Universal Robots

Inbolt, which sells 3D vision and AI software that lets industrial robots correct their motions in real time, said on 30 September 2026 it raised $12.5 million in a round led by Shift4Good. The money funds expansion in the US and Asia-Pacific and a move into data centres and electronics manufacturing, taking total funding to $34 million.

Direct Drive Tech, which makes direct-drive motor modules for household and wheel-legged robots, raised HK$1,080.0 million when it listed in Hong Kong on 29 September 2026. Robot-vacuum sensor supplier Camsense followed on 30 September with HK$682.0 million after retail investors oversubscribed its public tranche 3,546.91 times. Both companies depend on five customers for more than 80% of sales, their filings show.

Universal Robots unveiled its seventh-generation platform on September 14, 2026, with three new g-Series arms, a CB7 controller offering 40% more compute in a 30% smaller footprint, and native ROS 2 support. Two weeks earlier its parent Teradyne Robotics sued the German subsidiary of China's JAKA at the Unified Patent Court, its second European IP action against a Chinese cobot maker 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.

Standard Bots said on 9 June 2026 that it had raised a US$200 million Series C led by RoboStrategy, with existing investors including General Catalyst, at a valuation of US$1 billion. The Glen Cove, New York, robot maker is expanding its plant to 70,000 square feet and says it is on pace to supply 10% of new US industrial robot deployments by 2027.

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.

The Hamburg Regional Court on April 21, 2026 granted Teradyne Robotics a preliminary injunction barring Elite Robots Deutschland from distributing software that allegedly copies Universal Robots code. A week later Teradyne reported $91 million of first-quarter robotics revenue, about 7% of a record $1,282 million group total.

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.

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.

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.

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.

AutoStore said fourth-quarter 2025 revenue rose 9.0% to $179.7 million and order intake jumped 35.1% to $194.2 million, both company records. Full-year revenue still fell 10.4% to $538.6 million and net income dropped 40.1%, as the Norwegian cube storage maker absorbed longer customer decision cycles, restructuring and a robot write-down.

Teradyne said its Universal Robots and MiR unit booked $89 million of revenue in the fourth quarter of 2025, up about 19% on the third quarter but below $98 million a year earlier. Full year robotics revenue fell to $308 million from $365 million, and restructuring in the unit affected about 400 employees, while group revenue rose 44% in the quarter on AI chip test demand.

RobCo, which builds AI-driven industrial robots and leases them to manufacturers, raised $100 million in a Series C round co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Lingotto Innovation on January 29, 2026. The Munich-founded company will use the money for its Physical AI roadmap, larger enterprise deployments and a bigger US presence, but disclosed no valuation or deployment figures.

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.

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.

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.

SoftBank Group will acquire ABB Robotics for an enterprise value of US$5.375 billion, the two companies said on 8 October 2025, replacing ABB's plan to list the unit separately in 2026. The division had 2024 revenue of US$2.279 billion and about 7,000 employees, and the deal needs approval in the EU, China and the US before an expected close in mid-to-late 2026.

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.

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%.

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.