Dyna Robotics

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.

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.

Generalist AI said on August 19, 2026 that GEN-1.5 can learn a new manipulation task from one demonstration of 3 to 12 seconds placed in its context, averaging 59% success over 10 tasks with no fine-tuning and 83% after 10 gradient steps on about 5 minutes of data. The company says the ability emerged from more than eight months of pretraining, but calls the tasks simple and the skills brittle, and has named no customers.

Barcelona-based THEKER has raised US$85 million in a Series A led by CRV, with Samsung, LVMH, Henkel, Mercadona and others joining, according to investor Cathay Innovation. The four-year-old company builds AI-native generalist robots that it says already run in live European production lines, but it has not named customers or disclosed a valuation.

NVIDIA used its GTC keynote on March 16, 2026 to preview Isaac GR00T N2, a robot foundation model built on its DreamZero world action model research that it says succeeds at new tasks in new environments more than twice as often as leading VLA models. It also put the 3-billion-parameter GR00T N1.7 into commercial early access and announced Cosmos 3 and Isaac Lab 3.0, with N2 due by the end of 2026.

Sunday, the Silicon Valley developer of the Memo household robot, said on 12 March 2026 that it had raised an oversubscribed $165 million Series B at a $1.15 billion valuation, led by Coatue, with Coatue's Thomas Laffont joining the board. The company trains Memo on data from people wearing its Skill Capture Glove instead of teleoperating robots, plans an invite-only home beta from the autumn and expects to ship at scale in 2027-2028.

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.

Palo Alto start-up Rhoda AI emerged on 10 March 2026 with a $450 million Series A from Khosla Ventures, Mayfield, Temasek and six other institutions, plus John Doerr. Its Direct Video Action model predicts video of a task and converts it into robot actions, and the company says new tasks can need as little as ten hours of teleoperation data. No lead investor, valuation or customer was 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.

Bedrock Robotics, founded in 2024 by former Waymo engineers, raised a $270 million Series B co-led by CapitalG and Valor Atreides AI Fund, taking total funding past $350 million. The San Francisco company retrofits existing excavators with autonomy and is targeting its first operator-less deployments this year, a month after Caterpillar unveiled its own construction autonomy line.

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.

Microsoft Research on January 21, 2026 introduced Rho-alpha, its first robotics model, derived from the Phi vision-language family and trained partly on synthetic data from NVIDIA Isaac Sim on Azure. The model adds tactile sensing and learning from operator corrections to the usual vision-language-action recipe, and is offered through a research early access program ahead of a later Microsoft Foundry release.

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.

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.

Dyna Robotics closed a US$120 million Series A on 15 September 2025, led by Robostrategy, CRV and First Round Capital with NVIDIA, Amazon, Salesforce, Samsung and LG venture arms joining, six months after a US$23.5 million seed. The Redwood City company did not disclose a valuation; it says its DYNA-1 model already runs paying deployments in hotels, restaurants, laundromats and gyms for up to 16 hours a day.

Genesis AI, a physical AI lab based in Paris and Palo Alto, came out of stealth on July 1, 2025 with $105 million co-led by Eclipse and Khosla Ventures, with Bpifrance, HSG, Eric Schmidt and Xavier Niel also investing. The company, which later called the round seed funding, plans a universal robotics foundation model trained on a data engine that mixes in-house physics simulation, generative modelling and real robot data, and did not disclose a valuation.

Physical Intelligence on 22 April 2025 published π0.5, a vision-language-action model that drove mobile manipulators through 10- to 15-minute cleaning jobs in three homes absent from its training set. The San Francisco start-up says co-training on data from other robots, web tasks and spoken coaching, rather than more home-robot data alone, is what lets the model generalise, and its own ablations show which ingredients matter most.