Every funding round, launch and paper, as it's reported.
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.
AMD will buy Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for about $8.2 billion in shares, the largest robotics or physical-AI acquisition value in MEKAWIRE's 2026 records and about 1.5 times the enterprise value SoftBank agreed for ABB's whole robot division. AMD frames it as model expertise for its chip roadmap, not a robot product.
Gecko Robotics is integrating NVIDIA's Open Agent Safety Platform into its infrastructure inspection robots, The Robot Report reported on Sept. 28. The platform pairs open-source OpenShell software, which enforces policy limits on NVIDIA Vera CPUs while agents run, with Sentry, a reference design on BlueField-4 data processing units that watches agents and quarantines those breaking policy within milliseconds. In Gecko's systems, AI agents start and stop data collection, plan robot paths and raise or lower payloads but do not handle data uploads. The robots inspect fuel tanks, nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers for Fortune 100 energy companies, the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy.
The Open Agent Safety Platform pairs open-source OpenShell software with a Sentry reference design. NVIDIA names three robotics companies using it to put safety limits on physical systems.
Fidelity and Amplify co-led the Series C, lifting SiMa.ai's total funding to $500M. The company plans a 1,000-TOPS chip for the first half of 2028 and names humanoid robots as a core market.
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months.
Agility Robotics is looking at other robot designs, including wheeled ones, to serve different operating environments and customer needs, CEO Jonathan Hurst confirmed. Hurst said the effort has only just started, with no launch timeline and no decision on whether it would mean a wheeled Digit or an entirely new machine. The company holds more than $300 million in multi-year Digit v5 orders from a single unnamed customer and is going public through a SPAC deal valued at $2.5 billion that is expected to raise more than $620 million in gross proceeds. Agility posted 2025 revenue of $1.8 million and an operating loss of $140 million.
The global stock of operational industrial robots reached 5 million units in 2025, up 9% on the year, according to statistics the International Federation of Robotics released on Sept. 24. Annual installations rose 11% to more than 600,000 units, of which China accounted for 354,000, or 59%, with Chinese manufacturers supplying 195,000 of those robots. The United States ranked second with 38,500 installations, while Japan fell 19% to 36,219 units and dropped to third, ahead of South Korea at 30,000 and Germany at under 25,000. The IFR forecasts installations of 655,000 units in 2026 and 806,000 units in 2029.
Qualcomm Technologies said on 23 September 2026 it had agreed to acquire PickNik Inc., the Boulder, Colorado company behind the MoveIt manipulation framework and its commercial MoveIt Pro platform. Terms were not disclosed. Qualcomm pledged to keep MoveIt 1 and MoveIt 2 open source and hardware agnostic while integrating PickNik's software more tightly with its Dragonwing robotics processors and Arduino boards.
Boston Dynamics opened the Robotics Metaplant Application Center at Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America, where Atlas is training on parts sequencing ahead of assembly work by 2030. The company said Hyundai plans to deploy 25,000 Atlas units and build a US facility able to make 30,000 robots a year, while Hyundai targets Atlas on its Georgia line from 2028.
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months.
Watney has raised an $80 million Series A co-led by the Valor Atreides AI Fund and Hummingbird Ventures, taking its total funding past $100 million. The San Francisco company runs dexterous robots for hyperscale cloud operators and claims better than 99.99% reliability over hundreds of thousands of operating hours, but it disclosed no customer names, valuation or founders.
The robotics industry is still waiting for their breakthrough into day-to-day life. Nvidia's Les Karpas has an answer as to why at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026.
Agility Robotics unveiled Digit 5 on September 15, 2026, a humanoid it says can work beside people without safety fences. The company reported more than $300 million in multi-year Digit 5 orders as of May 2026, subject to contractual milestones, while general availability is set for the end of 2027 as its Churchill Capital Corp XI listing heads for a fourth-quarter close.
Houston-based Persona AI disclosed in an SEC Form D filed on September 14, 2026 that it has sold $65,363,626 of a planned $141,964,814 private offering to 46 investors, with the first sale on August 28. The company, which builds humanoid robots for shipyard welding and other skilled trades and has a deployment agreement with HD Hyundai, raised $27 million in a pre-seed round in May 2025.
Skild AI said on September 10 that it crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue ten months after its first commercial deployment, with more than 60 paying customers. The figure follows the August 18 launch of S1, a robot foundation model that the company says can pick up a new task from a single video demonstration without retraining.
Churchill Capital Corp XI filed a Form S-4 with the SEC on September 4, 2026 for its $2.5 billion merger with Agility Robotics, the maker of the Digit humanoid, which plans to trade on Nasdaq as AGLT. The filing discloses 2025 net sales of $1.78 million, a net loss of $138.1 million, a $100 million SAFE raised in July 2026 and a single customer commitment of $300 million for Digit v5.
The Pittsburgh-based ARM Institute said on Sept. 3, 2026 that the Department of War's manufacturing technology office awarded it nearly $90 million for ten projects under the Organic Industrial Base Modernization Challenge. Fifteen member organizations must deliver working robotics and AI solutions at 12 military manufacturing sites within two years, each paired with a workforce plan.