Rainbow Robotics

Korean brokerages expect the robotics businesses of Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics to spend through 2027 building revenue and enter a steep profit phase from 2028, Bloter reported on Oct 15; the outlook comes from unnamed securities analysts, not company guidance. The report says Samsung set up an RX business unit under DX division head Roh Tae-moon in July, merging its scattered robotics teams, is deploying Rainbow Robotics AMRs and the two-armed RB-Y1 at its chip and overseas plants, and is building a robot data factory at its Gumi site. LG, per the report, plans to show a biped humanoid with NVIDIA Jetson Thor and its own Axium actuators in the first quarter of 2027 and is selling the actuators to other robot makers. MEKAWIRE's database lists Rainbow Robotics, Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics among the Korean robotics companies it tracks, and none of the three has disclosed robot-unit revenue.

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.

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.

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.

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.

South Korea's finance ministry said the 2027 budget proposal raises spending on sensors, actuators and humanoid batteries to 62 billion won from 11.6 billion won, after the three were named super-innovation leading projects in July. The money will fund technology development and field demonstrations, inside an industry ministry budget that rises 40.5% to 13.2573 trillion won.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

LG Electronics unveiled the CLOiD home robot and launched LG Actuator AXIUM, a brand of motor, drive and reducer joint modules aimed at the wider robotics market, at CES 2026. The robot came with detailed joint counts but no price or date, and the actuator with no specifications or customer, leaving LG behind Hyundai Mobis, which named Boston Dynamics' Atlas as its first actuator customer three days later.

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.

LG Electronics' board voted on 22 January 2025 to exercise a call option for another 30% of Silicon Valley delivery robot maker Bear Robotics, lifting its stake to 51% and making the start-up a subsidiary. LG will move its CLOi commercial robot unit under Bear and keep chief executive John Ha in charge, but has not said what it paid for the second tranche.

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.