Figure AI

In the 30 days to October 14, 2026, MEKAWIRE verified 14 private robotics rounds with disclosed amounts worth $1,071.3 million. Compute chips took 51.3%, robot models 20.5% and data, perception and safety software 8.7%, while humanoid makers received $10 million, or 0.9%, against 13.4% between January and mid-September. The four October rounds, Mecka, Multiply Labs, SafeWorld and Minerva Humanoids, paid for what stands between a capable robot and a paid deployment, while humanoid makers raised through an IPO, a SPAC and a Form D offering.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Anthropic economists scored about 19,000 O*NET job tasks and concluded that robots can technically perform 74% of physical tasks in the US, yet beat human labour on cost for only 0.3% of tasks. At the historical 3% annual decline in robot prices, the study estimates it would take 40 years for that share to reach 10%.

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.

Runway announced Praxis-1 on 30 September 2026, an open-weight world action model that converts its large-scale video pretraining into control for real robots. Early tests run with Noble Machines, Standard Bots and Ultra on bimanual, six-axis arm and mobile-base hardware, and public weights are promised in the coming months.

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.

General Intuition, which trains AI models on action-labelled gameplay clips from the Medal platform, said on 29 September 2026 that it had raised $220 million at a $6.2 billion valuation from investors including Khosla Ventures and General Catalyst. The figure is 2.7 times the $2.3 billion it disclosed with its Series A 96 days earlier, and the company has opened a waitlist for partners in robotics, simulation and games.

Global humanoid robot shipments reached nearly 25,000 units in the first half of 2026, up 432.1% year on year, with market value above $740 million, IDC said on September 29. China took about 77.9% of shipments, Chinese vendors supplied more than 95%, and IDC raised its 2030 forecast by about 50% to more than 750,000 units.

The Open Agent Safety Platform pairs open-source OpenShell software with a Sentry reference design. NVIDIA names three robotics companies using it to put safety limits on physical systems.

Qualcomm Technologies said on 23 September 2026 it had agreed to acquire PickNik Inc., the Boulder, Colorado company behind the MoveIt manipulation framework and its commercial MoveIt Pro platform. Terms were not disclosed. Qualcomm pledged to keep MoveIt 1 and MoveIt 2 open source and hardware agnostic while integrating PickNik's software more tightly with its Dragonwing robotics processors and Arduino boards.

Boston Dynamics opened the Robotics Metaplant Application Center at Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America, where Atlas is training on parts sequencing ahead of assembly work by 2030. The company said Hyundai plans to deploy 25,000 Atlas units and build a US facility able to make 30,000 robots a year, while Hyundai targets Atlas on its Georgia line from 2028.

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.

Agility Robotics unveiled Digit 5 on September 15, 2026, a humanoid it says can work beside people without safety fences. The company reported more than $300 million in multi-year Digit 5 orders as of May 2026, subject to contractual milestones, while general availability is set for the end of 2027 as its Churchill Capital Corp XI listing heads for a fourth-quarter close.

Houston-based Persona AI disclosed in an SEC Form D filed on September 14, 2026 that it has sold $65,363,626 of a planned $141,964,814 private offering to 46 investors, with the first sale on August 28. The company, which builds humanoid robots for shipyard welding and other skilled trades and has a deployment agreement with HD Hyundai, raised $27 million in a pre-seed round in May 2025.

Skild AI said on September 10 that it crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue ten months after its first commercial deployment, with more than 60 paying customers. The figure follows the August 18 launch of S1, a robot foundation model that the company says can pick up a new task from a single video demonstration without retraining.

XPeng said on September 8, 2026 that its IRON humanoid robot has started coming off a production line with more than 80% of core processes automated, ahead of mass production at the end of 2026 and deliveries in 2027. Two weeks earlier its robotics subsidiary Dogotix agreed to raise more than US$900 million at a post-money valuation above US$6.3 billion, including US$600 million from IDG Capital, Alibaba, Tencent and Gaorong Ventures.

Churchill Capital Corp XI filed a Form S-4 with the SEC on September 4, 2026 for its $2.5 billion merger with Agility Robotics, the maker of the Digit humanoid, which plans to trade on Nasdaq as AGLT. The filing discloses 2025 net sales of $1.78 million, a net loss of $138.1 million, a $100 million SAFE raised in July 2026 and a single customer commitment of $300 million for Digit v5.

Figure AI said on September 3, 2026 that it signed a strategic partnership with Nscale for up to 100,000 GPUs on Nvidia's Vera Rubin platform in Barstow, Texas, starting with a $3.5 billion compute commitment that the companies intend to scale beyond $6 billion. Nscale is also making a strategic investment in Figure, which says the capacity will train Helix on data from its crowdsourced Index program.

UBTech Robotics said revenue doubled to RMB1,269.1 million in the six months to June 30, 2026, driven by RMB590.3 million of full-size humanoid robot sales, up from RMB38.2 million a year earlier. The Hong Kong-listed company sold 921 Walker-class units and narrowed its loss for the period by 23.0% to RMB338.8 million, while one customer accounted for 24% of revenue.

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.

Two months after announcing a Series C of up to $1.4 billion, Germany's NEURA Robotics agreed to take over Bosch Rexroth's ACTIVE Shuttle transport-robot business on August 13, 2026 and bought all of Ulm-based ADLATUS Robotics on August 24. Together with a compute-module deal with Italy's SECO and a new training centre at RWTH Aachen, the moves show NEURA assembling a European physical-AI group by acquisition rather than only by in-house development.

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.

Unitree Robotics began trading in Shanghai on August 19, 2026 under code 688836 after selling 40.4 million new shares at RMB150.80, raising gross proceeds of RMB6,099.32 million. The issue price values the Hangzhou humanoid and quadruped maker at about RMB60.99 billion, or 219.23 times 2025 earnings, against an industry average of 38.56 times cited in its own listing document.

Tesla said in its second-quarter 2026 update, released on July 22, that it has decommissioned the Model S and Model X lines in Fremont and is installing first-generation Optimus production lines, with production expected soon and the first robots reserved for an internal Optimus Academy that collects training data. Capital expenditure rose to $5.79 billion from $2.49 billion in the first quarter and free cash flow turned negative at minus $1.09 billion, while the update gave no robot unit count, no capacity figure and no date for Optimus Gen 3.

Humanoid, a two-year-old London robotics company, closed a $152 million Series A led by Prime Movers Lab at a $1.35 billion post-money valuation, with industrial partners Schaeffler and Bosch joining the round. The company says the money will fund mass manufacturing of its wheeled humanoid, a Beta fleet from the fourth quarter of 2026 and its KinetIQ AI software.

China's industry ministry said on July 20, 2026 that more than 230 companies have released over 400 embodied AI robot models and that full-year output of complete machines is expected to exceed 100,000 units. Official data show industrial robot output rose 28% in the first half and 29.0% to 729,352 sets in the first eight months, as Beijing pushes humanoids into real factories through a joint programme with the state asset regulator.

Walden Robotics, spun out of Toyota Research Institute in January 2026, emerged from stealth on July 15, 2026 with a $300 million seed round at a $1.1 billion valuation co-led by Toyota and Deviation Capital. The Cambridge, Massachusetts company says its robots, driven by large behavior models, have been doing production work at a Toyota plant in North America since February, and on July 28 it added Samsung SDS as a manufacturing partner.

Figure AI said on June 30, 2026 that its Figure 03 humanoid is now working in Hall 52 of BMW Group Plant Spartanburg, sequencing parts with its Helix 02 model. The move follows Figure's April 29 disclosure that its BotQ factory went from one robot a day to one an hour in under 120 days and had delivered more than 350 units, and a May 26 agreement with JCPenney owner Catalyst Brands.

Agility Robotics, maker of the Digit humanoid, signed a definitive agreement on June 24, 2026 to merge with the blank-check company Churchill Capital Corp XI in a deal that values Agility at $2.5 billion before the money comes in. The transaction is expected to bring in more than $620 million of gross proceeds, including about $200 million from a PIPE led by Foxconn, and the combined company plans to trade on Nasdaq as AGLT.

Metzingen-based NEURA Robotics said on June 10, 2026 that it had secured a Series C of up to $1.4 billion, which it called the largest round ever raised by a full-stack robotics company. Backers include Tether, Qualcomm Technologies, Amazon, NVIDIA, Bosch, Schaeffler and the European Investment Bank, and the company put its order book and deployment pipeline above $1 billion. No valuation was disclosed.

OmniRetarget, a motion retargeting method from Amazon's Frontier AI & Robotics team and university collaborators, won both the Best Conference Paper Award and the Best Paper Award on Robot Manipulation and Locomotion at IEEE ICRA 2026 in Vienna. The method preserves contacts between body, objects and terrain, and the authors used it to generate more than 8 hours of trajectories that trained a Unitree G1 to perform parkour and box carrying in the real world without real-robot fine-tuning.

1X Technologies said on April 30, 2026 that its Hayward, California plant can build up to 10,000 NEO home humanoids a year and that it plans to scale toward more than 100,000 units annually by the end of 2027. The company makes its own motors, batteries, hands and structures in-house, said a year of production was booked within five days of opening preorders, and reaffirmed that first deliveries start in 2026.

Tesla said in its first-quarter 2026 shareholder update that its first-generation Optimus line, designed for 1 million humanoid robots a year, will replace the Model S and Model X lines at its Fremont factory. It is also preparing Gigafactory Texas for a second-generation line designed for long-term annual capacity of 10 million robots, while reporting revenue of $22.4 billion and $44.7 billion in cash and investments.

Sony AI's autonomous table tennis system Ace won three of five matches against elite players and lost both matches against two Japanese T.League professionals in April 2025 trials, according to a paper published in Nature on April 22, 2026. The robot combines event-based vision sensors from Sony Semiconductor Solutions, an eight-axis arm and reinforcement learning policies trained in simulation, and reaches a perception latency of 10.2 milliseconds.

An 82-author team from Toyota Research Institute, Cornell University and MIT reported in Science Robotics on April 15, 2026 that multitask large behavior models, built on diffusion policy, outperform single-task baselines in blind, randomized trials and need far less task-specific data. The preprint version describes about 1,700 hours of robot demonstrations across more than 500 tasks and 1,800 controlled real-world trials.

Skild AI said on April 15, 2026 that it had acquired the robotics division of Zebra Technologies, the business Zebra bought as Fetch Robotics in 2021. Zebra's quarterly SEC filing shows the sale closed on March 27 for $20 million in cash, escrow and a minority stake in Skild, against the $301 million Zebra recorded when it bought Fetch.

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.

Shanghai-based AgiBot said on 30 March 2026 that its 10,000th humanoid robot had come off the production line, 112 days after it announced its 5,000th. The company said the step from 5,000 to 10,000 units ran four times faster than earlier phases, but its own December breakdown shows that only about a third of its fleet is full-size.

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.

Fauna Robotics said on 24 March 2026 that it had joined Amazon and would operate as an Amazon company, keeping its Sprout humanoid on sale and its customers supported; no terms were disclosed. The deal gives the operator of more than 1 million warehouse robots a small, safety-first humanoid used by Disney, Boston Dynamics, NYU and UC San Diego, and a team drawn from Google DeepMind and CTRL-labs.

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.

The Shanghai Stock Exchange accepted Unitree Robotics' application to list on the STAR Market on March 20, 2026, with the Hangzhou company seeking RMB4.202 billion. Its prospectus shows reviewed 2025 revenue of RMB1,708.21 million, up 335.36%, and more than 5,500 humanoids shipped in 2025, with humanoids overtaking quadrupeds as its largest product line.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Austin humanoid maker Apptronik said on 11 February 2026 that it had closed a $520 million Series A-X extension priced at three times its Series A valuation, lifting total Series A funding above $935 million. John Deere, AT&T Ventures and Qatar Investment Authority joined returning backers B Capital, Google, Mercedes-Benz and PEAK6, and the company said the money will pay for Apollo production, training and data facilities and a new robot due in 2026.

Tesla said in its fourth-quarter 2025 update that it will unveil a mass-production Gen 3 Optimus in the first quarter of 2026 and start production on a first line before year end, with eventual capacity of 1 million robots a year. The plan came as 2025 net income fell 46% to $3.79 billion and Tesla agreed to invest about $2 billion in xAI.

Figure AI on Jan. 27, 2026 released Helix 02, a robot foundation model that runs a humanoid from camera pixels and fingertip touch down to joint commands at 1 kHz, replacing 109,504 lines of hand-written C++ with a 10-million-parameter learned controller. The company showed a Figure 03 unloading and reloading a dishwasher across a full kitchen in a four-minute, 61-action run it says had no resets and no teleoperation.

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.

Skild AI said on 14 January 2026 it had closed a $1.4 billion Series C led by SoftBank Group, valuing the company at more than $14 billion. NVIDIA's venture arm, Macquarie Capital and Bezos Expeditions joined, alongside new strategic backers LG, Schneider Electric, CommonSpirit and Salesforce Ventures. The start-up, founded in 2023, said its Skild Brain software went from no revenue to about $30 million within a few months of 2025.

Schaeffler and UK start-up Humanoid agreed on 13 January 2026 a five-year technology partnership that combines a supply contract for Schaeffler strain wave gear actuators with a purchase arrangement for humanoid robots. The German motion technology group said it would integrate several hundred humanoids into its global production network, and within a week Humanoid published pilot results from Siemens in Erlangen and Ford in Cologne.

1X Technologies said on January 12, 2026 that its NEO humanoid now runs on the 1X World Model, a 14-billion-parameter video generator that imagines a task before an inverse dynamics model turns the clip into joint commands. The system was mid-trained on 900 hours of first-person human video and fine-tuned on only 70 hours of NEO data. 1X's own trials show it working on simple household tasks and failing on fine ones such as pouring cereal, months before the first $20,000 NEOs were due in US homes.

Hyundai Mobis will supply actuators for the production version of Boston Dynamics' Atlas humanoid under a framework announced at CES on January 7, 2026, its first robotics customer. The Hyundai parts maker says actuators make up more than 60% of a humanoid's material cost, and plans to extend the tie-up to grippers, sensors, controllers and battery packs as Hyundai Motor Group targets 30,000 robots a year by 2028.

Mobileye agreed on 5 January 2026 to buy Israeli humanoid developer Mentee Robotics for $900 million in cash and stock and closed the deal on 3 February. Its filings show chief executive Amnon Shashua, Mentee's chairman and co-founder, receives about $341 million and chief technology officer Shai Shalev-Shwartz about $118 million, with 90% of the founders' stock released only after two and four years. Mentee targets autonomous customer pilots in 2026 and series production in 2028.

Boston Dynamics unveiled the production version of its electric Atlas humanoid at CES 2026 on January 5 and said manufacturing begins immediately in Boston, with all 2026 units already committed to Hyundai Motor Group and Google DeepMind. Hyundai set a goal of a production system able to build 30,000 robots a year by 2028, when Atlas is due to start parts sequencing at its Georgia Metaplant, moving into assembly by 2030. Hyundai Mobis will supply the actuators and Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics models are to supply the cognition.

NVIDIA used CES 2026 to launch the Jetson T4000, a Blackwell robot computer priced at $1,999 at 1,000-unit volume, and to release the GR00T N1.6 humanoid model and the Cosmos Reason 2 reasoning model as open models. Qualcomm answered a day earlier with its Dragonwing IQ10 robot processor and named Figure as a partner, setting up a fight for the compute socket inside humanoids.

1X Technologies said on 11 December 2025 that it would make up to 10,000 NEO humanoid robots available to companies owned by its investor EQT between 2026 and 2030. Pilots start in the United States in 2026 before scaling into Europe and Asia, with each portfolio company deciding whether and how to deploy. No prices or binding order volumes were disclosed.

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.

Hyundai Motor Group said on 16 November 2025 it will invest KRW125.2 trillion in South Korea from 2026 to 2030, its largest domestic commitment and KRW36.1 trillion more than in the previous five years. The plan puts KRW50.5 trillion into future businesses including AI, robotics and hydrogen, and lists a robot manufacturing and foundry facility, a Physical AI Application Center and a petabyte-scale AI data center that is still under review.

Tesla shareholders approved the 2025 CEO Performance Award at the November 6, 2025 annual meeting, with 1,892,235,822 shares voting for and 564,940,908 against, according to Tesla's 8-K. The award of up to 423,743,904 restricted shares is split into 12 tranches, each earned only when a market capitalization step from $2 trillion to $8.5 trillion is paired with one of 12 operating milestones, among them the cumulative delivery of 1 million Bots, a category the award agreement defines to include Optimus.

XPeng used its 2025 AI Day in Guangzhou on 5 November to show a redesigned IRON humanoid with 82 degrees of freedom, 22-degree-of-freedom hands, three in-house Turing AI chips and an all-solid-state battery. The carmaker said it aims for large-scale mass production by the end of 2026, starting with guide and retail roles, and named Baosteel as an industrial partner.

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.

At GTC Washington on October 28, 2025, NVIDIA expanded its Mega Omniverse Blueprint for factory-scale digital twins, with Siemens, FANUC and Foxconn among the first partners, and named Figure, Agility Robotics, Amazon Robotics and Skild AI as robot developers on its stack. It also unveiled IGX Thor, a 5,581 FP4 teraflop industrial and medical edge computer due in December 2025.

1X Technologies opened pre-orders on 27 October 2025 for NEO, a home humanoid priced at US$20,000 or US$499 a month, with US deliveries from 2026 and international expansion from 2027. The 66-pound robot runs 1X's Redwood AI onboard and relies on remote 1X experts for chores it has not yet learned.

Unitree Robotics unveiled the H2 humanoid on 20 October 2025, a 1,820 mm, roughly 70 kg machine with 31 degrees of freedom and leg joints rated at up to 360 Nm. Its product pages now list the base model at US$29,900 before tax and shipping, or RMB 199,000 including tax, the only published price among the full-size humanoids compared here.

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.

Figure AI said on 17 September 2025 that Brookfield, owner of more than 100,000 residential units, will help it build what it calls the world's largest humanoid pretraining dataset and will explore GPU data center and deployment work, and that Brookfield invested in its Series C. A day later Figure detailed Project Go-Big and said its Helix model had learned to navigate homes from first-person human video alone, without a single robot demonstration.

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.

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.

NVIDIA made its Jetson AGX Thor developer kit and Jetson T5000 production modules generally available on 25 August 2025, pricing the kit from $3,499 and claiming 7.5 times the AI compute of Jetson Orin with 128 GB of memory. Figure, Agility Robotics, Boston Dynamics and Amazon Robotics are among eight named early adopters, while 1X, OpenAI and Physical Intelligence are evaluating the computer.

Boston Dynamics and TRI showed Atlas completing a long workshop task under a single Large Behavior Model that commands walking and manipulation together. The 450M-parameter Diffusion Transformer runs at 30 Hz on camera, body-state and language inputs and learns new behaviours from VR teleoperation data without new code. No success rates or data volumes were disclosed.

FieldAI, an Irvine, California developer of robot autonomy software, said on August 20, 2025 that it had raised $405 million across two consecutive rounds from investors including Bezos Expeditions, BHP Ventures, Intel Capital, Khosla Ventures, NVIDIA's NVentures and Temasek. The company did not disclose a valuation and says its Field Foundation Models already run on quadrupeds, humanoids, wheeled robots and passenger-scale vehicles at industrial sites in Japan, Europe and the US.

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.

Unitree Robotics on 25 July 2025 launched the R1 humanoid, about 25 kg with 26 joints, from RMB 39,900 in China and US$5,900 abroad. The price is 40.3% of what the company charged for its G1 at launch and sets a public benchmark for low-cost humanoids.

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.

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.

Swedish measurement group Hexagon launched AEON, a humanoid robot for inspection, machine tending, manipulation and reality capture, at its Hexagon LIVE Global conference on 17 June 2025. Schaeffler and Pilatus will pilot the robot, which runs on NVIDIA Jetson Orin computers and swaps its own batteries, and Hexagon plans six months of production deployments before a wider commercial rollout.

NVIDIA introduced Isaac GR00T N1.5 and the Isaac GR00T-Dreams blueprint at Computex 2025 in Taipei, saying its researchers used Cosmos-generated video to build the model's training data in 36 hours instead of nearly three months of human data collection. The 3-billion-parameter model, opened on June 11, 2025 for non-commercial use, doubled language-following accuracy on Fourier's GR-1 humanoid in NVIDIA's own tests, while AeiROBOT, Foxlink, Foxconn and NEURA Robotics signed on to parts of the stack.

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.

Hugging Face said on 14 April 2025 that it had acquired Pollen Robotics, the French maker of the Reachy humanoid robots, its fifth acquisition. It will sell Pollen's Reachy 2 at US$70,000 as its first robot and tie the hardware to its open-source LeRobot software; the price and terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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.

Hyundai Motor Group said on March 24, 2025 it will invest US$21 billion in the United States from 2025 to 2028, lifting US vehicle capacity to 1.2 million units and building a 2.7 million-ton steel mill in Louisiana. US$6.3 billion goes to future industries and energy, including faster commercialisation at Boston Dynamics and reinforcement-learning robot work with the RAI Institute, though the group did not say how much is earmarked for robots.

NVIDIA on 18 March 2025 released Isaac GR00T N1, a dual-system vision-language-action model for humanoid robots, as downloadable weights on Hugging Face and GitHub, with 1X, Agility Robotics, Boston Dynamics, Mentee Robotics and NEURA Robotics named as early-access partners. It also announced Newton, an open-source physics engine under development with Google DeepMind and Disney Research, a synthetic manipulation-data blueprint and a 15-terabyte open physical AI dataset.

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.

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.

1X Technologies on Feb. 21, 2025 unveiled NEO Gamma, a redesigned version of its NEO home humanoid that the company says is 10 decibels quieter and ten times more reliable than before, wears a seamless knitted nylon suit and walks with a controller learned from human motion capture. The Palo Alto company said the design lets it start internal home testing, but disclosed no price, delivery date or physical specifications.

Figure AI on 20 February 2025 introduced Helix, a vision-language-action model that pairs a 7-billion-parameter vision-language model running at 7 to 9 Hz with an 80-million-parameter control policy running at 200 Hz across 35 degrees of freedom. Figure says the model was trained on about 500 hours of teleoperation data and runs entirely on two low-power embedded GPUs inside the robot.

Austin humanoid maker Apptronik said on 13 February 2025 it had raised a US$350 million Series A co-led by B Capital and Capital Factory, with Google participating. The round is more than 12 times the US$28 million the company had raised before and will fund Apollo production, new robot iterations and wider deployments in 2025.

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.