BMW Group

Korea's regulatory sandbox approval on October 13 lets Robros put 20 walking humanoids beside workers at Nepes, Sungwoo Hitech, HD Hyundai Samho and Delivery Lab, lifting a fence rule written for fixed industrial robots. Set against MEKAWIRE's records, the number is small: Hyundai plans 25,000 Atlas units, UBTech sold 921 full-size humanoids in six months and Figure says it builds one robot an hour. But Korea is the only market in our data where the state has formally changed who may let a humanoid work next to people, and that permission, not robot count, is what most factory deployments are still waiting for.

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.

BMW Group said on 27 February 2026 that Plant Leipzig will pilot Hexagon Robotics' wheeled AEON humanoid in high-voltage battery assembly and component production, after a first test in December 2025 and with the pilot phase set for summer 2026. It also set up a Munich-based Center of Competence for Physical AI in Production and published the results of its 2025 Figure 02 pilot in Spartanburg, where the robot moved more than 90,000 parts in about 1,250 hours.

Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada has signed a Robots-as-a-Service agreement with Agility Robotics to deploy Digit humanoids in manufacturing, supply chain and logistics work at its Cambridge and Woodstock plants in Ontario, following a pilot. Neither company disclosed fleet size, contract value or term. The deal adds a Toyota vehicle plant to a Digit customer list that already includes GXO, Schaeffler, Amazon and Mercado Libre, as rivals tie up with BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Hyundai.

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.

Figure AI said its Figure 02 humanoid contributed to the production of more than 30,000 BMW X3 vehicles over an 11-month deployment at Spartanburg before being retired. The company is replacing it with Figure 03, launched on 9 October 2025 with faster cameras, palm cameras, 3-gram tactile fingertips and 2 kW wireless charging, built for a BotQ line rated at up to 12,000 robots a year.

Figure AI said on 16 September 2025 it had secured more than $1 billion in committed Series C capital at a $39 billion post-money valuation, with Parkway Venture Capital leading and NVIDIA, Brookfield, Intel Capital, Qualcomm Ventures and LG Technology Ventures among the named backers. The company will spend the money on BotQ production, GPU infrastructure for its Helix model and large-scale collection of human video data.

Figure AI said on 15 March 2025 it has set up BotQ, a vertically integrated factory whose first-generation line can build up to 12,000 humanoids a year. The company redesigned its next robot around molded, cast and stamped parts, built its own factory software, and says its supply chain can scale to 100,000 robots in four years.