MEKAWIRE: robotics industry news, research and funding
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Will ‘boring’ robots win in the real world? Why robotic form should follow workflow
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Why dexterity is physical AI’s real bottleneck
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Why humanoid robot demos still fail the generalization test
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Edinburgh's Danu Robotics seeks $5M late seed for a claw-based recycling sorter
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We can’t help treating AI like it’s human. But should we?
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Shelf-scanning robots pivot to selling store data, Groceryshop 2026 column finds
Paper of the day
What Visual Representations Do World Action Models Need?
From the abstract
World Action Models (WAMs) inherit powerful priors from pretrained video generation models, but their variational autoencoder (VAE) representations are optimized for visual reconstruction rather than manipulation. External visual representations can improve manipulation, but existing methods couple representation choices with different integration mechanisms, obscuring their individual effects.
From the abstract. Our summary is in progress.
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MEKAWIRE Analysis
Analysis
Inside Unitree Robotics, where humanoids now outsell robot dogs but nearly three-quarters go to labs and classrooms
Unitree Robotics, the Hangzhou maker of quadruped and humanoid robots that listed on Shanghai's STAR Market in August 2026, now earns more from humanoids than from robot dogs. Its filings show 73.6% of humanoid revenue in the first nine months of 2025 came from research and education buyers, the central question for a company worth about RMB61 billion at its issue price.
Analysis
Who supplies humanoid robot joints? Japan's Harmonic Drive and Nabtesco, China's Leaderdrive and Germany's Schaeffler lead, while Tesla and Figure build their own
The joints of today's humanoid robots come from a short list of gear and actuator makers: Harmonic Drive Systems and Nabtesco in Japan, Leaderdrive, Tuopu and Sanhua in China, and Schaeffler in Germany, while Tesla, Figure and Unitree design key parts themselves. Filings show orders reaching the Japanese incumbents first, yet Tesla's stated Fremont capacity alone implies 25 million to 30 million joint actuators a year, about 22 times the 1.15 million precision reducers Nabtesco can make annually.
Analysis
Skild AI and Figure top the largest humanoid and embodied-AI funding rounds of 2025-2026, as money moves from robot bodies to robot brains
Skild AI's $1.4 billion Series C, led by SoftBank, and Figure AI's $1 billion Series C, led by Parkway Venture Capital, are the two largest humanoid and embodied-AI rounds in MEKAWIRE's verified records since January 2025, and together make up 41% of the $5.86 billion disclosed across 22 rounds. Humanoid makers took 70% of disclosed money in 2025, but developers of robot foundation models have taken 71% in 2026 so far, and NVIDIA joined seven rounds without leading one.
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- Feather Robotics$7.6M
- Tangent Robotics$4.5M
- Aleph Surgical$7.5M
- Inbolt$12.5M
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MEKAWIRE Intelligence
The analysis under each story: why it matters, how the rivals compare, what a valuation implies and what to watch next. Sourced the same way as the facts.