Tesla

Minerva Humanoids said in a GlobeNewswire release on Oct 6 that it raised about $10 million in a pre-seed round led by General Catalyst, with Long Journey Ventures and Credo Ventures co-leading. The San Francisco start-up, founded at the end of 2025 by alumni of Tesla's Optimus programme and Boston Dynamics, is building Roger, a semi-autonomous humanoid an operator drives through a VR headset, and starts paid pilots this autumn.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.