intel spinout whose depth cameras sit in the heads of many humanoids and quadrupeds, plus a $56.5M three-year retention pool and ~$50M in RSUs, so about $600M all in. RealSense expects $80–90M of 2026 revenue, growing 50%+, from 4,500+ customers. Close targeted for Q4 2026. Intel, which kept ~20% at the spinout, shares in the payout. Cognex shares fell ~5% on the news (Sep 22)
2026-09-27AgiBot’s 20,000th robot has come off its line, and more than 300 of its units now work across seven zones of Chimelong Spaceship Park in Zhuhai – shows, guided tours, retail, hotel check-in. It is the clearest sign yet of AgiBot’s volume lead, from the company at the front of China’s slowed IPO queue (Sep 24)
2026-09-27First Hydrogen (TSXV) is taking a 60% stake in Exodus Actuation Solutions for 2M shares and $2M of staged funding, picking up 26 issued actuator and gearbox patents, and launching a subsidiary called First Humanoid Corp. Another listed shell pivoting into humanoids, after Onconetix → Realbotix (Sep 9)
2026-09-27Tokyo’s O-ID raised a $1.2M pre-seed led by TAWANI Ventures for a modular factory humanoid with swappable parts – the second modular-humanoid raise in a week after Feather Robotics (Sep 25)
2026-09-26Added Feather Robotics – a $7.6M pre-seed led by Gradient Ventures for a $30,000 modular humanoid that developers reconfigure and run their own AI on, about half the price of Unitree’s H2 Edu. Co-founder Hoa Mai came from Kind Humanoid, the startup 1X bought in January 2025; co-founder Parsa Bakhtiari is ex-Tesla. Founded in 2025, it says it has already passed $1M in revenue (Sep 24)
2026-09-26The IFR counts about 7,000 humanoid robots sold worldwide in 2025, in its first dedicated humanoid tally. It only counts industrial and professional-service units – consumer, military and medical robots are left out – and many went to research, testing and data collection rather than production work. That sits well under the ~18,000 shipments in our header, which uses a broader definition, so we now show both (Sep 21)
2026-09-26Tesla Optimus output reportedly reached several hundred robots a week in August, roughly ten times the Q2 rate, with more than 1,000 a week targeted by year-end. The catch, per The Information: each hand still takes 100+ screws and small parts fitted by hand, touch sensors are unreliable, basic tasks take days to learn, and no unit is yet doing useful commercial work (Sep 25)
2026-09-26Agility Robotics will hold an Analyst & Investor Day in New York on Oct 6 to walk investors through Digit 5, deployments, manufacturing and financial targets ahead of the Q4 SPAC close. It is also exploring wheeled designs to sit alongside Digit (Sep 25)
2026-09-26Corrected Unitree: the Sep 24 close of ¥488.00 was down 0.6% on the day, not 3%. Shanghai was shut on Sep 25 for the Mid-Autumn Festival, so that close is still the latest price
2026-09-25Toyota plans 400,000 factory robots from 2028 – 150,000 in its own plants and 250,000 across group companies, backed by roughly ¥1 trillion (~$6.4B) a year. The lead platform is ELEY, a 50 kg wheeled humanoid with two-fingered hands that learns by watching Toyota’s veteran line workers rather than from simulation. Figures come from Japanese press reports rather than a published Toyota rollout plan, but if they hold, it is the largest planned robot deployment on this map, well ahead of Hyundai’s 25,000 Atlas units – and Toyota is building its own robot, not buying a startup (Sep 18)
2026-09-25Added Physical Intelligence to the leaderboard – about $2B raised across four rounds, the latest $1B in March 2026 at an ~$11B valuation, with CapitalG, Thrive, Lux, Sequoia, OpenAI and Jeff Bezos on the cap table. Its π0 model runs on at least seven robot platforms. With Skild AI at $14B, the two robot-brain companies are now valued above every private humanoid hardware maker except Figure
2026-09-25Updated Unitree valuation – closed at ¥488.00 on Sep 24, down 0.6% on the day, for a ~¥197.4B (~$28B) market cap. That is about 56% below the ¥1,100 debut peak and close to the ¥458 post-IPO low
2026-09-24Added Qualcomm → PickNik Robotics – Qualcomm agreed to buy the Boulder company behind MoveIt, the open-source motion-planning and manipulation framework most robot arms run on. Terms undisclosed. MoveIt stays open source under its existing licence, gets first-class support on Dragonwing silicon, and lands on Arduino’s new VENTUNO Q boards. It is the fifth piece of a deliberate roll-up after Foundries.io, Edge Impulse, Arduino and Modular – and the second time in three weeks that a chip vendor has bought a layer of open robotics software (Sep 23)
2026-09-24Added NEURA Robotics × SECO – the compute modules for NEURA’s cognitive robots, the 4NE1 humanoid included, will be designed and built in Europe by Italy’s SECO around Qualcomm Dragonwing processors. A NEURA Gym training hub in Italy and shared production data from semiconductor and electronics plants come with it. Terms undisclosed (Sep 7)
2026-09-24Updated Unitree valuation – ¥494.63 a share on Sep 24 for a ~¥200.1B (~$28B) market cap, flat on the week and still about 55% below the ¥1,100 debut peak
2026-09-22China is slowing the humanoid IPO queue – Reuters reports the CSRC has applied informal “window guidance” to pace humanoid listings as it questions whether revenue from state-backed data-collection centres reflects real demand. AgiBot, X Square Robot and Deep Robotics are among those preparing to list; some private valuations have already been cut 30–50%. Mech-Mind Robotics, which listed in Hong Kong on Sep 1 (09615.HK), is down ~20% from its debut-day high (Sep 20)
2026-09-22Boston Dynamics opens the Robotics Metaplant Application Center at Hyundai’s Georgia Metaplant – a permanent “robot behaviour factory” where Atlas trains on parts sequencing and logistics. It moves to a site about ten times larger next year, supporting Hyundai’s plan for 25,000 Atlas units across Hyundai and Kia plants and a US robot factory built for 30,000 a year by 2028. First visible return on Hyundai taking 100% control (Sep 21)
2026-09-22Added Watney Series A – $80M co-led by the Valor Atreides AI Fund and Hummingbird Ventures, taking the San Francisco data-centre robotics startup past $100M raised. Its two-armed robots swap cables and restart servers, and Meta is testing them in Iowa and Ohio. AI infrastructure is becoming its own buyer of physical AI (Sep 18)
2026-09-22Updated Unitree valuation – ¥495.80 a share for a ~¥200.5B (~$28B) market cap, about 55% below the ¥1,100 peak. Unitree also launched the G1+ humanoid at $15,000 and the DEX5-S human-sized hand at $6,500 (Sep 21)
2026-09-21Added SoftBank → Robotics and AI Institute — SoftBank agreed to buy Marc Raibert’s Cambridge, MA research institute (formerly the Boston Dynamics AI Institute) from Hyundai Motor Group, which put $400M+ into it from 2022. Terms undisclosed; the deal is under CFIUS review. It is SoftBank’s third physical-AI move in a year, alongside the pending $5.375B ABB Robotics purchase and the 1X majority-stake talks (Sep 18)
2026-09-21Added D-Robotics Series C — $400M led by Mirae Asset, with Meituan, Hefei state capital, Cathay Capital and Temasek’s Vertex Growth. The Horizon Robotics spinout makes the Sunrise edge-AI chips used in humanoid robots and competes directly with NVIDIA’s Jetson Thor. It has now raised ~$770M in four rounds over 26 months (Sep 17)
2026-09-21Hyundai now owns 100% of Boston Dynamics after buying SoftBank’s remaining ~10% stake (reported at $325M–$372M). A Boston Dynamics IPO in 2027 now looks unlikely: a senior Hyundai executive said “it won’t be easy,” analysts point to 2029–30, Atlas is not yet deployed at scale, and the 2025 loss was ₩528.4B (Sep 20)
2026-09-21Agility Robotics launches Digit 5 — it works cage-free alongside people, lifts 50 lb and recharges in 9 minutes. The $300M of multi-year commitments covers about 1,000 robots on a robots-as-a-service model at roughly $8,500 per robot per month, with early access in H1 2027 and general availability in late 2027. The SPAC with Churchill Capital Corp XI is still pending (Sep 15)
2026-09-211X targets 50,000 NEO shipments in 2027 — CEO Bernt Børnich plans for 110,000 units of combined annual capacity across Hayward (10,000) and San Carlos (100,000) (Sep 18)
2026-09-21Updated Unitree valuation — ¥514.98 a share on Sep 18 for a ~¥208B (~$29B) market cap, broadly flat on the week and still about 53% below the debut peak
2026-09-21The Robot Report puts August 2026 robotics investment at $4.87B across 162 disclosed rounds. China took ~50% ($2.44B) and humanoids ~$944M (19.4%), mostly from Xpeng’s $900M+ round (Sep 17)
2026-09-14Added NVIDIA → Hugging Face — $12.93B definitive agreement ($11.9B cash plus up to $1B in equity retention for staff), the largest deal yet to touch the humanoid stack. It makes NVIDIA the indirect owner of Pollen Robotics and the Reachy 2 open-source humanoid, and steward of the LeRobot library. Hart-Scott-Rodino notification triggered; FTC/DOJ and EU review ahead. Hugging Face had rejected a $500M NVIDIA investment earlier in 2026 over single-investor influence (Sep 3)
2026-09-14OpenAI confirms it will build its own humanoid — Sam Altman says OpenAI “will definitely do a humanoid,” with the focus on the brain rather than the body and home use explicitly not the first priority. Notable given OpenAI’s stake in 1X, which SoftBank is now moving to control (Sep 3)
2026-09-14Added Swarmer → Ratel Robotics — definitive agreement worth up to $224M for the Ukrainian unmanned-ground-vehicle maker; Nasdaq-listed, Erik Prince–backed Swarmer (SWMR) rose on the news. Defence ground robotics is consolidating on the same timetable as humanoids (Sep 10)
2026-09-14Added EXL → iMerit — deal worth up to $310M for the physical-AI data and foundation-model developer, closed in late August. The training-data layer beneath embodied AI is being bought up as aggressively as the robots themselves
2026-09-14Added Unichem → Loomia — up to $6.3M for the US e-textiles firm, taking Unichem into humanoid “electronic skin” and tactile sensing. Small ticket, but the first clear consolidation move in the humanoid touch-sensor supply chain (Aug)
2026-09-14Refined the Unitree post-IPO correction with settled figures — ¥513.93 a share on Sep 9 for a ~$30B market cap: down 53% from the ¥1,100 first-day peak and 39% from the ¥845 debut close, but still up 240% on the ¥150.80 IPO price. Roughly 125× 2025 revenue, against ~250× at the peak. Chinese regulators are reported to be raising the bar for humanoid listings, asking for recurring revenue, a path out of losses or real technical differentiation
2026-09-14Added Skild AI to the leaderboard — $100M annual revenue run rate within ten months of first commercial deployment, on hundreds of robots across 60+ companies; $14B valuation after a $1.4B raise in January. Its S1 model learns a task from a single video demonstration. The clearest evidence yet that the robot-brain layer can carry real recurring revenue (Sep 10)
2026-09-14Added Dynamic Creatures — a Boston Dynamics spinout building interactive character robots for theme parks and hospitality, launched from stealth with a partnership back to Boston Dynamics. Another data point for where humanoid talent lands when it leaves the majors (Sep 8)
2026-09-13Added Meta → Assured Robot Intelligence — Meta acquired the humanoid-foundation-model startup founded by Lerrel Pinto and Xiaolong Wang for an undisclosed sum; the team joined Meta Superintelligence Labs to work on whole-body humanoid control. Meta’s second humanoid move after the $1B Aria Robotics stake (May 1)
2026-09-13Added Figure AI → Nscale compute partnership — $3.5B initial commitment, with stated intent to scale beyond $6B, for up to 100,000 GPUs on NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin platform in Barstow, Texas; Nscale takes a strategic equity stake in Figure. Deployment begins H2 2027 (Sep 3)
2026-09-13Agility Robotics pre-SPAC financials disclosed — $1.8M in 2025 net sales against a ~$140M operating loss and ~$100M cash burn; the $300M+ backlog is multi-year Digit v5 orders from a single customer. Merger to deliver $620M+ gross proceeds ($420M SPAC trust plus a $200M PIPE led by Foxconn); still pending, not closed (Sep 7)
2026-09-13Corrected Unitree post-IPO valuation — the stock peaked at ¥444.9B (~$66B) intraday on debut, then fell ~44% from that high within four sessions to below ¥250B (~$37B) as investors balked at a 219× P/E against a sector average near 39×
2026-09-13Added Maven Robotics Series A — $100M led by RoboStrategy with LocalGlobe, Vine Ventures and XTX Ventures; ex-Apple Special Projects team building dual-arm mobile mixed-palletizing robots, now scaling to 250 third-generation units (Sep 10)
2026-09-13Xpeng opens what it calls the world’s first automated humanoid production line — the IRON platform walks off the line under its own power with >80% automation in core assembly; follows the $900M+ round at a $6.3B valuation (Sep 9–11)
2026-09-13Tesla Optimus roadmap firmed up — Fremont lines converting from Model S/X to Gen 3; limited production feeding “Optimus Academy” data collection; external B2B sales targeted for H2 2027 and consumer availability framed for late 2027 to early 2028 (Sep 6)
2026-09-13Barclays sizes the prize — humanoids on track for a $200B market by 2035, with roughly 24M units in China’s workforce (~4% of its labour force) by then; ~60,000 units reported as deploying globally in 2026
2026-09-13Highlanders × Mitsubishi Motors to build a Japanese-made humanoid at the Kyoto plant — production targeted for early 2027 at up to ~1,000 units per month, with domestic component sourcing (Sep 5)
2026-09-13Figure AI’s Index data platform reaches ~86,000 weekly active users within weeks of leaving stealth; Figure 03 past 1,000 units delivered with BotQ output at roughly one robot per hour
2026-09-07SoftBank in advanced talks to acquire majority stake in 1X Technologies at ~$6B valuation — deal would give SoftBank controlling interest in OpenAI-backed Norwegian humanoid developer; 1X had originally targeted ~$10B valuation (reported Aug 26)
2026-09-07SoftBank / ABB Robotics acquisition update — $5.375B deal to acquire ABB’s entire industrial robotics division now closing mid-to-late 2026; SoftBank building dual physical-AI strategy across industrial (ABB) and humanoid (1X) robotics
2026-09-07Agility Robotics SPAC merger on track — S-4 under SEC review; Churchill Capital Corp XI (CCXI) merger expected to close Q4 2026; will trade as AGLT on Nasdaq
2026-09-072026 humanoid/robotics VC funding now $8.7B+ YTD — nearly double 2025’s full-year record; megarounds ($50M+) represent 84% of all deals per Dealroom
2026-09-01NEURA Robotics acquires ADLATUS Robotics — German cleaning-robot startup absorbed into NEURA’s cognitive platform; extends physical AI into commercial services (Aug 24)
2026-09-01Unitree Robotics IPO completes on Shanghai STAR Market — raised $904M (¥6.1B); stock popped 629% on debut, closing at ~$50B market cap; DeepSeek joined as strategic placement investor (Aug 19)
2026-09-01FORT Robotics to go public via SPAC — business combination with Newbury Street II Acquisition Corp announced; FORT focuses on AI safety and trust for autonomous robots; follows its Jun 2026 acquisition of Mapless AI (Aug 18)
2026-08-31SoftBank in talks to acquire majority stake in 1X Technologies at ~$6B valuation — deal would make SoftBank largest shareholder in OpenAI-backed Norwegian humanoid developer (reported Aug 26)
2026-08-31Xpeng Robotics raises $900M+ in first funding round at $6.3B valuation — led by IDG Capital, backed by Tencent and Alibaba; sets new record for single private financing in China’s embodied AI sector (Aug 24)
2026-08-31Atom × NSK sign MOU for Japan humanoid robot development — precision component maker NSK opens factories as physical AI data collection sites alongside startup Atom (Aug 20)
2026-08-30Added Wonik Robotics growth equity — 350B KRW (~$253M) from National Growth Fund and private investors to build mass-production facilities for humanoid robots and robot hands in South Korea
2026-08-30Updated Apptronik funding to $935M+ total Series A — $520M extension (Feb 2026) added to initial $415M raise; valuation now $5.5B+; new investors include AT&T Ventures, John Deere, Qatar Investment Authority
2026-08-30Added Field AI — $405M across two consecutive rounds in August 2026 for embodied AI systems operating autonomous robots at scale
2026-08-30Updated 2026 funding stat to $8.7B+ (from $8.6B+) — humanoid robotics VC funding now nearly double 2025 full-year record per Dealroom data
2026-08-17Unitree Robotics IPO 8,000× oversubscribed — retail portion massively oversubscribed; trading expected to begin Aug 17–18 on Shanghai STAR Market; Hyperliquid pre-market derivatives value Unitree at ~$38B vs $9B IPO price
2026-08-17Figure AI Figure 03 crosses 1,000-unit production milestone — now active in logistics sequencing at BMW Spartanburg; BMW treating humanoid deployment as strategic manufacturing component, not pilot
2026-08-17Agility Robotics SPAC update — S-4 registration statement under SEC review; merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI (CCXI) on track for Q4 2026 close; will trade under ticker AGLT
2026-08-10Unitree Robotics IPO subscriptions open today on Shanghai STAR Market — targeting ¥6.1B ($901M) raise; first pure-play humanoid IPO in China now live
2026-08-10Added Onconetix → Realbotix acquisition — all-stock deal to acquire 100% of Realbotix LLC (AI humanoid robotics); expected to close H2 2026 and trade on Nasdaq (ONCO)
2026-08-10Added Avatar Robotics $6.5M seed — semi-humanoid teleoperation fleet for logistics/warehousing; led by AlleyCorp with Henry Ford III participation
2026-08-10Added XTEND + JFB $1.5B merger — creates Nasdaq-listed XTEND AI Robotics (XTND) for AI-driven autonomous defense systems; strategic investors include Eric Trump
2026-08-10Added GAM Enterprises → Schaeffler SUPD assets — IP acquisition of PSC precision gear reducers for robotics; new GAM-Melior GmbH unit in Germany
2026-08-10Noted Atoms $1.7B raise (Jul 22) — Travis Kalanick’s industrial AI/robotics company; led by a16z with Bain Capital and Fifth Wall
2026-08-03Added Unitree Robotics IPO — launched $620M STAR Market offering at ~$6.2B implied valuation; subscriptions open Aug 10; first pure-play humanoid IPO in China
2026-08-03Added Humanoid (UK) Series A — $152M at $1.35B valuation led by Prime Movers Lab; Europe’s first pure-play humanoid unicorn
2026-08-03Added FCC ban on foreign-produced humanoid robots — US closes market to new Chinese humanoid and quadruped imports (Jul 28)
2026-08-03Updated stats: 2026 humanoid funding now $8.6B+ (1.8× all of 2025); Agility Robotics SPAC S-4 confidentially filed (Jul 14)
2026-07-06Added Standard Bots Series C — $200M at $1B valuation for AI-native industrial robots; led by RoboStrategy Advisors and General Catalyst
2026-07-06Added General Intuition Series A — $320M at $2.3B valuation led by Khosla Ventures; trains AI agents on video game data for real-world robotics
2026-06-29Added Agility Robotics SPAC merger — $2.5B valuation via Churchill Capital Corp XI, becoming the first US-listed pure-play humanoid company
2026-06-29Updated NEURA Robotics Series C details — confirmed up to $1.4B from Nvidia, Amazon, Tether, Qualcomm, Bosch, Schaeffler, EIB; $7B valuation; largest full-stack robotics round ever
2026-06-22Added NEURA Robotics Series C — up to $1.4B from Nvidia, Amazon, Tether, Qualcomm, Bosch, Schaeffler and EIB; valuing the company at ~$7B
2026-06-22Added Figure AI to Funding Leaderboard — exceeded $1B in Series C commitments at a $39B post-money valuation
2026-05-03Added Meta → Aria deal ($1B investment for 49% stake, largest strategic bet by a tech giant into humanoid hardware)
2026-05-03Updated projected market size to $13T (RBC Capital upside case, including ~$3T from software subscriptions and app sales)

Acquisition Flow Chart

Visualizing the parent-child relationships across the industry’s biggest deals.

Hyundai Motor Group

South Korea · $1.1B acquisition · 2021 · 100% owner since 2026

$1.1B
→
2021

Boston Dynamics

Founder: Marc Raibert · Atlas · Spot · Stretch

1X Technologies

Norway / Bay Area · Bernt Børnich · OpenAI-backed

Undisclosed
→
Jan 2025

Kind Humanoid

Christoph Kohstall · ex-Stanford · Mona robot · Palo Alto

Baidu · Galbot

New shareholders · Earlier: Baidu Ventures, Shunwei, Ant Group, DiDi, Momenta · Equity stakes

Undisclosed
→
Oct 2026

Genrobot

Beijing · CEO Chen Jianxing (ex-Momenta) · Robot-free data collection · 7 rounds in a year · $200M+ reported

Sequoia · NVIDIA · M12

Lead + strategics · Framework, Menlo earlier · Series B

$60M
→
Oct 2026

Mecka AI

Human-motion data for robot training · Egoverse dataset · ~$500M valuation (reported)

General Catalyst · Long Journey · Credo

Co-leads · Hugging Face, RunwayVC, Compound · Pre-seed

$10M
→
Oct 2026

Minerva Humanoids

Sandor Felber (ex-Tesla Optimus) · Maurice Rahme (ex-Boston Dynamics) · VR-piloted humanoid for hazardous work

NVentures · Bezos · Gates Frontier

Existing backers · Intel Capital, Samsung, Khosla, Temasek · Term sheet

$700M
→
Oct 2026

FieldAI

CEO: Ali Agha · Hardware-agnostic robot brain · ~$10B valuation · $135M+ in contracts

Microagi

USA · Robot training from human work data · $55M seed

Undisclosed
→
Sep 2026

Stealth robotics startup

Co-founded from Animesh Garg’s Georgia Tech lab · Garg joins as CRO with 7 researchers

Valor · Atreides · Point72

Investors · Seven Seven Six, Khosla, General Catalyst

$220M
→
Sep 2026

General Intuition

New York · Medal spinout · Gameplay-trained action models · $6.2B valuation · ~$674M raised in total

8VC · Radical Ventures

Investors · NVIDIA, Bezos Expeditions, Union Square Ventures, Fei-Fei Li

$200M
→
Aug 2026

Generalist

Pete Florence · Andy Zeng · Andrew Barry · Cross-robot foundation model · $3B valuation · $600M Series B

Qualcomm

San Diego · NASDAQ:QCOM · Dragonwing · Arduino

Undisclosed
→
Sep 2026

PickNik Robotics

Founder: Dave Coleman · MoveIt · MoveIt Pro

Cognex

Natick, MA · NASDAQ:CGNX · Matt Moschner · Machine vision

$500M
→
Sep 2026

RealSense

CEO: Nadav Orbach · Intel spinout (2025) · Depth cameras for humanoids, AMRs, quadrupeds · Close Q4 2026

HD Hyundai Robotics

South Korea · HD Hyundai group (shipbuilding) · Industrial robots · Equity stake

₩13B (~$9.7M)
→
Sep 2026

AIDIN Robotics

Force & tactile sensors · Five-finger hand for shipyards · Samsung Venture Investment co-invested

SoftBank

Japan · 9984.T · Masayoshi Son · Bought from Hyundai Motor Group

Undisclosed
→
Sep 2026

Robotics and AI Institute

Cambridge, MA · Founded by Marc Raibert · formerly Boston Dynamics AI Institute · CFIUS review pending

Mirae Asset · Meituan · Temasek (Vertex)

Korea / China / Singapore · Led by Mirae Asset · Hefei state capital, Cathay Capital

$400M
→
Sep 2026

D-Robotics

China · Horizon Robotics spinout · Sunrise humanoid chips · Series C · ~$770M raised in total

Alibaba · Tencent · Meituan

Strategics · JD.com, Transsion · HongShan, Qiming, Luminous

$669M
→
Aug 2026

Sharpa

Singapore / Shanghai · Co-founded by Hesai CEO David Li · Dexterous hands & general-purpose robots · ~$3.3B valuation

Maverick Silicon

Lead investor · Series C · $1.6B post-money

$165M
→
Sep 2026

Lyte

CEO: Alexander Shpunt · Ex-Apple Face ID team · Custom-silicon robot perception · $272M raised in total

Gradient Ventures

Lead investor · Early-stage AI fund · Pre-seed

$7.6M
→
Sep 2026

Feather Robotics

Hoa Mai (ex-Kind Humanoid / 1X) · Parsa Bakhtiari (ex-Tesla) · $30,000 modular developer humanoid

Valor Atreides · Hummingbird

Co-leads · Conviction, Abstract, A*, Grant Gordon

$80M
→
Sep 2026

Watney

San Francisco · Ryan Gannon · Sean Cheong · Data-centre robots · Series A · $100M+ raised in total

AMD

Santa Clara · NASDAQ:AMD · Lisa Su · All-stock deal

$8.2B
→
Sep 2026

World Labs

Founder: Fei-Fei Li · Spatial intelligence · Marble world model · Close expected by end-2026

FF EAI Robotics (FFR)

USA · NASDAQ:FFR · formerly AIxCrypto · Majority-owned by Faraday Future

~$200M
→
Oct 2026

FF Robotics

Faraday Future’s robot unit · Humanoid & biomimetic robots · 817 units shipped · Definitive agreement Oct 12 · Close expected end-Oct

NVIDIA

Santa Clara · NASDAQ:NVDA · Jensen Huang · $11.9B cash + equity retention

$12.93B
→
Sep 2026

Hugging Face

Delangue · Chaumond · Wolf · LeRobot · brings Pollen / Reachy 2 with it · Regulatory review pending

Hugging Face

Paris / NYC · Delangue · Chaumond · Wolf · $4.5B valuation

Undisclosed
→
Apr 2025

Pollen Robotics

Matthieu Lapeyre · 9yr open-source · Reachy 2 · Bordeaux

Bear Robotics

USA / South Korea · John Ha · 16,000+ service robots deployed

Undisclosed
→
Jun 2026

Kinisi Robotics

Bristol, UK · Brennand Pierce (Bear co-founder) · KR1 humanoid · Pierce becomes Chief Robotics Officer

UBTech Robotics

Shenzhen · HKEX:9880 · Zhou Jian · Walker S humanoids

¥1.6B (~$225M)
→
Apr 2026

Zhejiang Fenglong Electric

Shenzhen-listed · Engines, hydraulics & auto parts · 43.01% controlling stake · UBTech’s first A-share subsidiary

Mobileye

Israel · NASDAQ:MBLY · Amnon Shashua · Intel-owned

$900M
→
Jan 2026

Mentee Robotics

AI-first humanoid · 4yr old · Israel/US

Amazon

Seattle · NASDAQ:AMZN · Investor + Acquirer

Undisclosed
→
2025

Fauna Robotics

Developer-focused humanoid · New York

Deal-by-Deal Breakdown

The strategic logic behind each major acquisition.

Oct 2026
¥50B val.

AgiBot → New Round at ~¥50B

Shanghai · Co-founders Deng Taihua (CEO) and Peng Zhihui · ¥1–1.5B (~$140–210M) · Investors not named · Reported near close by Caijing, Oct 13, 2026

¥50B. That’s about $7B, and more than three times what Astribot fetched in its own round the same day. AgiBot, also known as Zhiyuan, is raising ¥1–1.5B and is close to done, according to Caijing. The size is modest. The price isn’t, and it rests on volume nobody else in China can match: Smart Analytics Global puts it first in H1 2026 with ~44% of global humanoid shipments, its 20,000th robot came off the line in September, and hundreds of units now work in theme parks and cookware shops. The cost is time. AgiBot said in July it would start preparing a Hong Kong listing, and HKEX makes a company that raises after filing wait 120 days from the close before it can trade. An investor quoted in the report says that rules out a 2026 IPO. With the CSRC pacing humanoid listings anyway, the market leader has decided private money at a higher price beats a slot in the queue. The same week it pledged up to RM1B in Malaysia and ¥200M+ to put 1,000 robots into Chinese universities.

Oct 2026
¥1B

Astribot → New Round at ¥15B

Shenzhen · Founded by Lai Jie (CEO) and Dai Yuan, both ex-Tencent Robotics X · Led by Toukong Donghai (Shenzhen Investment Holdings) · Hongtai Fund, Ningbo Xingtaihe, Shanheng Capital · Existing backer Xianmu · Earlier: Matrix Partners China, Jinqiu, Ant Group, Guoke · Oct 13, 2026

Four rounds in six months. Astribot, known in China as Xingchen Zhineng, raised ¥1B at a ¥15B (~$2.1B) valuation, about ¥5B more than it was worth when it closed a ¥1B+ round three months earlier. The lead is a Shenzhen state-owned fund, which tells you who is now underwriting the city’s embodied-AI champions while the CSRC paces the IPO queue. The company calls itself the first to mass-produce cable-driven robots: tendons rather than geared joints, which keeps arms light and safe enough for homes and shops. Its S-series has orders in the thousands, the MART retail robot is in six cities, and the T1 humanoid began shipping in June. On the model side it ships Lumo-2, a world-action model for home tasks, and the SmoothRL training framework. No revenue figures. That’s the gap the CSRC’s three IPO tests are built to expose.

Oct 2026
~$400M val.

DeepSeek → Winverse AI (Seed)

Founded 2026 · Founder Hu Han (ex-Tencent, Microsoft Research Asia, Baidu Research) · Led by DeepSeek · Long-Z Investments (Meituan) · Seed of tens of millions of dollars · Reported Oct 12, 2026

DeepSeek made its name on cheap language models. Now it’s paying for a robot brain. Bloomberg reports the Hangzhou lab has agreed to lead a seed round of tens of millions of dollars in Winverse AI, a company only a few months old, at about $400M after the money, with Meituan’s Long-Z Investments also in. Nothing is signed, so the terms can still move. The founder is the price. Hu Han led Tencent’s vision-language and embodied foundation-model teams, worked at Microsoft Research Asia and Baidu Research before that, and co-wrote Swin Transformer, the ICCV 2021 best paper. Winverse is in stealth and hasn’t said what it will ship. Still, it’s one of DeepSeek’s largest startup bets since 2023 and its second step into embodied AI, after taking part in Unitree’s IPO as a strategic placement investor. Read it next to Baidu turning up in Genrobot’s cap table a day earlier: China’s model labs and internet platforms are buying seats in robot intelligence now, while the companies are small and the founders are the asset.

Oct 2026
$62M

Ultra → Series A

Brooklyn, NY · CEO and co-founder Jon Miller Schwartz · $50M Series A led by Framework Ventures · Y Combinator · $12M seed from Y Combinator and NextView · AI models from Physical Intelligence · Oct 9, 2026

No legs. No hands with 22 joints. Ultra makes robots that pack boxes, and it rents them out. Warehouses and 3PLs pay an integration fee up front and then a monthly charge that covers the hardware and the software, which is why the company can talk about raising prices – something almost no humanoid maker can say yet. The robots have packed more than 500,000 orders. The interesting part is the split of labour: Ultra builds and installs the body, Physical Intelligence supplies the model that learns each customer’s line, and every shift feeds PI the messy real-world data its lab can’t produce. PI says its model has already run a full shift on an Ultra robot at about 96% autonomy. Revenue isn’t public and neither is the valuation. CEO Jon Miller Schwartz puts humanoids about five years behind this kind of scale. That’s the bet in one line: let the robot brains get trained on boring, paying work now, and bolt them onto humanoids later.

Oct 2026
$60M

Mecka AI → Series B

Team largely in Toronto · Founded 2024 by Josh Gao, Mogen Cheng, Jason Chong and Duy Nguyen · Led by Sequoia · NVIDIA, M12 (Microsoft) · Earlier backers Framework Ventures, Menlo Ventures, SV Angel · Oct 7, 2026

Robots have no internet to read. Mecka’s fix is to pay people to wear sensors. Contributors strap on body sensors or prop up an iPhone and record themselves doing ordinary jobs – making coffee, fixing a car – and the footage becomes Egoverse, a first-person dataset that robot labs and frontier model teams buy to train robot policies. The pitch is unscripted human motion instead of the stiff, staged moves that come out of teleoperation rigs. For a two-year-old company it’s moving quickly: a $25M Series A from Framework Ventures in November 2025, a $35M extension in June that came with the purchase of video-understanding startup Docula, and now $60M from Sequoia, NVIDIA and M12. TechCrunch reported a valuation near $500M in September, and the company talks about a $100M annual revenue run rate, though the contracts behind that number aren’t public. Scale AI did this job for language models. For robots the field is still open – Microagi with its sensor gloves, EXL through iMerit, and now Mecka with Sequoia behind it.

Oct 2026
$10M

Minerva Humanoids → Pre-Seed

San Francisco · Founded by Sandor Felber (CEO, ex-Tesla Optimus) and Maurice Rahme (CTO, ex-Boston Dynamics) · Led by General Catalyst, Long Journey Ventures and Credo Ventures · Hugging Face, RunwayVC, Compound · Oct 6, 2026

Two founders, two of the biggest humanoid programmes on their CVs. Felber worked on Optimus at Tesla. Rahme spent six years at Boston Dynamics and led technical work on Stretch. Minerva doesn’t pretend its robot is autonomous: Roger is driven by a trained specialist in a VR headset, while the robot’s own AI keeps it balanced, walks it about and picks it up after a fall. That’s a deliberate choice of market. Offshore rigs, high-voltage plants, bomb disposal and hazmat calls are jobs where a remote operator is a selling point, not a stopgap, and where a robot that costs more than a car still saves money if it keeps a person out of harm’s way. Prototypes are built in Germany and the software in the US, and paid pilots start this autumn. Hugging Face, soon NVIDIA’s, is on the cap table. It’s the same founder trail as Feather and Dynamic Creatures – engineers leaving the big humanoid makers to build narrower robots of their own.

Oct 2026
$700M

FieldAI → Term Sheet at $10B

Irvine, CA · CEO Ali Agha · Backers include NVentures, Intel Capital, Bezos Expeditions, Gates Frontier, Samsung, Khosla, Temasek · Reported Oct 2, 2026

Five times the price in thirteen months. FieldAI has signed a term sheet to raise $700M at a $10B valuation, Business Insider reported, against the $2B it was worth after its $405M raise in August 2025. A term sheet isn’t binding, so the number can still move. What it buys into is a brain that doesn’t care about the body: FieldAI’s models steer quadrupeds, humanoids, wheeled robots and drones through places with no maps, no GPS and no internet, which is why its customers are construction sites, energy plants and public-sector agencies rather than car factories. It has more than 30 of them and $135M+ in contracts, up from about $100M in June, and since March it has worked with Boston Dynamics on Spot for equipment inspection. CEO Ali Agha calls the last few months “very, very fast growth.” Put it on the board with Skild AI at $14B and Physical Intelligence at about $11B. Three robot brains, each worth more than every private humanoid body except Figure – and every one of them a reason for hardware makers to sell or partner rather than build their own.

Sep 2026
$12.93B

NVIDIA → Hugging Face

Santa Clara · NASDAQ:NVDA · Jensen Huang · Target founded by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, Thomas Wolf · Sep 3, 2026

The largest transaction to touch the humanoid stack, and it arrives sideways. NVIDIA is buying Hugging Face outright for $12.93B — roughly $11.9B in cash plus up to $1B in equity retention for staff — in a deal both sides describe as definitive. The headline is open-weight AI: 18M+ developers, 200,000+ companies, 3M models. The robotics consequence is that NVIDIA inherits LeRobot, the most widely used open-source robotics library, and with it Pollen Robotics and the Reachy 2 humanoid that Hugging Face bought in April 2025. A chip vendor that already supplies most of the sector’s training compute now also owns its default open software layer and an open-hardware humanoid. Hugging Face turned down a $500M NVIDIA investment earlier in 2026 over concerns about single-investor influence; Delangue approached Huang directly over the summer. NVIDIA says the platform stays open and multi-accelerator. That promise is the thing regulators will test: the deal triggers Hart-Scott-Rodino notification and faces FTC/DOJ scrutiny in the US. Europe is murkier: it isn’t clear the deal legally needs EU merger review, and MLex reported on Sep 23 that NVIDIA may ask the European Commission to take the case itself rather than face parallel national reviews. Closing isn’t expected before the first half of 2027.

Sep 2026
$8.2B

AMD → World Labs

Santa Clara · NASDAQ:AMD · Lisa Su · Target founded by Fei-Fei Li (2024) · Sep 28, 2026

NVIDIA had the answer and AMD didn’t. NVIDIA ships Cosmos, an open world model that robot makers use to generate training scenes; AMD had text and video models and nothing that understood a 3D room. So it bought one. World Labs, founded in 2024 by the Stanford computer scientist behind ImageNet, builds “spatial intelligence” models that generate, reconstruct and simulate 3D environments, and its Marble product is already pitched as a way to build simulated worlds for training robots. The price is $8.2B, paid in AMD stock, for a company that raised about $1B earlier in 2026 with AMD among the investors. Li becomes AMD’s executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting straight to Lisa Su. The two companies were already tuning model training on AMD GPUs; Su’s case is that “the more you understand end to end, the better system you are going to build.” Close is expected before the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approval. AMD shares rose about 1% premarket. Put it next to the other September deals and the pattern is plain. NVIDIA took the open robot-learning stack, Qualcomm took motion planning, and now AMD has taken the world model that sits in front of simulation. Three chip vendors, four weeks, each buying the software that makes robot makers pick their silicon.

Sep 2026
Undisclosed

Qualcomm → PickNik Robotics

San Diego · NASDAQ:QCOM · Nakul Duggal · Target founded by Dave Coleman (2015) · Sep 23, 2026

Three weeks after NVIDIA bought Hugging Face and LeRobot, Qualcomm bought the other half of open robotics software. PickNik is a 30-odd-person shop in Boulder, Colorado that maintains MoveIt, the ROS framework for motion planning, kinematics and manipulation that a large share of the world’s robot arms – humanoid arms included – actually run on. It sells MoveIt Pro on top, and has taken more than $9M in non-dilutive SBIR money; Google was an early customer and NASA a partner. Terms are undisclosed and closing is subject to customary conditions. Qualcomm says MoveIt 1 and 2 stay open source under their existing licence with community-driven roadmaps and continued support for third-party hardware, while Dragonwing becomes the best-supported target and MoveIt ships on Arduino’s VENTUNO Q boards. Read it as the fifth move in a patient roll-up: Foundries.io in March 2024 for OS and fleet management, Edge Impulse in March 2025 for edge MLOps, Arduino in October 2025 for the developer funnel, Modular in mid-2026 for the inference runtime, now PickNik for motion. Handset revenue fell 20% in the third quarter and Qualcomm has told investors it wants $40B of non-handset revenue by fiscal 2029; Dragonwing IQ10 is pitched at full-size humanoids. The sharp end is competitive. NVIDIA’s Isaac stack depends on MoveIt staying hardware-neutral, and the company that now stewards it sells the rival chip.

Sep 2026
$500M

Cognex → RealSense

Natick, MA · NASDAQ:CGNX · Matt Moschner (CEO) · Target led by Nadav Orbach · Sep 22, 2026

The eyes, this time. RealSense makes the stereo depth cameras bolted into a huge share of the world’s robot heads – fixed arms, warehouse AMRs, quadrupeds and humanoids – and Intel let it go as a standalone company in July 2025 with a $50M round from Intel Capital, the MediaTek Innovation Fund and others. Fourteen months later Cognex is paying $500M in cash from its balance sheet. Add a $56.5M three-year retention pool and roughly $50M in RSUs and the real price is closer to $600M. What Cognex gets: 4,500+ customers, $80–90M of expected 2026 revenue growing better than 50% a year, and 180 staff, 135 of them in Haifa, which becomes Cognex’s main development centre. Intel, which kept about 20% and a board seat, gets a decent return on a unit it nearly shut down. Close is targeted for Q4 2026. The market wasn’t convinced – Cognex fell almost 5% on the day. But the pattern is hard to miss. In one month NVIDIA bought the open robot-learning stack, Qualcomm bought motion planning, and now a factory-vision incumbent has bought perception. Each layer of the humanoid below the brain is getting an owner.

Sep 2026
$9.7M

HD Hyundai Robotics → AIDIN Robotics (Stake)

South Korea · HD Hyundai group, not Hyundai Motor Group · Co-investor: Samsung Venture Investment · Sep 11, 2026

There are two Hyundais in humanoids now, and they aren’t the same company. Hyundai Motor Group owns Boston Dynamics. HD Hyundai, the shipbuilding and heavy-industry group, is finding its own way in. Its robot arm, HD Hyundai Robotics, put ₩13B (about $9.7M) into AIDIN Robotics, a Korean maker of force and tactile sensors, for an equity stake in a ~$12.1M round that Samsung Venture Investment joined with $2.2M. AIDIN isn’t new to humanoids: it worked with CJ Logistics on a robot picked for Korea’s state-backed logistics humanoid project in 2025. The two will build a five-finger hand for shipbuilding and heavy industry. HD Hyundai’s own humanoid is a prototype still learning to manipulate, headed for tests on its controller assembly line, with no launch date. Separately, Houston’s Persona AI is building welding humanoids for its shipyards, though Persona’s August demo was teleoperated. The stated goal is modest – carry humanoid perception and touch back into the industrial arms HD Hyundai already sells. Small cheque. But it lands on the hand, the part that most often decides whether a humanoid can do real work, and it sits next to Unichem → Loomia and Wonik’s robot-hand plant as Korea’s component bets pile up.

Sep 2026
Undisclosed

SoftBank → Robotics and AI Institute

Japan / USA · Masayoshi Son · Seller: Hyundai Motor Group · Institute founded by Marc Raibert · Sep 18, 2026

SoftBank sold Boston Dynamics to Hyundai in 2021. Five years later it is buying back the research lab of the man who founded it. Hyundai set up the Robotics and AI Institute (RAI, originally the Boston Dynamics AI Institute) in 2022 with more than $400M. Its work covers robot control, perception, manipulation and the whole-body learning behind Atlas’s acrobatics. Terms are undisclosed and the deal is under CFIUS review. Raibert’s role after closing has not been announced. Taken with the pending $5.375B ABB Robotics purchase and the talks to take majority control of 1X, SoftBank is building a full physical-AI stack: industrial hardware from ABB, humanoids from 1X, and a research bench from RAI. Construction is the newest piece: SoftBank led a $200M round in excavator-autonomy startup Gravis Robotics in August, then put $225M into Utah’s ASI in September and formed a joint venture with it for driverless heavy-equipment fleets. For Hyundai, the sale comes as it takes full ownership of Boston Dynamics itself and tells investors that an IPO is further away than hoped. Son may want more than a stack. On Oct 9 the FT reported he is sounding out Gulf investors for a fund of up to $100B that would buy companies and run them with AI and robots from Roze, SoftBank’s robotics unit. Early talks, nothing committed.

Sep 2026
$400M

D-Robotics → Series C

China · Horizon Robotics spinout (2024) · Led by Mirae Asset · Meituan, Hefei state capital, Nanshan fund, Cathay Capital, GF Xinde, Vertex Growth · Sep 17, 2026

This round is about the chip inside the robot, not the robot. D-Robotics was spun out of Horizon Robotics to apply its edge-inference silicon to robots. Its Sunrise chips run from 5 to 560 TOPS, and more than 8M have shipped. The flagship S600 uses a dual “brain–cerebellum” design built for humanoids and has more than 20 customers. The $400M Series C brings total funding to about $770M across four rounds in 26 months. It pits a Chinese supplier directly against NVIDIA’s Jetson Thor for the humanoid compute socket, just as the US FCC closes its market to Chinese-built humanoids. Having a Korean lead investor in Mirae Asset is notable too. Morgan Stanley expects semiconductors to grow from 4–6% of a humanoid’s bill of materials today to about 24% by mid-century.

Sep 2026
$7.6M

Feather Robotics → Pre-Seed

USA · Founded 2025 by Hoa Mai and Parsa Bakhtiari · Led by Gradient Ventures · Sep 24, 2026

A small round with a clean founder trail. Hoa Mai worked at Kind Humanoid, the Palo Alto garage startup 1X bought in January 2025; Parsa Bakhtiari was a Tesla Model 3 engineer. Now they sell their own robot. Feather’s pitch is the “Android of robotics”: a $30,000 modular humanoid whose arms and other parts can be swapped per job, sold to developers who bring their own AI. That’s about half the price of Unitree’s H2 Edu, and it lands just as the FCC ban shuts new Chinese-built humanoids out of the US market. Units are already cooking in restaurants and cleaning laboratories, and the company says it has passed $1M in revenue in its first year. Gradient partner Darian Shirazi calls it the only US startup building a modular humanoid platform. At this size it is more likely an acqui-hire target than an acquirer, but it is exactly the kind of team the big platforms keep buying.

Sep 2026
$220M

General Intuition → New Round

New York · Medal spinout (2025) · Valor, Atreides, Seven Seven Six, Point72, Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst · $6.2B valuation · Sep 29, 2026

In June it was worth $2.3B. Now $6.2B. General Intuition took $220M from six backers, no lead named, bringing the total to roughly $674M across three rounds in a year. The bet is odd and specific: train action models on gameplay clips paired with the controller inputs that produced them, then fine-tune for real robots. Medal, the clip platform it spun out of, expects to take in three billion videos a year, and the company says that’s more training data than leading robotics labs can use. TechCrunch saw a quadruped walking its office after a small amount of real-world fine-tuning. No paying robot customer is named yet. Next to World Labs, bought by AMD for $8.2B the same week, it shows how much money is chasing the models a robot learns in before it ever touches a factory.

Aug 2026
$200M

Generalist → Series B Extension

USA · Founded 2024 by Pete Florence and Andy Zeng (ex-Google DeepMind) and Andrew Barry (ex-Boston Dynamics) · Led by 8VC · Radical Ventures, NVIDIA, Union Square Ventures, Bezos Expeditions, Fei-Fei Li · $3B valuation · Aug 25, 2026

Two months, another billion of valuation. Radical Ventures led a $400M Series B at $2B in June; in August 8VC put in about $200M more, taking the round to $600M and the price to $3B. What investors are buying is one foundation model meant to run across many robots. Gen 1.5 learns a new task from a video clip of 3 to 12 seconds, and Generalist is tuning it with a handful of customers it hasn’t named. That puts it in the same queue as Skild AI, Physical Intelligence and FieldAI – brains looking for bodies. NVIDIA is already on the cap table, and Fei-Fei Li’s own World Labs has just gone to AMD. The likeliest buyers are the chip companies now shopping for robot software.

Sep 2026
Undisclosed

Microagi → Stealth Robotics Startup

USA · Acquirer raised a $55M seed in 2026 · Target co-founded by members of Animesh Garg’s Georgia Tech group · Sep 29, 2026

A small acqui-hire with a familiar name attached. Microagi trains robots on recordings of people doing physical work, captured with cameras and sensor gloves, then tunes general-purpose models for car plants, logistics and food production. It bought a stealth startup spun out of Animesh Garg’s lab and hired Garg as chief research officer, along with seven of his researchers. Garg worked on NVIDIA’s simulation stack that fed into Isaac Lab and was Apptronik’s chief scientific officer in 2024–25. Terms weren’t disclosed. It’s the data layer again – the same instinct as EXL → iMerit – and another case of humanoid talent leaving a hardware maker for the software around it.

Sep 2026
$80M

Watney → Series A

San Francisco · Founded 2023 by Ryan Gannon (CEO) and Sean Cheong · Co-led by Valor Atreides AI Fund and Hummingbird Ventures · Sep 18, 2026

Watney is not a humanoid company, but it shows where the next buyer of physical AI is coming from. The startup builds two-armed robots that work inside AI data centres, swapping cables and restarting servers, and claims 99.99% uptime over hundreds of thousands of operating hours. The $80M Series A, with Conviction, Abstract, A* and Grant Gordon returning, takes it past $100M raised. Meta is testing the robots at its Altoona, Iowa and New Albany, Ohio sites. Compute companies already take stakes in humanoid makers (Nscale in Figure) and buy the software layer (NVIDIA and Hugging Face). Now the data centres themselves are becoming customers for robot bodies. An operator that settles on one manipulation platform is its natural acquirer.

Aug 2026
$669M

Sharpa → First Funding Round

Singapore / Shanghai · Co-founded 2024 by David Li (Hesai CEO), Xiang Shaoqing and Sun Kai · Alibaba, Tencent, Meituan, JD.com, Transsion, HongShan, Qiming · Aug 30, 2026

Most humanoid startups spend their first round on a body. Sharpa spent two years on the hand. Its Sharpa Wave is a multi-finger hand with tactile sensing, and the company’s robots now run a Dairy Queen in Shanghai around the clock, working through a 55-step Blizzard routine on standard, unmodified kitchen kit. The first round it has disclosed is a big one: ¥4.5B (about $669M) at a ¥22B (~$3.3B) post-money valuation, with nearly every Chinese platform giant on the cap table at once – Alibaba, Tencent, Meituan and JD.com, plus phone maker Transsion. At IROS in late September it added the D01 robot, a W02 hand under 750 g and an AE01 haptic glove for teleoperation. The founder line matters. David Li still runs Hesai, the lidar maker that got a car sensor cheap enough to ship by the million, and Sharpa reads like the same play aimed at hands. It lands as China’s regulator names “core technology such as robotic brains or hands” as one of three tests for a humanoid IPO. Sharpa has an answer to that one already.

Sep 2026
$165M

Lyte → Series C

USA · CEO Alexander Shpunt · Led by Maverick Silicon · $1.6B post-money · Sep 2, 2026

Lyte was founded in 2021 by engineers who built Apple’s Face ID, and it treats perception as a chip problem. It designs its own silicon, sensors and software, and its LyteVision platform fuses 4D vision, RGB and inertial data on a single synchronised timeline so a robot isn’t stitching together three vendors’ clocks. The $165M Series C takes it to $272M raised. It’s in production with customers in inspection, logistics and manufacturing, not yet a named humanoid maker. “Physical AI has a sensing problem before it has a model problem,” says Shpunt. Three weeks later Cognex paid $500M for RealSense. Two routes to the same socket, then: buy the incumbent depth-camera maker, or fund the startup trying to replace it.

Oct 2026
~$200M

FF EAI Robotics → Faraday Future Robotics

USA · NASDAQ:FFR (formerly AIxCrypto, AIXC) · Seller and majority holder: Faraday Future (NASDAQ:FFAI) · CEO Jerry Wang · Definitive agreement signed Oct 12, announced Oct 14, 2026 · Term sheet Sep 28

An EV maker is spinning its robots into their own stock, and it’s now binding. FF EAI Robotics Ecosystem, the Nasdaq shell Faraday Future already controls, signed definitive agreements on Oct 12 to buy FF’s whole robotics business in an all-stock deal that values it at about $200M. FFR issues the shares at $2.246, roughly 50% over its $1.50 close that day, and the shell itself is put at about $60M fully diluted. After closing FF owns ~65.7% with an 18-month lock-up, management and staff ~18.2%, and an up-to-$10M PIPE, priced at market with no discount and no warrants, ~5.5%. The public float is about 13M shares. What it buys is small but real: 24 products across three robot forms under a “one brain, many forms” pitch, 817 units sold or shipped through September (552 at the end of August), a Q2 gross margin above 30% and about $1.5M of cumulative revenue. Then the forecast: ~$7M of revenue in 2026, $45M in 2027 and close to $2B cumulatively by 2030, with 130,000+ units. Hold that next to the 817. Special committees at both companies signed off, and all closings are expected by the end of October. It belongs on this map as the third listed shell in two months to rebuild itself around robots, after Onconetix → Realbotix and First Hydrogen’s stake in Exodus Actuation.

Sep 2026
$224M

Swarmer → Ratel Robotics

USA / Ukraine · NASDAQ:SWMR · Erik Prince–backed acquirer · Definitive agreement · Sep 10, 2026

Swarmer, which builds autonomous swarm software for defence, agreed to buy Ukrainian unmanned-ground-vehicle maker Ratel Robotics for up to $224M — the largest disclosed UGV deal of the cycle. Ratel’s ground robots are battlefield-proven rather than pilot-stage, which is precisely what makes them expensive. It belongs on this map for the same reason the XTEND merger does: defence is where autonomous ground platforms currently have real budgets and real deployment volume, and public-market acquirers are using that revenue to consolidate the category while civilian humanoids are still pre-revenue. Swarmer shares rose on the announcement.

2026
$310M

EXL → iMerit

USA / India · NASDAQ:EXLS · Target: physical-AI data and foundation-model developer · Closed Aug 28, 2026

A deal about the layer nobody demos. EXL, an enterprise AI and analytics firm, paid up to $310M for iMerit, which builds the annotated data and model tooling that embodied-AI systems train on. Robots learn from demonstration data, and demonstration data is laborious, proprietary and increasingly the binding constraint — the same logic behind NSK opening factories to Atom as data-collection sites and Tesla routing early Optimus units into “Optimus Academy.” Expect more of the humanoid supply chain to be bought at the data layer rather than the hardware one.

Aug 2026
$6.3M

Unichem → Loomia

South Korea / USA · Acquirer: specialty materials maker · Target: soft-electronics and e-textiles startup · Up to $6.3M

The smallest deal on this page and one of the more telling. Unichem bought US e-textiles firm Loomia, paired with an R&D alliance, to enter the humanoid “electronic skin” market — flexible, touch-sensitive surfaces that give a robot tactile feedback across its whole body. Hands and skin are the two components most often named as the gap between a humanoid that can walk and one that can work. Component-level consolidation like this, alongside GAM’s purchase of Schaeffler’s PSC gear-reducer IP, is where the next tier of humanoid M&A is quietly happening.

Sep 2026
$3.5B

Figure AI → Nscale (Compute + Equity)

Sunnyvale, CA · Brett Adcock · Counterparty: Nscale · Sep 3, 2026

Not an acquisition, but the largest capital commitment yet made by a humanoid company — and a template for how compute is becoming the sector’s real consolidation lever. Figure signed an initial $3.5B agreement with Nscale for up to 100,000 GPUs on NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin platform at a Barstow, Texas facility, with stated intent to scale the commitment beyond $6B. Nscale takes a strategic equity stake in Figure as part of the deal, and the two are exploring deploying Figure humanoids into Nscale’s own supply chain. Deployment begins in H2 2027. The commitment is roughly twice the ~$1.9B Figure has raised to date, making it a bet financed against future rounds rather than cash on hand.

Sep 2026
$100M

Maven Robotics → Series A

USA · Hamza Derbas (CEO) · Led by RoboStrategy with LocalGlobe, Vine Ventures, XTX Ventures · Sep 10, 2026

An ex-Apple Special Projects team exiting stealth with $100M. Maven builds wheeled dual-arm robots that lift 30kg and handle “mixed palletization” — rebuilding pallets from multiple inbound shipments to match retail demand. Around eight robots are already deployed with customers on 16-hour shifts at a claimed 99%+ uptime; the round funds 250 third-generation units and a fourth-generation platform. CEO Hamza Derbas spent nine years in Apple’s special projects group; co-founder and CFO Khalid Derbas comes from private equity. Maven is a reminder that the near-term revenue in embodied AI is in wheeled, task-specific form factors rather than legs.

May 2026
Undisclosed

Meta → Assured Robot Intelligence

Menlo Park · NASDAQ:META · Target founded by Lerrel Pinto and Xiaolong Wang · May 1, 2026

Meta’s second humanoid move of 2026, and a pure talent-and-models acquisition rather than a hardware one. ARI, roughly a year old, built foundation models intended to let humanoids understand, predict and adapt to human behaviour in dynamic environments. Terms were undisclosed; the whole team, including both founders, moved into Meta Superintelligence Labs to work on robot control, self-learning and whole-body humanoid control. The founders map the industry’s talent flows neatly: Wang came from Nvidia and UC San Diego, while Pinto taught at NYU and co-founded Fauna Robotics — itself since absorbed by Amazon. Paired with the $1B, 49% stake in Aria Robotics, Meta now holds both a hardware option and an in-house physical-AI research bench.

Aug 2026
Undisclosed

NEURA Robotics → ADLATUS Robotics Acquisition

Germany · David Reger · Acquirer: NEURA Robotics · Aug 24, 2026

NEURA Robotics (Metzingen, Germany) acquired ADLATUS Robotics, a German startup specialising in professional cleaning robots, for an undisclosed sum. The deal brings physical AI capabilities into commercial cleaning services, extending NEURA’s cognitive robotics platform beyond industrial humanoids. ADLATUS becomes NEURA’s first acquisition and a blueprint for applying its Series C-funded Physical AI stack to vertical service markets. The move follows NEURA’s landmark €1.3B ($1.4B) Series C closed in June 2026 at a ~$7B valuation.

Aug 2026
SPAC

FORT Robotics → Public Listing via SPAC

USA · Autonomous robot safety platforms · SPAC: Newbury Street II Acquisition Corp · Aug 18, 2026

FORT Robotics announced a business combination with Newbury Street II Acquisition Corp to become a publicly traded company. FORT builds AI-powered safety and trust platforms that enable enterprises to deploy autonomous robots at scale. The deal follows FORT’s own acquisition of Mapless AI in June 2026, adding AI-native navigation to its safety stack. FORT joins Agility Robotics (SPAC with Churchill Capital Corp XI) in a wave of robotics companies pursuing public listings in 2026 ahead of projected market acceleration. The two are now tied operationally too. On Oct 1 FORT and Agility signed an MoU to build an “Offboard Safety Bridge” that connects Digit 5 to plant-wide safety systems, moving FORT from parts supplier to co-developer. No terms disclosed.

Aug 2026
$904M

Unitree Robotics → Shanghai STAR Market IPO

Hangzhou, China · Founded by Wang Xingxing · Listed on Shanghai STAR Market Aug 19, 2026 · ~$9B IPO valuation

The first pure-play humanoid/quadruped robotics company to IPO in China. Unitree raised $904M (¥6.1B) at a ~$9B IPO valuation; shares were more than 8,000× oversubscribed by retail investors. Trading commenced Aug 19 on the Shanghai STAR Market — the stock popped 629% on debut, peaking at ¥444.9B (~$66B) intraday. The re-rating was violent: shares fell 18.7% on Aug 20 and were ~44% below the debut high within four sessions, taking the market cap under ¥250B (~$37B), with analysts pointing to an IPO priced at 219× earnings against a sector average near 39×. By mid-September the stock had settled around ¥515, roughly ¥208B (~$29B). On Sep 24 it closed at ¥488 (~¥197.4B, ~$28B) as Beijing started pacing the humanoid IPOs queued behind it. The slide went on: on Sep 28 it traded down ~4% at ¥466.80 (~¥188.8B, ~$27B) after hitting a fresh post-IPO low of ¥456.25, about 58% off the peak. It slipped again on Sep 29, closing at ¥451.02 (~¥182.4B, ~$26B) after a new low of ¥450.70, the day J.P. Morgan started coverage at Underweight with a ¥300 target and the CSRC’s three listing tests for humanoid companies became public. It steadied at around ¥454 on Sep 30, the last session before Golden Week, then dropped 5% when Shanghai reopened on Oct 8, closing at ¥427.80 (~¥173.0B, ~$25B). It went lower still on Oct 14, trading at ¥420.33 (~¥170.0B, ~$24B) – about 62% off the peak. DeepSeek joined as a strategic placement investor. The company holds nearly a fifth of global humanoid market share with ~5,500 humanoid units shipped in 2025 (humanoid revenue exceeded quadruped revenue). However, the US FCC’s Jul 28 ban on foreign-produced humanoid robots adds significant regulatory headwinds for international expansion.

“The IPO will fund AI-model development for intelligent robotics and long-term strategic breakthroughs.”
— Unitree IPO Prospectus

Jul 2026
$152M

Humanoid (UK) → Series A

London, UK · Led by Prime Movers Lab · Schaeffler, Bosch, Fubon Financial, Aglaé Ventures · $1.35B post-money valuation

Europe’s first pure-play humanoid robotics unicorn. The two-year-old company raised $152M in its Series A, bringing total funding to $270M. Humanoid develops the HMND 01 industrial humanoid powered by KinetIQ, a proprietary four-layer AI framework. Capital will fund next-gen platform development, mass manufacturing of wheeled robots, and commercial deployments with industrial customers.

“We’re building robots that understand, reason, and execute complex physical tasks in real industrial environments.”
— Humanoid press release

Jun 2026
$2.5B

Agility Robotics → Churchill Capital Corp XI (SPAC)

Salem, Oregon · Led by Peggy Johnson (CEO) · SPAC: Churchill Capital Corp XI (NASDAQ:CCXI) · Ticker: AGLT

On track to be the first US-listed pure-play humanoid robotics company, though the merger has not yet closed. Agility will combine with Michael Klein’s SPAC at a $2.5B pre-money valuation for $620M+ in gross proceeds — about $424M from Churchill’s trust, assuming no redemptions, plus a $200M PIPE led by Foxconn. The SEC declared the S-4 effective on Oct 13, 2026; Churchill shareholders vote on Nov 2, and closing is expected in November. Agility made its case at an Analyst & Investor Day in New York on Oct 6, with Schaeffler and Foxconn on stage and 65,000+ hours of real-world operation as the proof point. Registration filings published in September 2026 put hard numbers on the sector’s revenue gap for the first time: $1.8M in 2025 net sales against a ~$140M operating loss and ~$100M of cash burn, with the much-cited $300M+ backlog consisting of multi-year Digit v5 orders from a single customer, partly compensated through warrants. Agility is the launch partner for NVIDIA’s Halos safety system. Digit 5, launched on Sep 15, 2026, lifts 50 lb, reaches 7.2 ft, recharges in 9 minutes and works without safety cages. It will be sold as a service at roughly $8,500 per robot per month, with early access in H1 2027 and general availability in late 2027.

“Humanoid robots are a critical driver of American technology leadership and the future of global industry.”
— Peggy Johnson, CEO, Agility Robotics

Jun 2026
$1.4B

NEURA Robotics → Series C

Metzingen, Germany · Led by David Reger · Investors: Nvidia, Amazon, Tether, Qualcomm, Bosch, Schaeffler, European Investment Bank

The largest funding round in European humanoid robotics history. NEURA’s Series C could reach $1.4B contingent on milestones, valuing the company at ~$7B. The capital accelerates deployment of the 4NE1 humanoid, the Neuraverse platform, and a global network of NEURA Gyms for physical-AI training.

“The future of AI will not only live on screens. It will move, interact, learn and work beside us in the real world.”
— David Reger, Founder & CEO, NEURA Robotics

May 2026
$1B

Meta → Aria Robotics

Menlo Park · Acquirer is Meta (NASDAQ:META) · Target founded by ex-Meta Reality Labs team building consumer humanoids

Meta’s largest strategic bet into physical AI. The $1B investment secures a 49% stake in Aria, giving Meta preferred access to embed its Llama models and Ray-Ban smart glasses stack into a consumer humanoid platform. Mark Zuckerberg called it “the next computing platform after AR.”

“We believe the future of AI is not just digital — it’s physical. Aria represents the convergence of everything we’ve built in Reality Labs.”
— Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta

Jan 2025
Undisclosed

1X Technologies → Kind Humanoid

Norway/Bay Area · Acquirer founded by Bernt Børnich · Target founded by Christoph Kohstall (ex-Stanford, ex-Google Robotics)

Kind Humanoid built Mona, a bipedal robot for home and healthcare, out of a Palo Alto garage. The deal expanded 1X’s Bay Area presence and brought in a deeply bio-inspired hardware team to complement 1X’s NEO program.

“It’s rare to find someone who is not just a powerhouse engineer but also completely aligned philosophically and strategically on how humanoids as products should take shape.”
— Bernt Børnich, CEO of 1X

Apr 2025
Undisclosed

Hugging Face → Pollen Robotics

Paris/NYC · Acquirer founded by Clément Delangue, Julien Chaumond, Thomas Wolf · Target founded by Matthieu Lapeyre (9 years building open-source robots)

Hugging Face’s 5th acquisition and first hardware play. Pollen built Reachy 2, an open-source humanoid that pairs naturally with the LeRobot library Hugging Face launched in 2024 (led by ex-Tesla engineer Remi Cadène). As of September 2026 this asset changes hands again: NVIDIA’s $12.93B acquisition of Hugging Face, if cleared, makes Reachy and LeRobot NVIDIA property.

“Robotics could be the next frontier unlocked by AI — and it should be open, affordable, and private.”
— Thomas Wolf, Co-founder & Chief Scientist, Hugging Face

Jun 2026
Undisclosed

Bear Robotics → Kinisi Robotics

USA / UK · Acquirer: Bear Robotics · Target founded by Brennand Pierce · Jun 22, 2026

A founder buying his way home. Brennand Pierce co-founded Bear Robotics, the restaurant- and warehouse-robot company that has shipped more than 16,000 units since 2017, then left to build a humanoid. Kinisi, run out of Bristol, made the KR1: a two-armed humanoid driven by vision-language-action models and trained with a cheap glove Kinisi designed for capturing human demonstrations. Now Bear owns it. Terms weren’t disclosed. Pierce returns as chief robotics officer, the Bristol office stays open as Bear’s engineering hub, and existing Kinisi pilots carry on. Bear’s own pitch is that it already had navigation and delivery covered and was missing hands. It has a 4,000-unit backlog and says revenue doubles every year. That’s the attraction for a small humanoid team: a buyer with real fleets to drop the arms onto.

Apr 2026
¥1.6B

UBTech → Zhejiang Fenglong Electric (43%)

Shenzhen · HKEX:9880 · Acquirer led by Zhou Jian · Announced Dec 24, 2025 · Completed Apr 24, 2026

Two things for the price of one. UBTech, the Hong Kong–listed maker of the Walker S factory humanoids, paid ¥17.72 a share – about ¥1.6B (~$225M) in total – for 43.01% of Zhejiang Fenglong Electric, a Shenzhen-listed maker of small engines, hydraulic systems and car parts. It got there in two steps: a 29.99% block bought from existing holders, then a partial tender offer for another 13.02%. Share registration finished on Apr 24, 2026, and Fenglong is now UBTech’s first A-share subsidiary. The stated reason is cost and scale: more manufacturing capacity and supply-chain control as UBTech pushes into mass production. The other reason is the listing. A controlled A-share company gives UBTech a mainland foothold without joining the queue of humanoid IPOs that Beijing is now pacing. Fenglong’s stock ran hard on the news, and in May the company put out a notice denying it had humanoid business of its own. That may be the most honest line in the whole deal. The robots are UBTech’s; Fenglong is the factory and the ticker.

Jan 2026
$900M

Mobileye → Mentee Robotics

Israel/US · Acquirer led by Amnon Shashua (Intel subsidiary, public on Nasdaq) · Target: 4-year-old AI-first humanoid startup

The largest pure-humanoid M&A of the cycle so far. Mobileye is repositioning from autonomous-driving pure-play to a “physical AI” company — the same Jensen Huang–coined frame Tesla and Nvidia are pushing. Approved by Intel as Mobileye’s largest shareholder.

“The convergence of vehicle autonomy and humanoid robotics is the future.”
— Amnon Shashua, CEO of Mobileye

2021
$1.1B

Hyundai Motor Group → Boston Dynamics

South Korea · Founded by Marc Raibert (now leads the Robotics and AI Institute, which Hyundai agreed to sell to SoftBank in Sep 2026)

The first big anchor deal that signaled humanoids weren’t a research toy. Hyundai bought 80% from SoftBank, valuing the company at $1.1B. In April 2025, Hyundai announced a $21B U.S. investment including $6B for robotics and AI. In 2026 it bought SoftBank’s remaining ~10% stake (reported at $325M–$372M), making Boston Dynamics wholly owned. The IPO that was meant to follow now looks unlikely before 2029–30: Atlas is not yet deployed at scale, the 2025 loss was ₩528.4B, and Hyundai is targeting 30,000 robots a year by 2028, with deployment at its Georgia plant. That work started in September 2026, when Boston Dynamics opened the Robotics Metaplant Application Center at the Georgia Metaplant to train Atlas on parts sequencing and logistics before a 25,000-unit rollout across Hyundai and Kia plants. In October Hyundai handed the company to an AI executive rather than a roboticist: Rohit Prasad, formerly Amazon’s head scientist for Alexa and AGI, became CEO on Oct 7.

2025
Undisclosed

Amazon → Fauna Robotics

Seattle/NYC · Acquirer is Amazon (also a strategic investor in Agility Robotics’ Digit)

Amazon picked up Fauna’s developer-focused humanoid platform to extend its warehouse automation moves beyond the Agility partnership. A vertical-integration play similar to Hyundai’s Boston Dynamics deal — bring the IP in-house.

Jun 2026
$200M

Standard Bots → Series C

Glen Cove, New York · Led by RoboStrategy Advisors · Investors: General Catalyst, GiantLeap Capital · $1B valuation

Standard Bots raised $200M in Series C funding to scale American-made, AI-native industrial robots. The company claims to be the largest manufacturer of AI-native collaborative robots in the US, with payloads from 7kg to 30kg. The funding will expand manufacturing in New York.

Jun 2026
$320M

General Intuition → Series A

New York · Led by Khosla Ventures · Investors: General Catalyst, Jeff Bezos · $2.3B valuation

General Intuition raised $320M to build AI models trained on billions of hours of video game data. The company believes gameplay action data can train AI agents that transfer to real-world robotics and physical environments. Total disclosed funding was $454M at this point. In September 2026 it raised another $220M at $6.2B – see above.

“We’re building AI that learns from play to master the real world.”
— General Intuition

Aug 2026
All-Stock

Onconetix → Realbotix LLC

Cincinnati, OH · Onconetix (NASDAQ:ONCO) acquires 100% of Realbotix LLC · Expected close H2 2026

Onconetix, a former biopharma company, is pivoting to humanoid robotics via an all-stock acquisition of Realbotix LLC. Realbotix builds AI-powered humanoid robots for education, healthcare, and entertainment. Robots are already being deployed in schools (Salamanca City pilot with 500 students in Fall 2026) and secured a deal to feature humanoid robots in an Emmy-winning streaming series. The combined entity will trade on Nasdaq. A rare example of a public-market shell pivoting entirely into humanoid robotics.

“We see humanoid robotics as the next transformative technology platform.”
— Onconetix

Jul 2026
$1.5B

XTEND + JFB → XTEND AI Robotics (XTND)

Tampa, FL · All-stock merger · XTEND 70% / JFB 30% · Nasdaq: XTND

Israeli defense tech company XTEND and JFB Construction Holdings announced a $1.5B all-stock merger to create XTEND AI Robotics, a Nasdaq-listed US leader in AI-driven autonomous defense and security robotics. XTEND’s XOS operating system enables human-guided autonomous systems across air, ground, and maritime domains, with 10,000+ operational systems deployed worldwide. Strategic investors include Eric Trump, Unusual Machines (NYSE:UMAC), and Aliya Capital. While not humanoid-specific, the deal represents the growing convergence of defense AI and robotics autonomy.

“XOS is not just a product, but a core autonomy platform that integrates software, hardware, and mission execution in real-world environments.”
— Joseph F. Basile III, CEO of JFB

Aug 2026
$6.5M

Avatar Robotics → Seed Round

San Francisco · Led by AlleyCorp · Pre-seed led by defy.vc · Henry Ford III among investors

Avatar Robotics raised $6.5M to deploy semi-humanoid robots across logistics, manufacturing, and warehousing via a teleoperation-first model. Founded by MIT grads Colin Webb and Nenye Anagbogu, the company uses human-in-the-loop remote operations while building toward full autonomy through continuous data collection. Team includes engineers from Cruise, Apple, Tesla, and Intuitive Surgical. An early-stage humanoid play betting that remote operators will bootstrap the data needed for autonomous humanoids at scale.

“Avatar’s approach is incredibly clever: Use remote human operators to bridge the gap today while improving autonomy with every task completed.”
— Amy Yin, defy.vc

Aug 2026
$253M

Wonik Robotics → Growth Equity

South Korea · Led by National Growth Fund (150B KRW direct investment) · Private investors: 200B KRW

Wonik Robotics raised 350 billion KRW (~$253M) in growth equity to build mass-production facilities for humanoid robots and robot hands. The company’s self-developed “Allegro Hand” has been supplied to global firms including Nvidia and Meta, and since 2024 it has co-developed a dedicated AI robot hand with Meta. Funds will go to a robot-hand production plant and AI transformation centre in Wanju, North Jeolla, plus in-house development of core components. Actuators and robot hands make up roughly 70% of humanoid hardware costs.

“This investment addresses a critical bottleneck in humanoid hardware costs and accelerates South Korea’s position in the global robotics supply chain.”
— Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy

Aug 2025
$405M

Field AI → Series A/B

Irvine, CA · Two consecutive rounds announced August 2025 · $2B valuation · Followed by a $700M term sheet at $10B in Oct 2026

Field AI raised $405 million across two consecutive rounds in August 2025 at a $2B valuation, from NVentures, Bezos Expeditions, Khosla Ventures, Temasek, Canaan, Intel Capital and Prysm, with Gates Frontier and Samsung returning. Its models run the same intelligence on quadrupeds, humanoids, wheeled robots and vehicles, deployed in energy, construction, manufacturing and inspection. Thirteen months later the price had quintupled – see the October 2026 entry above.

Oct 2025
$5.375B

SoftBank → ABB Robotics Division

Switzerland / Japan · Masayoshi Son, SoftBank · Signed Oct 2025 · Closing expected mid-to-late 2026

SoftBank agreed to acquire ABB’s entire robotics business division from Swiss engineering giant ABB Ltd for $5.375 billion, financing the deal with a $1.75B loan. ABB Robotics is a world leader in industrial robot arms with decades of manufacturing expertise and a global install base. The acquisition is the industrial-robotics pillar of SoftBank’s dual physical-AI strategy — pairing ABB’s industrial hardware muscle with its concurrent negotiations to take a majority stake in 1X Technologies’ humanoid robots. In September 2026 SoftBank added a third piece: an agreement to buy the Robotics and AI Institute from Hyundai. Pending regulatory approvals; expected to close mid-to-late 2026.

“The convergence of AI and robotics is creating one of the most powerful technological shifts of our generation.”
— Masayoshi Son, CEO, SoftBank Group

Aug 2026
~$6B val.

SoftBank → 1X Technologies (Majority Stake Talks)

Norway / Bay Area · OpenAI-backed humanoid developer · Reported Aug 26, 2026

SoftBank is in advanced talks to acquire a majority stake in 1X Technologies, the Norwegian humanoid robot company backed by OpenAI, at a valuation of approximately $6 billion. The deal would make SoftBank — already one of the largest tech investors in the world — the controlling shareholder in one of the most closely watched humanoid startups outside of China. 1X develops the NEO and EVE humanoid robots, targeting both consumer and industrial markets. SoftBank declined to comment; terms remain subject to change.

Aug 2026
$900M+

Xpeng Robotics → First Funding Round

Hangzhou, China · Led by IDG Capital · Strategic investors Tencent & Alibaba · Aug 24, 2026

Xpeng’s robotics unit raised more than $900 million in its first-ever external funding round, setting a new record for a single private financing in China’s embodied AI sector. The round was led by IDG Capital with strategic participation from Tencent and Alibaba, valuing the business at more than $6.3 billion. The unit is developing humanoid robots that leverage Xpeng’s deep expertise in autonomous driving and AI, targeting industrial and logistics deployment. The raise puts Xpeng Robotics at the top tier of globally funded humanoid players alongside NEURA Robotics and Unitree.

Independent Players

Still standing alone — and the most likely future M&A targets or acquirers.

Figure AI

Private

USA · Sunnyvale, CA

$2B+

$39B valuation · Sep 2025

Founder: Brett Adcock
Product: Figure 03
Latest round: $1B Series C

Adcock previously took Archer Aviation public at multi-billion valuation. Backers include Microsoft, OpenAI, Nvidia, Jeff Bezos. Past 1,000 Figure 03 units delivered, in paid work at BMW Spartanburg; committed $3.5B+ to Nscale for up to 100,000 Vera Rubin GPUs, which also bought Nscale an equity stake. NVIDIA is reportedly weighing a second $1B investment as Figure looks for new money at about $38B pre-money (The Information, Oct 7); nothing is signed yet.

1X Technologies

Private

Norway · Bay Area

$125M+

OpenAI-backed · SoftBank in talks at ~$6B

Founder: Bernt Børnich
Product: NEO
Acquired: Kind Humanoid (Jan ’25)

Formerly Halodi Robotics. Opened NEO household robot orders in late 2025. Backed by OpenAI Startup Fund and Tiger Global. SoftBank has been in late-stage talks since August 2026 for a majority stake at a ~$6B valuation — well below the ~$10B 1X sought a year earlier. 1X is targeting 50,000 NEO shipments in 2027 from its Hayward and San Carlos plants. If the SoftBank deal closes, 1X leaves this list.

Tesla / Optimus

Public

USA · Austin, TX

In-house

NASDAQ:TSLA

Founder: Elon Musk
Product: Optimus Gen 3
Target sale: B2B H2 2027

Optimus development is funded internally from Tesla’s auto/AI revenue. Fremont lines are converting from Model S/X to Gen 3, with limited output feeding “Optimus Academy” data collection. External B2B sales are targeted for H2 2027 and consumer availability for late 2027 to early 2028. Output reportedly reached several hundred robots a week in August, aiming for 1,000+ a week by year-end, but hand assembly and touch sensors are still bottlenecks and, per The Information, no unit is yet doing useful commercial work. On Oct 1 Musk said Tesla had cut memory on the AI5 and AI6 chips going into Optimus – to 72GB and 144GB – calling it the only way to get enough volume. Ten days later he partly walked it back: AI5 gets 96GB, AI6 stays at 144GB. The dedicated Optimus plant at Giga Texas, over 7M sq ft and sized for a long-run 10M robots a year, was about 40% through its steel frame by early October, with limited production pencilled in for late 2027.

Agility Robotics

Private

USA · Salem, OR

$400M+

SPAC vote Nov 2 · $2.5B pre-money

Founders: Shelton, Hurst, Jones
Product: Digit 5
Op cost: $10–12/hr today

Backed by Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund. First-of-its-kind humanoid factory in Salem, OR. Targets $2–3/hr operating cost. Its SPAC filings disclosed $1.8M of 2025 net sales against a ~$140M operating loss — the sector’s first audited look at the gap between demos and revenue. Digit 5 launched in September 2026 with ~$300M of multi-year commitments (about 1,000 robots at ~$8,500 a month each), and general availability is slated for late 2027. The SEC declared its S-4 effective on Oct 13, so the Churchill XI vote is set for Nov 2 and the listing as AGLT for November; Agility says it has 30+ potential customers and wants about 100 by the end of 2027. It made its pitch at an Analyst & Investor Day in New York on Oct 6, with Schaeffler, Foxconn and AUVSI on stage and 65,000+ hours of real-world operation as the headline number. Agility is also exploring wheeled designs alongside Digit. On Oct 1 it signed an MoU with FORT Robotics for an offboard safety bridge linking Digit 5 to customers’ plant safety systems. CEO Peggy Johnson is also advising MITRE’s Project Meridian defence study on humanoid logistics, in a personal capacity.

Boston Dynamics

Subsidiary

USA · Waltham, MA

$1.1B exit

Acquired 2021 · 100% Hyundai since 2026

Founder: Marc Raibert
Parent: Hyundai Motor Group
CEO: Rohit Prasad (from Oct ’26)
Products: Atlas · Spot · Stretch

Originally an MIT spinout. Owned successively by Google, SoftBank, and now Hyundai, which bought out SoftBank’s last ~10% in 2026. The IPO has slipped: a senior Hyundai executive says 2027 “won’t be easy,” and analysts now point to 2029–30. Raibert’s separate Robotics and AI Institute is being sold to SoftBank. In September 2026 Boston Dynamics itself opened the Robotics Metaplant Application Center in Georgia to train Atlas on real factory work, ahead of Hyundai’s planned 25,000-unit rollout. On Oct 1 it showed a four-finger Atlas hand with 13 degrees of freedom and tactile palms, designed for mass production. The sales pitch is now payback: under two years for Atlas, the same bar it claims for Spot. Since Oct 7 the company is run by Rohit Prasad, who built Alexa and the Nova models at Amazon. He replaced interim CEO Amanda McMaster, the CFO who held the job after Robert Playter left in February.

Hugging Face

Private

France/USA · Paris & NYC

$235M

$4.5B valuation · 2023

Founders: Delangue, Chaumond, Wolf
Robotics arm: LeRobot · Reachy 2
Acquired: Pollen Robotics (Apr ’25)
Being acquired by: NVIDIA · $12.93B · Sep ’26

First foray into hardware. Operates the most-used open-source robotics platform globally via the LeRobot library. No longer independent in practice: NVIDIA agreed in September 2026 to buy the company for $12.93B, subject to US antitrust review and a likely EU one, with a public commitment to keep the platform open and multi-accelerator.

Apptronik

Private

USA · Austin, TX

$935M+

Series A · $5.5B+ valuation · 2025-2026

Founders: Jeff Cardenas, Nick Paine
Product: Apollo
Partners: Mercedes-Benz, Google DeepMind, John Deere, AT&T

UT Austin spinout from the Human Centered Robotics Lab. Mercedes is testing Apollo on production lines.

Unitree Robotics

Public

China · Hangzhou

$904M IPO

Shanghai STAR · listed Aug 19, 2026

Founder: Wang Xingxing
Product: G1 · G1+ · H1
2025 shipments: 5,500 units

Revenue up 335% YoY. Humanoids now 51.5% of revenue. The Chinese price-leader threatening Western incumbents. Now the sector’s valuation bellwether: after a ~$66B debut peak, the stock fell 5% on Oct 8, the first session after Golden Week, to ¥427.80, bounced to ¥436.63 by Oct 13, then hit a new low of ¥420.33 in trade on Oct 14 – about 62% below that high, at a ~$24B market cap, and still roughly 179% above the IPO price. J.P. Morgan’s first call is Underweight, with a ¥300 target. The FCC’s import ban closes its largest Western market, so it is competing on price: the G1+ launched at $15,000 in September 2026. It has also lost the volume crown: Smart Analytics Global puts AgiBot first in H1 2026 with 44% of global shipments to Unitree’s 31%.

The Funding Leaderboard

Total capital raised or transacted, ranked.

Company	Founder(s)	Total Raised	Valuation	Status
NEURA Robotics	David Reger	$1.4B (Series C)	~$7B	Private
Figure AI	Brett Adcock	$2B+	$39B (~$38B pre in talks)	Private
Boston Dynamics	Marc Raibert	$1.1B (exit)	—	Hyundai (100%)
Mentee Robotics	—	$900M (exit)	—	Mobileye
Unitree	Wang Xingxing	$904M (IPO)	~$25B	Public (SSE STAR)
Agility Robotics	Shelton · Hurst · Jones	$400M+	$2.5B (SPAC)	SPAC pending
Apptronik	Cardenas · Paine	$935M+	—	Private
Hugging Face	Delangue · Chaumond · Wolf	$12.93B (exit)	$12.93B	NVIDIA pending
1X Technologies	Bernt Børnich	$125M+	~$6B (talks)	SoftBank talks
Physical Intelligence	Hausman · Levine · Finn	~$2B	~$11B	Private
Skild AI	Deepak Pathak · Abhinav Gupta	$1.4B+	$14B	Private
FieldAI	Ali Agha	$1.1B (incl. term sheet)	~$10B	Private
General Intuition	Pim de Witte	~$674M	$6.2B	Private
Generalist	Florence · Zeng · Barry	$600M+	$3B	Private
Xpeng Robotics	He Xiaopeng	$900M+	$6.3B	Private (Xpeng unit)
Sharpa	David Li · Xiang Shaoqing · Sun Kai	$669M	~$3.3B	Private
Tesla / Optimus	Elon Musk	In-house	Public	Public

Five Trends Driving Consolidation

🔗

Vertical Integration

Buyers want full-stack control: hardware, AI models, and data pipelines under one roof. NVIDIA’s $12.93B move on Hugging Face takes it to its logical end — the compute supplier now also owns the open software layer, an open-hardware humanoid, and the developer base — while EXL’s purchase of iMerit shows the same instinct applied to training data. Qualcomm answered within three weeks by buying PickNik and the MoveIt framework, the fifth acquisition in a stack it has assembled from Foundries.io, Edge Impulse, Arduino and Modular. Both chip vendors now own the software their customers build on. Perception went the same way a day earlier: Cognex paid $500M for RealSense, the depth cameras in many humanoid heads. Then AMD made it three chip vendors on Sep 28, paying $8.2B in stock for Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs and the 3D world models robots are trained in. Touch is next – HD Hyundai Robotics took a stake in sensor maker AIDIN to build its own robot hand, and Sharpa raised $669M on the strength of its hands. Toyota Ventures is in too, co-leading a $4.5M pre-seed for Columbia spinout Tangent’s tactile three-finger hand. Boston Dynamics is keeping its hand in-house: a four-finger, 13-DOF Atlas hand built for mass production, shown on Oct 1.

🌍

Geographic Expansion

European and Israeli teams entering the US market via acquisitions; Chinese consolidation expected next. Some just move. RobCo, a Munich robot-arm maker now valued at over $1B, has sent its founder-CEO to San Francisco and builds in Austin, and Minerva Humanoids builds its prototypes in Germany but sells from San Francisco. Chinese makers are heading the other way, outward: AgiBot has pledged up to RM1B (~$237M) and 5,000 jobs in Malaysia through 2035.

🚗

Auto-Industry Crossover

Mobileye, Tesla and Hyundai are reusing autonomous-driving stacks as the base for humanoid intelligence. Toyota is taking the other route: a reported 400,000-robot plan from 2028, led by its own wheeled ELEY humanoid and trained on its line workers. Japan’s other industrials are following: Panasonic wants humanoids in production by 2029, and Kawasaki will run its Kaleido robot on Noetra, the state-funded physical-AI consortium of Sony, SoftBank, NEC and Honda. Carmakers are becoming the biggest buyers of humanoids – FAW-Volkswagen has just signed UBTech up for factory logistics – and the ones building their own are the least likely to buy a startup. BYD is one of them: its first humanoid turned up in a design patent on Oct 9. Korea is clearing the floor for them: its sandbox committee has just let 20 Robros bipeds work unfenced beside people at a car-parts plant, a chip packager, a shipyard and a cold-chain warehouse.

🧠

“Physical AI” Framing

Jensen Huang’s term has become the industry’s investment thesis — and an M&A justification. It now also buys compute: Figure’s $3.5B+ Nscale commitment traded equity for GPUs. And it buys open source – NVIDIA took LeRobot, Qualcomm took MoveIt. AMD’s $8.2B World Labs deal, which Reuters framed as a bet on physical AI, pays for the world model. Private money is pricing the brains even higher than the bodies: FieldAI is raising at $10B, General Intuition at $6.2B, and SiMa.ai at $1.45B for the low-power chips meant to run them. Generalist hit $3B in August. Runway, a video-AI company, is giving its Praxis-1 robot model away as open weights. The data under the models is getting priced too: Sequoia led Mecka AI’s $60M round for human-motion recordings. And the brains want paying work: Ultra raised $62M to rent out packing robots that run on Physical Intelligence models. In China the robot makers are buying into the data themselves: Galbot and Baidu have both taken stakes in Genrobot. The model labs want in as well: DeepSeek is leading the seed in Winverse AI, a robot-brain startup a few months old and already priced at about $400M.

🐉

Chinese Pressure

$2B+ raised by Chinese humanoid companies in 2025; ~90% of global shipments. IDC counts nearly 25,000 humanoids shipped worldwide in the first half of 2026, up 432%, and 77.9% of them came from China. Smart Analytics Global counts fewer, 19,100, but gives Chinese vendors 97% and puts AgiBot (44%) ahead of Unitree (31%). Most of that volume is small and cheap: BTIG finds only 32% of ~31,000 humanoids from the leading makers are full-size, and 13% are bipeds. Unitree is now listed, Xpeng raised $900M+ at $6.3B and has opened an automated humanoid line, and D-Robotics’ $400M round goes after NVIDIA’s place in the humanoid chip stack. Beijing is now pacing the IPO queue, with AgiBot, X Square and Deep Robotics waiting, and has set three tests: real orders, shrinking losses and core tech such as brains or hands. AgiBot isn’t waiting idle: its 20,000th robot is off the line, 300+ are at work in a single Zhuhai theme park and another 100 are greeting shoppers across 100 ASD cookware stores. Nor is it waiting on the queue: it’s raising privately at about ¥50B (~$7B), which pushes its Hong Kong listing into 2027. UBTech took a different route to the mainland market: it bought control of Shenzhen-listed Fenglong Electric for ¥1.6B, a route onto the A-share market without an IPO. Western consolidation is partly a defensive response — and the FCC import ban is the policy version of it. The money hasn’t slowed yet – IT Juzi counts ¥112.6B (~$15.8B) of embodied-AI funding in China by Oct 11, nearly three times all of 2025 – but investors now say out loud that only 20–30 companies will be left standing. The robot makers have started acting like VCs themselves: AgiBot, X Square, Galaxea and Galbot hold stakes in joint, sensor and data suppliers, 100+ deals in all. Local state funds are filling the gap the slowed IPO queue leaves: a Shenzhen state-owned fund led Astribot’s ¥1B round at ¥15B, its fourth raise in six months. Listed suppliers are buying in too: Sunwave Communications led a ¥100M-range Pre-A in Ruoyu Technology, a robot-brain startup out of Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen).

Tracking the most important consolidation story in robotics.
Last updated: October 15, 2026 · Sources: TechCrunch, Reuters, The Robot Report, Forbes, Hugging Face, 1X Technologies, Mobileye, Meta, CNBC, NEURA Robotics, prnewswire, Axios, Bloomberg, Standard Bots, Caixin Global, BusinessWire, BBC, FCC, GlobeNewswire, Robotics 24/7, Yahoo Finance, Quartz, CoinDesk, Karmactive, Dealroom, Apptronik, Wonik Robotics, Field AI, Figure AI, Nscale, Barclays, SCMP, Fortune, Gasgoo, Engadget, Humanoids Daily, NVIDIA, The Hill, Swarmer, GlobeNewswire, EXL, Loomia, The Next Web, Dealroom, Humanoid Press, KED Global, Cyprus Mail, Tech Times, Boston Dynamics, Watney, Valor Atreides, Mech-Mind Robotics, Longbridge, Qualcomm, PickNik, RoboticsTomorrow, NAND Research, SECO, Unite.AI, Automotive World, Just Auto, Physical Intelligence, The Elec, Gradient Ventures, International Federation of Robotics, Electrek, The Information, Investing.com, Cognex, Calcalist, Benzinga, DC Velocity, AGIBOT, TechRepublic, First Hydrogen, The AI Insider, MLex, Seoul Economic Daily, WOWTALE, SiliconANGLE, DealStreetAsia, KrASIA, Crunchbase News, AMD, World Labs, The Yangtzeer, Xueqiu, investingLive, IDC, TechNode, Faraday Future, Stock Titan, Robotics & Automation News, Asia Business Daily, Business Insider, Runtime Wire, SiMa.ai, Smart Analytics Global, Inside Deep Tech, Fangda Partners, The Standard, Eni, Pulse 2.0, Bear Robotics, Hitachi, Agile Robots, Tangent Robotics, FORT Robotics, Galbot, UBTech, Nikkei Asia, Panasonic, Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Noetra, SoftBank Corp., Runway, Teradyne, Bright Machines, MITRE, Minerva Humanoids, General Catalyst, RobCo, BusinessWorld, BTIG, GuruFocus, Robots & Startups, Mecka AI, Sequoia, The San Francisco Standard, Boston Globe, ad-hoc-news, eWeek, AASTOCKS, Schneider Electric, PTC, AWS, Crypto Briefing, Tesla North, USPTO, RoboStrategy, Ultra, Financial Times, CnEVPost, Pandaily, Safeworld, Sohu, Sina Finance, Jiemian, IT Juzi, 36Kr, Securities Daily, The Star, Jabil, Google DeepMind, LinkedIn, XPeng, Forbes Asia, STAR Market Daily, Cailian, Tech Insider, Humanoid.guide, Pedaily, 21st Century Business Herald, The Kyunghyang Shinmun, National Business Daily, Caijing, IT Home, Phoenix New Media

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AgiBot → New Round at ~¥50B

Astribot → New Round at ¥15B

DeepSeek → Winverse AI (Seed)

Ultra → Series A

Mecka AI → Series B

Minerva Humanoids → Pre-Seed

FieldAI → Term Sheet at $10B

NVIDIA → Hugging Face

AMD → World Labs

Qualcomm → PickNik Robotics

Cognex → RealSense

HD Hyundai Robotics → AIDIN Robotics (Stake)

SoftBank → Robotics and AI Institute

D-Robotics → Series C

Feather Robotics → Pre-Seed

General Intuition → New Round

Generalist → Series B Extension

Microagi → Stealth Robotics Startup

Watney → Series A

Sharpa → First Funding Round

Lyte → Series C

FF EAI Robotics → Faraday Future Robotics

Swarmer → Ratel Robotics

EXL → iMerit

Unichem → Loomia

Figure AI → Nscale (Compute + Equity)

Maven Robotics → Series A

Meta → Assured Robot Intelligence

NEURA Robotics → ADLATUS Robotics Acquisition

FORT Robotics → Public Listing via SPAC

Unitree Robotics → Shanghai STAR Market IPO

Humanoid (UK) → Series A

Agility Robotics → Churchill Capital Corp XI (SPAC)

NEURA Robotics → Series C

Meta → Aria Robotics

1X Technologies → Kind Humanoid

Hugging Face → Pollen Robotics

Bear Robotics → Kinisi Robotics

UBTech → Zhejiang Fenglong Electric (43%)

Mobileye → Mentee Robotics

Hyundai Motor Group → Boston Dynamics

Amazon → Fauna Robotics

Standard Bots → Series C

General Intuition → Series A

Onconetix → Realbotix LLC

XTEND + JFB → XTEND AI Robotics (XTND)

Avatar Robotics → Seed Round

Wonik Robotics → Growth Equity

Field AI → Series A/B

SoftBank → ABB Robotics Division

SoftBank → 1X Technologies (Majority Stake Talks)

Xpeng Robotics → First Funding Round

Independent Players

Figure AI

1X Technologies

Tesla / Optimus

Agility Robotics

Boston Dynamics

Hugging Face

Apptronik

Unitree Robotics

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