Every funding round, launch and paper, as it's reported.
Zimmer Biomet and THINK Surgical said in a joint press release on Oct 13 that they have extended their Limited Exclusive Distribution and Supply Agreement for several years. Zimmer Biomet will keep selling an exclusive version of the wireless, handheld TMINI robot that works with its Persona Knee System. Neither company disclosed the length of the extension or any financial terms.
Symbotic said in a press release on Oct 13 that it has acquired cellumation, the Bremen company behind the celluveyor sorting platform, in an all-cash deal whose price it did not disclose. The celluveyor will be sold on its own to customers and other integrators and also built into Symbotic's systems, giving the Walmart-anchored automation group a European team and a second product line.
The next major challenge in robotic dexterity is making the entire system reliable enough to turn capabilities into useful work.
Alberto Rodriguez, director of robot behavior for Atlas at Boston Dynamics, told The Robot Report in an interview published Oct 9 that the company's new four-finger, 13-degree-of-freedom hand is built from 13 identical, fully encapsulated actuators with no cables crossing the joints, a choice meant to make it reliable and quick to iterate. He said earlier Atlas hands could already lift objects over 100 lb, so the team cut some strength to improve actuation transparency, and that hands are too central to humanoids to buy off the shelf. Test tasks include handheld power tools, cable handling and fishing for screws. MEKAWIRE covered the hand's unveiling on Oct 1, when Boston Dynamics said it dropped the pinky to make the hand cheaper to build and repair.
Thomas Brown, senior director for engineering and technology at contract manufacturer Jabil, told The Robot Report in a written interview published Oct 8 that humanoid developers are leaving hand assembly behind and entering a phase of tens of thousands of units, where cost structure, manufacturability and quality decide who scales. He said edge compute and memory prices remain a pain point, that humanoid wiring harnesses need automotive-grade robustness in a consumer-electronics form factor, and that Jabil works with major humanoid makers in the U.S. and abroad it cannot yet name. The St. Petersburg, Florida company has worked with Apptronik to bring its Apollo humanoid into factories; MEKAWIRE's records show Apptronik has raised $923 million in verified rounds, most recently a $520 million Series A extension in February.
Teradyne Robotics, the Teradyne unit that owns Universal Robots, said in a news post on Oct 1 that its legal dispute with Chinese cobot maker Elite Robots has been resolved by mutual agreement on confidential terms. Chief legal officer Jette Withers said the settlement is not an admission by Elite Robots of liability, infringement or the validity of any intellectual property right, and that both sides wanted to avoid the cost of further proceedings. The post does not say whether Elite Robots will change its products or how the German case is closed. MEKAWIRE reported on Apr 28 that Universal Robots had won a preliminary injunction in Hamburg against Elite Robots Deutschland over its software, which this agreement now ends.
Mecka said in a company post dated Oct 7 that it raised a $60 million Series B led by Sequoia Capital, with NVIDIA, M12, Qualcomm Ventures and Samsung joining and Kindred, Framework Ventures and Neo returning. The company, which records human demonstrations with its own sensor rigs and sells the data and post-trained models, says it passed a $100 million revenue run rate in June and aims for $300 million by year end.
Boston Dynamics said in a press release on Oct 6 that Rohit Prasad becomes chief executive effective Oct 7, filling the post Robert Playter left in February. Prasad spent 12 years at Amazon, where he ran Alexa and the company's artificial general intelligence work and led the Nova foundation model family, after nearly 14 years of machine-learning research at Raytheon BBN Technologies. Hyundai Motor Group vice chair Jaehoon Chang, who chairs the Boston Dynamics board, said Prasad's record of commercialising AI products fits the push to scale Spot, Stretch and the electric Atlas. The hire puts an AI executive in charge as Atlas moves toward factory work: MEKAWIRE reported on Sep 21 that Boston Dynamics opened an Atlas training center at Hyundai's Georgia plant while Hyundai targets 25,000 humanoids.
Multiply Labs said in a press release on Oct 6 that it raised a $75 million Series B led by Patrick Soon-Shiong, with AstraZeneca, Lingotto, Teradyne and Strange Ventures joining as new investors. The San Francisco company, which automates GMP manufacturing of cell and gene therapies, said total funding now exceeds $100 million and the money goes to manufacturing capacity, product work and engineering, regulatory and commercial hiring.
SafeWorld said in a press release on Oct 5 that it emerged from stealth with a $12.2 million seed round co-led by Shine Capital and a16z speedrun, joined by Box Group, the Carnegie Mellon University Endowment, Innovation Endeavors and SV Angel. Co-founded by Carnegie Mellon safe-AI professor Ding Zhao, it sells software that runs robots through thousands of simulated encounters with reactive human motion before and after deployment.
Boston Dynamics has redesigned the hand on its Atlas humanoid with a thumb and three fingers, 13 degrees of freedom and direct-drive actuators packed into the joints instead of tendons or cables, IEEE Spectrum reported from the company's blog. Each actuator pack can be swapped as a single unit and can be back-driven so the hand yields on contact, choices the company said favour reliability, manufacturability and cost over a human-like look. Alberto Rodriguez, who directs robot behavior at Boston Dynamics, said the aim is a hand that can use tools such as drills and welding torches, be simulated cleanly and be trained from human demonstrations, with a production target of 100,000 hands a year.
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.
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.
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.
Destro AI, a Brooklyn startup founded in 2026, said on 29 September 2026 it raised an $8 million seed round co-led by Base10 Partners and Bonfire Ventures. Its software assigns tasks across mixed robot fleets and is already live with Yusen Logistics (Americas).
General Intuition, which trains AI models on action-labelled gameplay clips from the Medal platform, said on 29 September 2026 that it had raised $220 million at a $6.2 billion valuation from investors including Khosla Ventures and General Catalyst. The figure is 2.7 times the $2.3 billion it disclosed with its Series A 96 days earlier, and the company has opened a waitlist for partners in robotics, simulation and games.