19 Sep
SoftBank agrees to acquire Robotics and AI Institute (1 minute read)
SoftBank has agreed to acquire the Robotics and AI Institute, The Robot Report reports.
— therobotreport.comindustry-funding
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34 items · newest first
industry-funding
Rounds, deals, hires and consolidation.
18 Sep
D-Robotics Closes $400M in Series C Funding to Boom the Robotics Industry (2 minute read)
D-Robotics has closed a US$400 million Series C, with strategic investment from an unnamed global internet company and follow-on from existing shareholders. The round funds its Sunrise chip portfolio and a software platform. The company says cumulative Sunrise shipments passed 8 million units in the first half of 2026, and that its S600 embodied AI chip, launched in November 2025, has been adopted by more than 20 customers in six months.
12 Sep
Mecka AI nears $500M valuation in Sequoia-led deal amid rush for robot training data (2 minute read)
Mecka AI, which collects and analyses human motion data to train humanoid and other robots, is nearing a new round led by Sequoia at a valuation of about $500 million, TechCrunch reports, citing two people with knowledge of the deal. It comes three months after a $60 million round led by Framework Ventures; the terms are not final, and neither company commented.
12 Sep
100M ARR after 10 months of deploying robots (video · 3 min)
Skild AI says it has passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue, ten months after it began deploying robots commercially. The figure is the company's own, from a short video and a post on its blog.
— Skildindustry-funding
9 Sep
Big-D Construction expands FieldAI robot deployments across its project portfolio (4 minute read)
Big-D Construction is expanding its use of FieldAI, with a company executive saying he expects every project to carry some representation of FieldAI tools.
8 Sep
The Boston Dynamics spinout building robots you’ll actually want to hug (4 minute read)
Fortune profiles the Boston Dynamics spinout building character robots, starting with Danielle, a lavender poodle.
— fortune.comindustry-funding
8 Sep
LG Electronics-owned Bear Robotics eyes up to $300 mn pre-IPO funding (1 minute read)
LG Electronics-owned Bear Robotics is seeking up to $300 million in pre-IPO funding, KED Global reports.
— KED Globalindustry-funding
7 Sep
Agility Robotics reports $1.8M revenue ahead of humanoid SPAC (3 minute read)
Agility Robotics generated $1.8 million in net sales in 2025 against a $140 million operating loss, according to an S-4 filed ahead of its SPAC merger with Churchill Capital Corp. XI. The deal values Agility at $2.5 billion, roughly 1,400 times annual revenue, with Digit deployed at nine customer sites. The merger is expected to raise more than $620 million, including a $200 million PIPE led by Foxconn.
7 Sep
NEURA Robotics and SECO Join Forces to Scale Physical AI from Europe (5 minute read)
NEURA Robotics and SECO will jointly design and manufacture the compute modules for NEURA's cognitive robots, including the 4NE1 humanoid, with series production in Europe. The modules carry Qualcomm Dragonwing processors and form part of NEURA's distributed Brain-plus-Nervous-System architecture. The two will also work together on industrial data and automation for semiconductor and electronics manufacturing.
5 Sep
Sabac Robot Factory Ships First Humanoid Units (2 minute read)
A plant in Šabac shipped its first humanoid units on 4 September 2026, with a planned capacity of three thousand robots a year. Serbia's first factory of its kind is a joint venture between Chinese automotive parts maker Minth and robot maker Agibot, building two humanoid models and a quadruped. Serbia is the base Minth wants for the European market rather than another car-industry plant, and the robots go first to industry and later to households.
4 Sep
NVIDIA Is Buying Hugging Face. One of Its Hottest Robots Runs on a Chinese Chip (4 minute read)
NVIDIA's proposed $12.9 billion acquisition of Hugging Face is being framed as a software deal, but Hugging Face also owns Pollen Robotics. Its new $399 Microduck, which passed 10,000 orders, runs on Rockchip's RK3566 rather than an NVIDIA processor. Pollen, the French company Hugging Face bought in 2025, lists the RK3566 and its AI accelerator among Microduck's key specifications, and the backlog has pushed some deliveries past the original Christmas target.
4 Sep
Lyte raises $165M to help robots better sense their surroundings (2 minute read)
Lyte AI raised $165 million in Series C at a $1.6 billion post-money valuation, for processors, multimodal sensors and software it says it owns from the transistor up. Chief executive Alexander Shpunt argues that physical AI has a sensing problem before it has a model problem. Lyte is in production and shipping to inspection, logistics and manufacturing customers, and will use the round to put LyteVision into more robots and more environments.
4 Sep
Robot.com signs a seven-year delivery-robot deal with Sodexo (4 minute read)
Robot.com, founded as Kiwibot, has signed a seven-year agreement with Sodexo, its largest single enterprise deployment, extending a partnership on North American college campuses that began in 2021. Its R-Kiwi robots have completed 2.4 million tasks, and the company plans to add a wheeled and legged delivery robot, R-Dog, and a wheeled humanoid.
— The Robot Reportindustry-funding
4 Sep
Berg Insight forecasts 26 million humanoid shipments a year by 2040 (3 minute read)
Berg Insight forecasts annual humanoid robot shipments rising from 16,000 units in 2026 to 26 million by 2040, a compound growth rate of 63.7%, with the market growing from US$890 million to US$554 billion. It counts more than 100 companies developing full-size humanoids, most still at the prototype or pilot stage.
4 Sep
Medtronic invests $700M in surgical partner Cornerstone Robotics (2 minute read)
Medtronic is investing $700 million in Cornerstone Robotics and has taken rights to distribute its Sentire surgical system in selected markets outside the US. Sentire will be sold alongside Medtronic's own Hugo robotic-assisted surgery platform. Surgical head Matt Anderson said Medtronic is deliberately investing across several robotic platforms because surgeons, health systems and markets have different needs.
— The Robot Reportindustry-funding
3 Sep
Figure and Nscale sign for up to 100,000 GPUs on NVIDIA's Vera Rubin platform (1 minute read)
Figure is committing $3.5 billion, with intent to scale past $6 billion, to deploy up to 100,000 GPUs on NVIDIA's Vera Rubin platform from the second half of 2027 in Barstow, Texas. Nscale is also investing in Figure, which says it is now bound by the data and compute needed to train Helix. It follows Index, Figure's effort to assemble the most diverse humanoid training dataset yet, which the company says is generating 35 minutes of data every second.
28 Aug
Overcooked? Why robotic pizza makers are failing (4 minute read)
A pair of $160,000 pizza robots at Moto Pizza in Seattle went dead in May when their supplier Picnic shut down and technical support disappeared. The BBC traces a wider pattern of failure across the robotic pizza business, from the dough feeder through the sauce and cheese modules. Zume, Pazzi and Basil Street had all come and gone before Picnic, leaving a trail the BBC describes as overcooked promises and melting fortunes.
26 Aug
Robot brain builders are pushing out of their GPT-2 era (5 minute read)
TechCrunch finds the builders of robot AI models, gathered at the Actuate conference, still short of the training data that would let robots do value-creating work, in the week Unitree lost nearly half its value. Wayve argues the tooling built for self-driving will carry over; Genesis AI says hardware and AI have to be designed together.
26 Aug
Robotics startup Generalist reaches $3B valuation, sources say (2 minute read)
Generalist is valued at $3 billion after a nearly $200 million extension led by 8VC, taking its Series B to $600 million in total. The company was founded in 2024 by former Google DeepMind researchers Pete Florence and Andy Zeng with ex-Boston Dynamics engineer Andrew Barry. Early backers include NVIDIA, Union Square Ventures, Bezos Expeditions and Fei-Fei Li, and the company says its Gen 1.5 model learns new tasks from video demonstrations.
25 Aug
AGIBOT x Chimelong Group: Build the World’s First Embodied‑AI Theme Park (video · 3 min)
AGIBOT and Chimelong Group have formed a partnership to build what they describe as the world's first embodied-AI theme park.
24 Aug
NEURA Acquires ADLATUS Robotics, Bringing Physical AI to Professional Cleaning (5 minute read)
NEURA Mobile Robots has acquired 100% of ADLATUS Robotics of Ulm, bringing hundreds of installed autonomous cleaning machines and proprietary navigation software into the group. It follows the Bosch Rexroth ACTIVE Shuttle deal as NEURA consolidates different robots onto one Physical AI infrastructure. ADLATUS has spent years building autonomous cleaning and sweeping robots for industry, logistics, healthcare and public spaces, and NEURA will add sensing and fold it into the Neuraverse.
20 Aug
China's humanoid robot boom is fueled by government-backed training centres (1 minute read)
The Financial Times reports that government-backed training centres are fuelling China's humanoid robot boom.
19 Aug
VCs Pour Billions into Physical AI as the Next Wave of AI Investing Takes Shape (5 minute read)
Crunchbase counts $47.4 billion of venture funding into physical AI across 521 deals in the first half of 2026, almost four times the $12 billion of the second half of 2025 and more than the $41.9 billion invested from 2022 to 2024 combined. Its definition is broad — robotics, autonomous vehicles, aerospace, drones, industrial automation and sensors — and one deal, Waymo's $16 billion Series D, accounts for nearly a third of the total.
— news.crunchbase.comindustry-funding
18 Aug
Former SpaceX engineers are building a robotic factory for making steel parts (1 minute read)
Former SpaceX engineers are building a robotic factory for making steel parts, Ars Technica reports.
18 Aug
Unitree Robotics IPO: "Embodied AI" Valuation Bubble? (4 minute read)
Unitree's shares rose more than 600% on their Shanghai debut, after an IPO that raised 6.1 billion yuan ($905 million) and was oversubscribed more than 8,000 times — a record for the STAR market. Days earlier the company unveiled Superman, a humanoid it says jumps two metres and runs at 12.66 metres per second. Founder Wang Xingxing sat in the front row at President Xi's rare symposium with top technology businesses, a marker of how strategically the company is now regarded.
14 Aug
The Global Humanoid Robotics Ecosystem Is Broader Than Robot Makers (5 minute read)
Humanoid Analytics' July 2026 market snapshot tracks 351 companies and programmes: 225 build complete humanoids and 126 work in adjacent segments such as dexterous manipulation, sensing, components, AI and data infrastructure. That puts 35.9% of the tracked ecosystem into humanoid robotics without building the robot — a count of participants, the firm stresses, not market share. Dexterous manipulation is the largest adjacent segment, with 58 entities.
13 Aug
NEURA Robotics acquires Bosch Rexroth's ACTIVE Shuttle (4 minute read)
NEURA Robotics is acquiring Bosch Rexroth's ACTIVE Shuttle automated guided vehicle, effective 1 October 2026. Bosch Rexroth's navigation and fleet management will be available through the NEURA platform, with the shuttle gaining NEURA's AI interfaces in stages. The shuttle is already field-proven across industrial customers for moving material between assembly workstations, and NEURA is folding it into a European Physical AI ecosystem.
— Neura Roboticsindustry-funding
13 Aug
Anthropic in Talks to Buy World Model AI Startup Decart for $6B (1 minute read)
Anthropic is in talks to buy the world-model startup Decart for about $6 billion, Bloomberg reports.
10 Aug
Global Humanoid Robot Shipments Surge Threefold in First Half; China Captures 97% Market Share, Agibot Leads (4 minute read)
Global humanoid shipments reached 19,100 units in the first half of 2026, more than three times the 5,100 of a year earlier, and Chinese manufacturers took 97% of them. Agibot overtook Unitree for the top place with 44% of the global total, and the four largest suppliers were all Chinese. Smart Analytics Global puts industrial and commercial work at more than 70% of shipments, and names falling margins and the US import ban as what shapes the next phase.
10 Aug
Unitree's Shanghai IPO more than 8k times oversubscribed by retail investors (1 minute read)
Retail investors oversubscribed Unitree's Shanghai IPO more than 8,000 times, Reuters reports.
— reuters.comindustry-funding
8 Aug
Robot dogs undercut security guards on cost, Business Insider reports (2 minute read)
Business Insider reports that contracting robot dogs to cover a round-the-clock guard shift costs $80,000 to $130,000 a year less than human officers, and US operators are deploying them at data centres, crop farms and stadiums. Asylon, one such company, has about 50 robots with 25 customers, against 1.3 million human guards; a Berkeley labour researcher expects guards' work to get harder rather than disappear.
— Futurismindustry-funding
5 Aug
China’s X Square Robot submits confidential filing for Hong Kong IPO: sources (1 minute read)
Shenzhen-based X Square Robot has filed confidentially for a Hong Kong listing, with Huatai Securities and Morgan Stanley as sponsors. AgiBot and Galbot have filed confidentially as well, according to sources cited by the South China Morning Post. The rush comes as Hong Kong's IPO market hit a five-year high in both funds raised and number of listings over the first half of 2026.
— South China Morning Postindustry-funding
3 Aug
Walden Robotics Partners With Toyota on Practical Humanoids (5 minute read)
Walden Robotics, the Toyota Research Institute spinout that left stealth on 15 July with $300 million at a $1.1 billion valuation, is partnering with Toyota on humanoids built for practical work. IEEE Spectrum sets it against two years in which humanoid companies were founded largely because it was possible and lucrative, and the industry-wide sobering about practicality and value that followed.
3 Aug
Unitree opens its STAR Market IPO to subscription on 10 August; AgiBot starts a Hong Kong listing (7 minute read)
Gasgoo's weekly roundup leads with Unitree's STAR Market listing: the preliminary inquiry was set for 5 August and subscriptions for 10 August, for 40.45 million new shares, 10% of the enlarged capital. Unitree projects first-half revenue of 1.05 billion to 1.13 billion yuan, up roughly 35.6% to 45.4% year on year, and net profit attributable to shareholders of 258 million to 306 million yuan. The roundup also notes AgiBot starting its Hong Kong listing process.