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M&ASymbotic
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Symbotic buys Bremen's cellumation for cash to put a software-steered sorting floor inside its warehouse systems
Symbotic said in a press release on Oct 13 that it has acquired cellumation, the Bremen company behind the celluveyor sorting platform, in an all-cash deal whose price it did not disclose. The celluveyor will be sold on its own to customers and other integrators and also built into Symbotic's systems, giving the Walmart-anchored automation group a European team and a second product line.
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Wire
BusinessSingle source
Will ‘boring’ robots win in the real world? Why robotic form should follow workflow
BusinessSingle source
Why dexterity is physical AI’s real bottleneck
BusinessSingle source
Why humanoid robot demos still fail the generalization test
BusinessSingle source
Edinburgh's Danu Robotics seeks $5M late seed for a claw-based recycling sorter
BusinessSingle source
We can’t help treating AI like it’s human. But should we?
BusinessSingle source
Shelf-scanning robots pivot to selling store data, Groceryshop 2026 column finds
Paper of the day
Forward Dynamics Models
From the abstract
Vision-language-action (VLA) models and world action models (WAMs) have advanced robotic policy learning by building on pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) and video generative models (VGMs), respectively. Yet VLAs learn without explicit supervision from future world states, while WAMs that condition actions on predicted futures incur extra inference cost and let visual prediction errors propagate into actions.
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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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.