Toyota Research Institute

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.