NVIDIA

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.

Mecka said in a company post dated Oct 7 that it raised a $60 million Series B led by Sequoia Capital, with NVIDIA, M12, Qualcomm Ventures and Samsung joining and Kindred, Framework Ventures and Neo returning. The company, which records human demonstrations with its own sensor rigs and sells the data and post-trained models, says it passed a $100 million revenue run rate in June and aims for $300 million by year end.

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.

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.

Singapore's Ministry of Home Affairs opened the Home Team Humanoid Robotics Centre (H2RC) on Sept. 30, 2026, with the goal of having a humanoid robot working alongside officers in a real operational setting by 2028. Run by the agency HTX and backed by a S$100 million commitment announced in 2025, the centre will work with ST Engineering on robot platforms and with Singtel's RE:AI on computing.

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.

Singapore-based Sharpa launched three products at IROS 2026 in Pittsburgh: the D01 robot with whole-body electronic skin, the W02 hand with 21 active degrees of freedom at under 750 grams, and the AE01 haptic glove for teleoperation and data capture. Together they give the company the hardware to collect, replay and learn from touch-rich manipulation data.

AMD will pay roughly $8.2 billion in shares for the world-model startup and expects to close by the end of 2026, pending regulators. It frames the deal around compute for robotics, simulation and physical AI.

Gecko Robotics is integrating NVIDIA's Open Agent Safety Platform into its infrastructure inspection robots, The Robot Report reported on Sept. 28. The platform pairs open-source OpenShell software, which enforces policy limits on NVIDIA Vera CPUs while agents run, with Sentry, a reference design on BlueField-4 data processing units that watches agents and quarantines those breaking policy within milliseconds. In Gecko's systems, AI agents start and stop data collection, plan robot paths and raise or lower payloads but do not handle data uploads. The robots inspect fuel tanks, nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers for Fortune 100 energy companies, the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy.

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.

Fidelity and Amplify co-led the Series C, lifting SiMa.ai's total funding to $500M. The company plans a 1,000-TOPS chip for the first half of 2028 and names humanoid robots as a core market.

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.

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.

D-Robotics, the robot-chip business Horizon Robotics stopped consolidating in March, said on 17 September 2026 it had closed a US$400 million Series C without naming a single investor or a valuation. The company says it has shipped more than 8 million Sunrise chips and that its newest S600 part won more than 20 robot customers within six months, including UBTECH, Fourier and Booster Robotics.

The robotics industry is still waiting for their breakthrough into day-to-day life. Nvidia's Les Karpas has an answer as to why at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A Tsinghua University team working with ByteDance Seed and China Agricultural University published a reinforcement learning controller in Science Robotics on August 19, 2026 that links a humanoid's camera directly to its legs. On Booster Robotics' T1, the authors report a 46% cut in ball-position error, up to 64% faster time-to-kick and about 90% kick success in frontfield positions, with no real-world fine-tuning.

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.

LG Group and NVIDIA signed a strategic collaboration MOU on Aug. 13 covering robots, AI factories and mobility, LG Corp. said. LG will unveil a bipedal humanoid on Jetson Thor and Isaac GR00T in the first quarter of 2027 using LG Electronics actuators, LG Innotek sensors and LG Energy Solution batteries, and will test its wheeled CLOiD on a Tennessee washing-machine line this year.

Google DeepMind on July 30 released Gemini Robotics 2, a family of three models covering whole-body humanoid control, high-level embodied reasoning and on-device inference. The reasoning model ER 2 is available to developers through the Gemini API and Google AI Studio, while the action models remain limited to early-access partners and trusted testers.

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.

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.

FlashSAC, an off-policy reinforcement learning method from a team spanning Holiday Robotics, KAIST, KRAFTON, TU Darmstadt, KTH and others, won the Outstanding Paper Award at Robotics: Science and Systems 2026 in Sydney. The authors report training a Unitree G1 walking policy in about 20 minutes on a single RTX 5090, against about three hours for the standard PPO method.

Fujitsu said on July 16 it had begun exploring physical AI businesses with three of Japan's largest robot makers, FANUC, Yaskawa Electric and Kawasaki Heavy Industries, using NVIDIA Cosmos, Omniverse, Isaac and the Newton physics engine. Fujitsu will build a common software platform and hardware interfaces, with manufacturing, retail and logistics, and healthcare as first targets. No timeline or financial terms were given.

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.

Hugging Face released version 0.6.0 of its open-source LeRobot robotics library on July 7, adding three world-model policies, five vision-language-action models including NVIDIA's GR00T N1.7, two reward models and six simulation benchmarks. NVIDIA said a day earlier that it is bringing GR00T, Isaac Teleop, Isaac Lab-Arena, Jetson Thor support and, soon, Cosmos 3 into LeRobot.

Seoul on June 29 named physical AI alongside semiconductors and AI data centres as a national mega project and set out a '3M' plan for AI robots. The plan targets ten industry-specific humanoids commercialised by 2028, 1,000 robot deployments a year, data factories for ten sectors and a robot foundry in Saemangeum tied to Hyundai Motor Group investment.

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.

NVIDIA announced at GTC Taipei on June 1, 2026 an Isaac GR00T reference humanoid for academic research, built on Unitree's H2 Plus body with two 22-degree-of-freedom Sharpa Wave tactile hands and a Jetson AGX Thor T5000 computer. Unitree will sell it from late 2026; Ai2, ETH Zurich, Stanford and UC San Diego are the first named research users. No price was given.

Korea's trade ministry said on May 29 that the AI robot division of its M.AX manufacturing alliance now has about 280 members and is running industrial humanoid pilots with HD Hyundai Heavy Industries, SK Energy and BGF. It also highlighted Korean robot foundation models, a 13 km/h humanoid lower body from KAIST and plans for a 500 billion won fund with a mandatory humanoid share.

Kawasaki Heavy Industries opened the Kawasaki Physical AI Center San Jose on May 21 to develop AI-driven robot systems with NVIDIA, Analog Devices, Microsoft and Fujitsu, with healthcare and elderly care as the first focus. President Yasuhiko Hashimoto said the goal is a hospital one-stop solution covering patients from arrival to post-operative care. The move comes as Kawasaki plans to lift robot sales 24% this year, led by car body and semiconductor equipment lines.

FANUC said on May 13 that all of its robots will be fully supported on Intrinsic's enterprise software platform and that it has joined Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics trusted tester programme, after shipping more than 1,000 robots for physical AI uses since December. Two days later it expanded its NVIDIA work, linking ROBOGUIDE with Isaac Sim, training a dual-arm robot with Isaac GR00T N and moving a collision-avoidance system to Jetson Thor.

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.

Dresden software firm Wandelbots, gripper and automation maker SCHUNK and consultancy EY said on April 19, 2026 they would combine SCHUNK's GROW automation cell, Wandelbots' NOVA platform and NVIDIA Omniverse into a standardised physical AI offer for mid-sized European manufacturers. The same day, W. Gessmann GmbH said it would show NOVA-based mobile robots at Hannover Messe.

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.

Google DeepMind released Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 on April 14, 2026, an embodied reasoning model built on Gemini 3.0 Flash and offered as a preview through the Gemini API and Google AI Studio. DeepMind said the model reads industrial instruments correctly 86% of the time, or 93% with an agentic zoom and code execution step, against 23% for ER 1.5. Boston Dynamics is using the capability for Spot facility inspections.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Los Angeles-based Machina Labs closed a $124 million Series C on 4 February 2026 with Woven Capital, Lockheed Martin Ventures, Balerion Space Ventures and the Strategic Development Fund. The money funds a 200,000-square-foot US factory for up to 50 RoboCraftsman cells making defense and aerospace structures. No lead investor or valuation was disclosed.

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.

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.

FANUC said robot division orders rose 20.9% to ¥98.8 billion in the October to December quarter, while robot sales grew 21.9% to ¥96.6 billion. The Japanese robot and CNC maker raised its full-year sales forecast to ¥840.7 billion but trimmed its operating profit outlook by ¥3.0 billion, and said it had taken orders for more than 1,000 CRX collaborative robots linked to physical AI since the iREX show in December.

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.

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.

FANUC released an open-source ROS 2 driver, made Python standard on its robots and showed NVIDIA-based physical AI demonstrations at the International Robot Exhibition in Tokyo. Yaskawa Electric and SoftBank Corp. signed a memorandum to build office robots that split AI between the mobile network edge and the robot. Organisers counted a record 673 exhibitors and 156,110 visitors over the show's four days.

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.

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.

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.

NVIDIA and South Korea said on 31 October 2025 that more than 260,000 NVIDIA GPUs will go into the government's sovereign cloud and the country's biggest industrial groups. Hyundai Motor Group and NVIDIA put about $3 billion behind a physical AI push that includes virtual testing of humanoid robots, while Samsung and SK plan AI factories with robotics and digital twin workloads.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.