The analysis under each story: why it matters, how the rivals compare, what a valuation implies and what to watch next. Sourced the same way as the facts.
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.
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.
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.
Swiss legged-robot maker ANYbotics has released Shift, a four-module platform that plans robot inspection rounds, analyses the readings and pushes findings into plant systems such as SAP and IBM Maximo. The company says Shift already analyses more than 120,000 inspections a month across over 1,000 industrial assets.
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.
Anthropic economists scored about 19,000 O*NET job tasks and concluded that robots can technically perform 74% of physical tasks in the US, yet beat human labour on cost for only 0.3% of tasks. At the historical 3% annual decline in robot prices, the study estimates it would take 40 years for that share to reach 10%.
Runway announced Praxis-1 on 30 September 2026, an open-weight world action model that converts its large-scale video pretraining into control for real robots. Early tests run with Noble Machines, Standard Bots and Ultra on bimanual, six-axis arm and mobile-base hardware, and public weights are promised in the coming months.
Zhuhai-based Amicro, which designs robot-specific chips, sensors and navigation software for cleaning and service robots, published its post-hearing information pack on the Hong Kong exchange on 30 September 2026 and is seeking a Main Board listing under Chapter 18C. Revenue rose 42.3% to RMB406.7 million in 2025 on more than 3.5 million solution sets sold, while the net loss widened to RMB155.1 million.
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.
Feather Robotics, a US startup selling an open-hardware wheeled robot with two arms for US$29,990, raised US$7.6 million in a round led by Gradient, the lead investor said on 30 September 2026. Gradient said Feather has already passed US$1 million in revenue, with robots at work in manufacturing and food service.
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.
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