Sanctuary AI

Sanctuary AI said in a research post on Oct 2 that TIGER (Task-Space Imitation Guidance for Efficient Reinforcement Learning) uses an imitation policy's predicted action chunk not as commands but as a short-horizon end-effector target, giving a reinforcement learner a dense reward at every control step instead of a single success bit at the end. The company reports 20% to 57% fewer steps to reach 50% success on every sparse-reward manipulation task it tested, zero safety resets in the first 1,000 real-robot steps against 35 to 38 for the baseline, and 90% insertion into a rotating socket when demonstrations only showed a stationary one. The results are the company's own and not peer reviewed. MEKAWIRE records Sanctuary's last disclosed priced round as a $58.5 million Series A in March 2022, followed by strategic investments with undisclosed amounts in 2024 and May 2026.

Tangent Robotics, a New York company spun out of Columbia Engineering, said on 30 September 2026 it raised a $4.5 million pre-seed round co-led by Fly Ventures and Toyota Ventures. It is building robot hands with light-based touch sensors and learning methods for fine assembly tasks such as connector mating and gear meshing.

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.

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.

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.

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.