Agile Robots

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.

Hitachi has reached a basic agreement with Munich's Agile Robots to fuse their AI models into a robot "brain" for factory work and pair it with Hitachi's edge AI chips, then sell the results globally through HMAX Industry. No financial terms or launch dates were disclosed, and the deal came a day before Hitachi's separate physical AI partnership with FANUC.

Rokae (Shandong) Robotics Group began trading on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange Main Board under code 3752 on 9 July 2026 after selling 23,031,900 H shares at a fixed HK$38.00, for gross proceeds of HK$875.2 million. The Hong Kong public tranche was subscribed 156.58 times and the international tranche 11.96 times, and a full over-allotment exercise on 5 August took the total raised to about HK$1,006.5 million.

Standard Bots said on 9 June 2026 that it had raised a US$200 million Series C led by RoboStrategy, with existing investors including General Catalyst, at a valuation of US$1 billion. The Glen Cove, New York, robot maker is expanding its plant to 70,000 square feet and says it is on pace to supply 10% of new US industrial robot deployments by 2027.

Sereact, the Stuttgart developer of the Cortex robot model, raised US$110 million in a Series B led by Headline on 27 April 2026, citing more than 1 billion production picks and one remote intervention in about 53,000. The money funds Cortex 2.0, which adds a world model to a vision-language-action model, and a first US office in Boston; Zalando later joined, lifting the round to US$116 million.

UK robotics start-up Humanoid said on 30 March 2026 that its wheeled HMND 01 Alpha completed a January to February proof of concept with SAP and Turkish seat maker Martur Fompak, taking orders from SAP's AI agent in live production. It was the first time an enterprise system controlled a Humanoid robot externally, through the four-layer KinetIQ AI framework the company unveiled on 5 February.

Munich-based Agile Robots said on 24 March 2026 it had formed a strategic research partnership with Google DeepMind to integrate Gemini Robotics foundation models with its hardware, starting with manufacturing use cases. The German company, which says it has installed more than 20,000 robotic solutions, becomes the latest hardware maker in Google's orbit after Boston Dynamics and Apptronik. No financial terms were disclosed.

Physical Intelligence on February 24, 2026 laid out its plan to sell general-purpose robot models as a ready-made ‘physical intelligence layer’ for other robot makers, the way developers call language models through an API. It named home robot maker Weave and warehouse robot maker Ultra as partners, reporting a full packing shift at 96.4% autonomy and a 50% cut in laundry-folding interventions, but gave no pricing or access terms.

RobCo, which builds AI-driven industrial robots and leases them to manufacturers, raised $100 million in a Series C round co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Lingotto Innovation on January 29, 2026. The Munich-founded company will use the money for its Physical AI roadmap, larger enterprise deployments and a bigger US presence, but disclosed no valuation or deployment figures.

Robot foundation model developer Physical Intelligence has raised $600 million at a $5.6 billion valuation in a Series B led by Alphabet's growth fund CapitalG, according to its investors. The round followed the release of π*0.6, a model the company says more than doubles throughput on hard tasks after reinforcement learning on real robots.

Generalist AI introduced GEN-0 on November 4, 2025, a family of embodied foundation models that the company says improves predictably with more physical interaction data. It reported a capacity threshold at 7 billion parameters, models scaled past 10 billion, and a pretraining corpus of more than 270,000 hours growing by over 10,000 hours a week. The findings were published as a company blog post, not a peer-reviewed paper.

Schaeffler and NEURA Robotics announced on 4 November 2025 that they will jointly develop and supply humanoid components, led by actuators, and signed an offtake agreement under which Schaeffler plans to integrate a mid-four-digit number of humanoids into its global production network by 2035. Schaeffler's planetary gear actuators, rated at up to 250 Nm, are designed for the joints of NEURA's 4NE1 humanoid.

SoftBank Group will acquire ABB Robotics for an enterprise value of US$5.375 billion, the two companies said on 8 October 2025, replacing ABB's plan to list the unit separately in 2026. The division had 2024 revenue of US$2.279 billion and about 7,000 employees, and the deal needs approval in the EU, China and the US before an expected close in mid-to-late 2026.

Google DeepMind on 25 September 2025 introduced Gemini Robotics 1.5, a vision-language-action model that reasons in natural language before moving and transfers skills across robot bodies, alongside Gemini Robotics-ER 1.5, an embodied reasoning model opened to developers as a preview in the Gemini API. In its technical report, the pairing of the two cut total subtask failures on long-horizon tasks to 22% from 44.5% when a general Gemini 2.5 Flash model did the planning.

The International Federation of Robotics said on 25 September 2025 that 542,000 industrial robots were installed worldwide in 2024, the second-highest annual total on record and 2% below 2023. Japan (44,500 units, down 4%), the Republic of Korea (30,600, down 3%) and Germany (26,982, down 5%) all contracted, while China installed 295,000 units and domestic Chinese makers took 57% of their home market for the first time.

Skild AI on July 29, 2025 named and described its robotics foundation model, the Skild Brain, a two-layer system pre-trained on simulation and internet video that the company says runs across quadrupeds, humanoids, table-top arms and mobile manipulators. The launch carried no customers or prices, but set out the body-agnostic strategy that later underpinned a $14 billion-plus valuation and more than $100 million in annual recurring revenue.

Google DeepMind on June 24, 2025 released Gemini Robotics On-Device, a vision-language-action model built to run locally on a robot with no network link. It is the first VLA the lab is letting outside developers fine-tune, through a new Gemini Robotics SDK offered to trusted testers, and DeepMind says it adapted the model from its ALOHA training rig to a bi-arm Franka FR3 and Apptronik's Apollo humanoid.

Beijing embodied AI start-up Galbot completed a RMB 1.1 billion financing in June 2025 led by battery maker CATL and Puquan Capital, with China Development Bank's CDB Science and Technology Innovation, the Beijing Robotics Industry Fund and GGV Capital also investing, according to the Zhongguancun Science City administration. The deal took the company's funding over two years past RMB 2.4 billion and gave its synthetic data approach to robot learning a strategic industrial backer.

Google DeepMind on 12 March 2025 introduced Gemini Robotics, a vision-language-action model built on Gemini 2.0 that issues motor commands, and Gemini Robotics-ER, a spatial reasoning model for robot makers. The lab said the action model more than doubles performance on a generalization benchmark against other leading models, named Apptronik as its humanoid partner and opened Gemini Robotics-ER to four trusted testers including Boston Dynamics and Agility Robotics.

NEURA Robotics of Metzingen, Germany, said on 15 January 2025 it had raised EUR 120 million in a Series B round led by Lingotto Investment Management. The company said the money would fund research and development, new product launches and its Neuraverse software platform, and reported more than 300 staff, tenfold revenue growth in a year and a EUR 1 billion order book.

NVIDIA on 6 January 2025 launched Cosmos, a platform of world foundation models, video tokenizers and data-curation tools that generate physics-aware video for training robots and autonomous vehicles, releasing the first models under a licence that permits commercial use. It named 14 robotics and self-driving developers plus Uber as early adopters, and the same day unveiled an Isaac GR00T Blueprint that turns a few human demonstrations into large synthetic motion datasets for humanoids.