Warehouse robots and AMRs in 2026 explained: 117,500 logistics robots sold, Amazon past 1 million, and venture money gone to humanoids

Robots that move goods are the biggest robot market outside the factory. The International Federation of Robotics (IFR) said in its World Robotics 2026 service robot release on Sept 30 that 117,500 transport and logistics robots were sold for professional use in 2025, 21% more than a year earlier and 47% of almost 250,000 professional service robots. These are mostly autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) and automated vehicles that carry totes, shelves, pallets and parcels, and the IFR said robots-as-a-service has become the dominant business model in the United States.

That answers the first question readers ask about warehouse automation. The second is where the money is going, and here our database tells a story the unit numbers hide. Sales and revenue are growing at double-digit rates, but venture investors have largely left the category, and the capital that used to fund warehouse startups now funds humanoid robots pitched at the same warehouses. MEKAWIRE uses only primary statistics, company filings and our own verified rows here, and no market-research estimates of market value.

Almost every other professional robot now moves goods

The IFR figures come from a sample of 238 of 1,001 known manufacturers and are not projected to the whole industry, so they understate the true total. They still show the shape of the market. Working back from 21% growth, about 97,100 logistics robots were sold in 2024, so the segment added roughly 20,400 units in a year by MEKAWIRE calculation. Logistics grew more slowly than inspection (+83%) and professional cleaning (+40%), but from a far larger base.

The IFR count also misses the biggest fleet. Amazon said on July 1, 2025 that it had deployed its one millionth robot across more than 300 facilities and introduced DeepFleet, a generative AI model it said improves the travel efficiency of its fleet by 10%. Amazon builds most of its robots in house. Its installed fleet is about 8.5 times the IFR's entire 2025 sales of logistics robots, which is a comparison of a stock with a one-year flow and shows how concentrated the market is in a single operator.

The listed leaders are growing on large customers

Outside Amazon, the listed companies report the cleanest numbers. Symbotic, whose largest customer is Walmart, reported revenue of $720.8 million for the quarter ended June 27, 2026, up 22%, and net income of $55 million against a loss a year earlier; it said 77 systems were in deployment. AutoStore, the Oslo-listed maker of cube storage grids, reported second-quarter revenue of $192.1 million, up 43.4%, with about 73% from North America, and said it has about 2,000 systems and 92,500 robots installed in 68 countries. That is about 46 robots per system. AutoStore also signed a global supply framework with Amazon in August, without purchase commitments.

The two business models explain why the margins differ so much. Symbotic builds complete case-handling systems and reported a 22.3% gross margin. AutoStore sells grids and robots through integration partners and reported 72.2%. KION Group's Intelligent Automation Solutions segment, which covers Dematic, grew revenue 23% to EUR 861 million in the second quarter while order intake fell 40%, a reminder that large projects arrive unevenly. Ocado's technology unit grew revenue 13% to 561.2 million pounds in the year to November 2025, but Kroger closed three of the US fulfilment centres built on its system.

Symbotic's quarterly revenue was 3.75 times AutoStore's, and at the midpoint of its fourth-quarter guidance its fiscal 2026 revenue would be about $2.8 billion against AutoStore's guide of about $700 million for calendar 2026. Both depend heavily on a few large retailers, which is the main risk to the growth story.

Venture money left the warehouse

MEKAWIRE tracks 29 warehouse automation, AMR and logistics-picking companies with verified funding histories. Their disclosed venture and growth rounds peaked at $1,051.0 million in 2021, 23.3% of all disclosed robotics funding in our database that year. In 2026 to date the same group has disclosed $39.0 million in two rounds, Vecna Robotics' $31 million in September and Destro AI's $8 million seed, or 0.33% of the $11,788.8 million we have recorded across robotics. Companies whose primary category is humanoids disclosed $1,042.4 million over the same period, almost exactly the warehouse group's 2021 peak.

The drop is not a sign that warehouses stopped buying robots. The IFR data and the listed companies' revenue say the opposite. It reflects where the category now sits. Warehouse automation has become a scale business whose winners are listed or owned by large groups (Amazon, KION, Rockwell Automation through OTTO, Teradyne through MiR) and fund growth from revenue, while the venture story in logistics has moved to humanoids such as Agility's Digit, which is being sold for tote handling. Some private companies may also be raising without announcements, which our count cannot see.