Doosan Robotics

MakinaRocks said in a press release on Oct 14 that it has been selected as a co-developer in a KRW 11.8 billion R&D project under the trade ministry's machinery programme, run by the Korea Evaluation Institute of Industrial Technology, to automate die design and production for hot-forged auto parts; KRW 2.4 billion of the budget goes to MakinaRocks. Forging maker Seil Forging leads the six-member consortium, which includes KITECH, Gyeongsang National University and the University of British Columbia, and runs from June 2026 to December 2029, with the system to be proven on Seil's production line. MakinaRocks will use its Runway AI operating system and DrawX drawing agent to read part drawings, extract design parameters and recommend die corrections, and to add multi-sensor fault diagnosis and vision-based quality prediction. The KOSDAQ-listed company reported first-half revenue of KRW 7.0 billion, up 168%, and the award follows Doosan Robotics' Oct 6 win of two KEIT-run physical-AI projects that MEKAWIRE covered.

Doosan Robotics said in a press release on Oct 6 that two projects it proposed to programmes run by the trade ministry (MOTIR) and the Korea Evaluation Institute of Industrial Technology have been selected, with total R&D budgets of about KRW 98.9 billion, of which about KRW 68.1 billion is government funding. The first, a 54-month project, puts a Korean AI system-on-chip with an NPU and real-time control into three cobots with 5, 10 and 20 kg payloads and a two-armed, omnidirectional industrial humanoid, targeting 72-hour non-stop trials at two or more sites, international safety certification and standard products from 2031; partners include AIDIN Robotics, Mobilint, KETI and KITECH. The second, a 45-month project with DEEPX as a co-researcher and Doosan Enerbility as the user, aims to automate nuclear-component welding with paths that match skilled welders at least 95% of the time within plus or minus 3 mm and to cut multi-layer welding time by more than half. The award followed Doosan Robotics' Oct 1 announcement naming Kwon Young-min, head of Doosan Bobcat subsidiary Doosan Mottrol since 2021, as chief executive; DEEPX's edge NPU was also on MEKAWIRE today.

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.

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.

A vision-language-action (VLA) model is one neural network that reads camera images and a plain-language instruction and outputs a robot's next motor commands, built by training a vision-language model on robot demonstrations. Google DeepMind, Physical Intelligence, NVIDIA, Figure AI, Skild AI and AgiBot lead, and the commercial race now turns on the cost of action data rather than model design.

The U.S. Army has named five winners of its xTechHumanoid competition after final demonstrations at Marine Corps Base Quantico, and only one of them, IHMC's Alex, is a complete humanoid robot. The other four supply power, touch sensing and command software, a mix that shows where the Army sees the bottlenecks in military humanoids.

Shipments of professional service robots rose 24% to almost 250,000 units in 2025, led by 117,500 transport and logistics robots, the International Federation of Robotics said on 30 September 2026. The IFR counted about 7,000 full-size humanoids sold worldwide and 174 humanoid makers, more than half of them in China, and said most humanoid uses still rely on teleoperation.

Prime Minister Han Seong-sook's strategic-industry committee designated new specialized zones on September 30: robotics in Daegu-Gyeongbuk, defense in Gyeongnam and batteries in Jeonnam.

South Korea's National Advanced Strategic Industry Committee adopted a plan on September 30 to deploy 200,000 AI robots by 2030, about 15,000 through public procurement and 185,000 through private adoption. The state will buy more than 1,700 units in 2027 for public safety, labour-short sites and education, and will widen purchases to public enterprises and local governments from 2028.

Korean cobot maker Neuromeka said on Sept 28, in a statement posted to its newsroom, that it will lead a project under the Ministry of Science and ICT's programme to develop and test human-AI collaborative Large Action Models, focused on welding the curved outer-hull blocks used in shipbuilding. The project runs from August 2026 to December 2030 with a total budget of KRW 17.5 billion, of which KRW 10.5 billion is government R&D funding, and includes Neuromeka's subsidiary Robolution and other industry, academic and research partners. Neuromeka plans to build combined datasets of block geometry, weld-seam positions, robot motion, welding conditions and quality readings, then use them to train a model that lets the robot find seams, plan its own path and correct trajectory and settings in real time as parts distort under heat. Chief executive Park Jong-hoon said the company aims to turn the results into a standard autonomous welding platform for shipyards and later offshore plants, steel structures and defence. The ministry's wider physical-AI programme commits KRW 1.4131 trillion in North Jeolla and South Gyeongsang from 2026 to 2030. Earlier in September, Pohang City said Neuromeka signed an investment MOU for a KRW 180 billion robot foundry and data centre in the city, as reported by EBN and reposted on Neuromeka's site; on Oct 6 Doosan Robotics said it had won two government projects worth about KRW 98.9 billion, one of them for intelligent cobot welding.

Watney has raised an $80 million Series A co-led by the Valor Atreides AI Fund and Hummingbird Ventures, taking its total funding past $100 million. The San Francisco company runs dexterous robots for hyperscale cloud operators and claims better than 99.99% reliability over hundreds of thousands of operating hours, but it disclosed no customer names, valuation or founders.

Korean force and tactile sensor maker AIDIN Robotics said it raised KRW 16 billion in strategic investment from HD Hyundai Robotics and Samsung Venture Investment, announced on Sept 11. HD Hyundai Robotics said in a press release that its share was KRW 13 billion and that the two companies will co-develop a five-fingered hand for shipbuilding and heavy industry, later to be fitted to the humanoid it is developing, plus force-controlled grinding and polishing robots for hull work.

Wonik Robotics will issue 349.99998 billion won of convertible preferred shares to Korea Development Bank's Advanced Strategic Industry Fund and an IMM Credit Solution vehicle, according to the Financial Services Commission and a Wonik Holdings filing. The money funds a robot-hand factory and AX center in Wanju, R&D and acquisitions, while Wonik Holdings grants investors a put option if the unit does not list within six years.

Teradyne reported second-quarter 2026 revenue of $1,329 million, up 104% from a year earlier, with its Robotics group, home to Universal Robots and MiR, contributing $100 million against $75 million in the second quarter of 2025. The company guided third-quarter revenue to $1.2 billion to $1.3 billion.

NVIDIA released Cosmos 3 Edge on July 20, the smallest member of its Cosmos 3 physical-AI model family, as open weights on Hugging Face. The 4-billion-parameter model runs on Jetson Thor and generates 32 robot actions per inference, and Doosan Robotics, Siemens, Agile Robots and Skild AI are evaluating it.

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.

Doosan Robotics said on April 29 that it will launch robot solutions on its Agentic Robot O/S in 2027 and an industrial humanoid in 2028, after hosting NVIDIA's Madison Huang to discuss linking that software with NVIDIA's simulation and training stack. In May it moved its European office to Frankfurt with local repair and training, and in June it unveiled the PalletizHD+ palletiser in Chicago.

Generalist AI released GEN-1 on April 2, 2026, an embodied foundation model pretrained on more than 500,000 hours of human physical interaction data captured with wearable devices and no robot data. The company reports 99% average success on tasks where its previous model reached 64%, about one hour of robot data per task and task times roughly three times faster than the prior state of the art; the results are the company's own and have not been independently replicated.

UBTech Robotics said in its 2025 annual results that revenue from full-size humanoid robots rose 2,203.7% to RMB820.6 million on 1,079 units, lifting group revenue 53.3% to RMB2.0 billion. The net loss narrowed to RMB789.8 million, while three share placings raised RMB5.78 billion to fund capacity for more than 6,000 robots a year.

Chinese collaborative robot maker Guangdong Huayan Robotics began trading in Hong Kong under code 1021 on 30 March 2026 after pricing its H shares at HK$17.00 and raising HK$1,579.34 million gross. The retail tranche was subscribed 5,059.38 times, while preliminary 2025 results showed revenue up 24.6% to RMB386.9 million and a net loss of about RMB29.9 million.

Doosan Robotics reported 2025 consolidated revenue of KRW 32.98 billion, down 29.6%, and an operating loss of KRW 59.47 billion, according to its DART filings. Sales of its core cobot arms roughly halved as North American demand fell about 50% under tariff uncertainty. On 26 March 2026 the board approved a USD 16.0 million capital injection into Doosan Robotics Americas, the former ONExia, to expand its factory on the back of a USD 14.9 million order backlog.

South Korea's Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy on 23 March 2026 invited proposals to build a dedicated safety and security certification centre for humanoid robots, with up to 9,681 million won of government funding over 2026 to 2030. The lead institution must secure cash or in-kind backing from a Daegu-area local government, and by the final year the centre is expected to set three group standards and win KOLAS accreditation.

Mind Robotics, the industrial AI robotics company founded and led by Rivian chief executive RJ Scaringe, said on March 11, 2026 that Accel and Andreessen Horowitz co-led a $500 million Series A, about four months after a $115 million seed. Rivian's filings show it deconsolidated the start-up in March, valued its remaining 37.6% at about $569 million using the Series A share price and recorded a $506 million gain, which by MEKAWIRE arithmetic implies an equity value near $1.51 billion.

The European Commission cleared SoftBank Group's purchase of ABB's robotics division, valued at USD 5.375 billion, under its simplified procedure on 11 March 2026. The price equals 17.2 times the division's 2024 EBITDA, while the floor valuation of Skild AI, whose round SoftBank led in January, is 2.6 times as high. Approvals in China and the United States remain, and both companies expect closing in mid-to-late 2026.

Hyundai Motor Group agreed on February 27, 2026 to invest about 9 trillion won from 2026 in a robotics, AI and hydrogen hub at Saemangeum in North Jeolla. The plan includes a 400 billion won robot cluster with a finished-robot factory sized for about 30,000 units a year, a contract-manufacturing foundry and a parts complex, due in 2029, next to a 5.8 trillion won AI data centre scaled in phases to 50,000 GPUs.

Shenzhen-based LimX Dynamics said on 2 February 2026 it had closed a US$200 million Series B with investors including Stone Venture, JD, Oriental Fortune Capital, CoStone Capital and SAIC-backed Shangqi Capital. The round came three weeks after the launch of LimX COSA, the agentic operating system that runs its full-size humanoid Oli, and the company added a second US$200 million pre-IPO round 162 days later.

Orders for industrial robots from Japan Robot Association members rose 27.8% in value to ¥925.8 billion in 2025, driven by a 36.2% rise in exports while domestic shipments fell 8.9%. The association expects all-industry orders to grow only 3.2% to ¥1.03 trillion in 2026, citing AI-linked demand from semiconductor and electronics makers.

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.

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.

Doosan Robotics agreed on 28 July 2025 to buy 89.59% of ONExia, an Exton, Pennsylvania robot integrator, for a final KRW 37.41 billion (USD 27.19 million) in cash, closing on 17 September 2025. ONExia has since absorbed Doosan's US sales arm, won Haleon packaging contracts and swung to a loss as the merged unit, while Doosan raised its stake to 94.12%.

South Korea's Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy launched the K-Humanoid Alliance in Seoul on 10 April 2025, with about 40 companies, universities and other organisations signing a cooperation agreement aimed at making Korea the world's leading humanoid nation by 2030. The ministry expects more than 1 trillion won of public and private investment by 2030 and set 2028 targets for a shared robot AI foundation model and for humanoids under 60kg with more than 50 degrees of freedom.

Samsung Electronics exercised a call option on 31 December 2024 to raise its Rainbow Robotics stake from 14.71% to 35.00%, buying 3,935,814 shares from the founding group for 267,462,550,960 won. It also created a Future Robotics Office reporting to the chief executive, led by Rainbow co-founder Oh Jun-ho, and closed the share purchase on 12 March 2025.

Doosan Robotics and Doosan Enerbility terminated on 10 December 2024 the split-merger that would have made Doosan Bobcat a subsidiary of the cobot maker, two days before shareholder votes. The companies said a sharp fall in their share prices had widened the gap with appraisal prices and made closing uncertain. The move ended a five-month restructuring that had already lost its Bobcat share swap in August.