MEKAWIRE
News

Wire

Every funding round, launch and paper, as it's reported.

127 stories
Nov 7, 2025
BusinessUS

Tesla shareholders approve Musk award that pays out only if Tesla delivers 1 million robots or hits other operating goals alongside a market value of up to $8.5 trillion

Tesla shareholders approved the 2025 CEO Performance Award at the November 6, 2025 annual meeting, with 1,892,235,822 shares voting for and 564,940,908 against, according to Tesla's 8-K. The award of up to 423,743,904 restricted shares is split into 12 tranches, each earned only when a market capitalization step from $2 trillion to $8.5 trillion is paired with one of 12 operating milestones, among them the cumulative delivery of 1 million Bots, a category the award agreement defines to include Optimus.

Nov 5, 2025
ResearchUS

Generalist AI's GEN-0 claims robotics' first scaling laws, trained on 270,000 hours of real-world manipulation data

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.

Oct 29, 2025
IndustryUS

NVIDIA pitches factory digital twins and Thor robot computers as the toolkit for US reindustrialization, enlisting Foxconn, Siemens, FANUC and four robot developers

At GTC Washington on October 28, 2025, NVIDIA expanded its Mega Omniverse Blueprint for factory-scale digital twins, with Siemens, FANUC and Foxconn among the first partners, and named Figure, Agility Robotics, Amazon Robotics and Skild AI as robot developers on its stack. It also unveiled IGX Thor, a 5,581 FP4 teraflop industrial and medical edge computer due in December 2025.

Oct 27, 2025
ProductUS

1X puts a price on the home humanoid, opening NEO pre-orders at US$20,000 or US$499 a month with US deliveries in 2026

1X Technologies opened pre-orders on 27 October 2025 for NEO, a home humanoid priced at US$20,000 or US$499 a month, with US deliveries from 2026 and international expansion from 2027. The 66-pound robot runs 1X's Redwood AI onboard and relies on remote 1X experts for chores it has not yet learned.

Oct 23, 2025
ProductUS

Amazon unveils Blue Jay, a multi-arm robot that merges three workstations, and Project Eluna, an agentic AI for warehouse managers

At its Delivering the Future event on October 22, 2025, Amazon showed Blue Jay, a multi-arm system it said could pick, stow and consolidate about 75% of the item types at a South Carolina test site, and Project Eluna, an agentic AI piloted at a Tennessee fulfillment center. Amazon said Blue Jay went from concept to production in just over a year, but an update dated February 25, 2026 states the company no longer uses it in operations.

Sep 30, 2025
ProductUS

DoorDash unveils Dot, an in-house road and sidewalk delivery robot, and an AI dispatcher to run it alongside Dashers

DoorDash on September 30, 2025 introduced Dot, an all-electric delivery robot built by DoorDash Labs that travels up to 20 mph on bike lanes, roads, sidewalks and driveways. Early access starts in Tempe and Mesa, Arizona, with an Autonomous Delivery Platform that assigns each order to a Dasher, Dot, drone or sidewalk robot.

Sep 17, 2025
PartnershipUS

Figure turns Brookfield's 100,000 homes into a recording studio for humanoid pretraining data

Figure AI said on 17 September 2025 that Brookfield, owner of more than 100,000 residential units, will help it build what it calls the world's largest humanoid pretraining dataset and will explore GPU data center and deployment work, and that Brookfield invested in its Series C. A day later Figure detailed Project Go-Big and said its Helix model had learned to navigate homes from first-person human video alone, without a single robot demonstration.

Sep 16, 2025
FundingUS

Figure raises more than $1 billion in Parkway-led Series C at a $39 billion valuation, 15 times its 2024 price

Figure AI said on 16 September 2025 it had secured more than $1 billion in committed Series C capital at a $39 billion post-money valuation, with Parkway Venture Capital leading and NVIDIA, Brookfield, Intel Capital, Qualcomm Ventures and LG Technology Ventures among the named backers. The company will spend the money on BotQ production, GPU infrastructure for its Helix model and large-scale collection of human video data.

Sep 16, 2025
FundingUS

Dyna Robotics raises US$120 million Series A from Robostrategy, CRV and First Round to scale its DYNA-1 robot foundation model into paid laundry and restaurant work

Dyna Robotics closed a US$120 million Series A on 15 September 2025, led by Robostrategy, CRV and First Round Capital with NVIDIA, Amazon, Salesforce, Samsung and LG venture arms joining, six months after a US$23.5 million seed. The Redwood City company did not disclose a valuation; it says its DYNA-1 model already runs paying deployments in hotels, restaurants, laundromats and gyms for up to 16 hours a day.

Aug 25, 2025
ProductUS

NVIDIA puts a Blackwell brain inside robots with the $3,499 Jetson Thor as Figure, Agility and Boston Dynamics sign on

NVIDIA made its Jetson AGX Thor developer kit and Jetson T5000 production modules generally available on 25 August 2025, pricing the kit from $3,499 and claiming 7.5 times the AI compute of Jetson Orin with 128 GB of memory. Figure, Agility Robotics, Boston Dynamics and Amazon Robotics are among eight named early adopters, while 1X, OpenAI and Physical Intelligence are evaluating the computer.

Aug 21, 2025
ResearchUS

Boston Dynamics and Toyota Research Institute put one 450-million-parameter behaviour model in charge of Atlas's hands and feet

Boston Dynamics and TRI showed Atlas completing a long workshop task under a single Large Behavior Model that commands walking and manipulation together. The 450M-parameter Diffusion Transformer runs at 30 Hz on camera, body-state and language inputs and learns new behaviours from VR teleoperation data without new code. No success rates or data volumes were disclosed.

Aug 20, 2025
FundingUS

FieldAI raises $405 million in two back-to-back rounds to sell one physics-first brain for any robot body

FieldAI, an Irvine, California developer of robot autonomy software, said on August 20, 2025 that it had raised $405 million across two consecutive rounds from investors including Bezos Expeditions, BHP Ventures, Intel Capital, Khosla Ventures, NVIDIA's NVentures and Temasek. The company did not disclose a valuation and says its Field Foundation Models already run on quadrupeds, humanoids, wheeled robots and passenger-scale vehicles at industrial sites in Japan, Europe and the US.

Jul 30, 2025
ProductUS

Skild AI unveils the Skild Brain, a single robot foundation model it says can drive quadrupeds, humanoids and arms alike

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.

Jul 1, 2025
BusinessUS

Amazon puts its millionth robot to work in Japan and launches DeepFleet, an AI model it says cuts fleet travel time by 10%

Amazon said on 1 July 2025 that it had delivered its one millionth robot, to a fulfillment centre in Japan, for a fleet that now works across more than 300 facilities worldwide. It also introduced DeepFleet, a generative AI foundation model built with AWS tools that coordinates robot traffic and, by Amazon's account, improves the fleet's travel time by 10%.

Jun 24, 2025
ProductUS

Google DeepMind moves Gemini Robotics onto the robot itself and opens it to fine-tuning with as few as 50 demonstrations

Google DeepMind on June 24, 2025 released Gemini Robotics On-Device, a vision-language-action model built to run locally on a robot with no network link. It is the first VLA the lab is letting outside developers fine-tune, through a new Gemini Robotics SDK offered to trusted testers, and DeepMind says it adapted the model from its ALOHA training rig to a bi-arm Franka FR3 and Apptronik's Apollo humanoid.

Jun 12, 2025
FundingUS

Gecko Robotics doubles its valuation to $1.25 billion in a Cox-led Series D as navies and power plants buy its inspection data

Gecko Robotics said on 12 June 2025 that its Series D valued the Pittsburgh company at $1.25 billion, double the price of its previous round, with Cox Enterprises leading as a new investor and USIT, XN, Founders Fund and Y Combinator returning. The company did not state the round size on its own release; it is selling its Cantilever software platform, fed by climbing, flying and swimming robots, to defence, energy and manufacturing customers.

Jun 6, 2025
PolicyUS

Trump orders a BVLOS drone rule within 30 days and a Buy American push, turning US drone policy from bans into industrial policy

President Donald Trump signed two executive orders on June 6, 2025 that direct the FAA to propose a rule for routine beyond visual line of sight drone flights within 30 days and finalise it within 240 days, order agencies to prioritise US-made drones, and tell the Pentagon to widen its Blue UAS list. A companion order creates a federal task force on airspace sovereignty and expands counter-drone powers ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup and the 2028 Olympics.

May 19, 2025
ProductUS

NVIDIA upgrades its humanoid model to GR00T N1.5 at Computex and says world-model video cut a three-month data job to 36 hours

NVIDIA introduced Isaac GR00T N1.5 and the Isaac GR00T-Dreams blueprint at Computex 2025 in Taipei, saying its researchers used Cosmos-generated video to build the model's training data in 36 hours instead of nearly three months of human data collection. The 3-billion-parameter model, opened on June 11, 2025 for non-commercial use, doubled language-following accuracy on Fourier's GR-1 humanoid in NVIDIA's own tests, while AeiROBOT, Foxlink, Foxconn and NEURA Robotics signed on to parts of the stack.

May 7, 2025
ProductUS

Amazon unveils Vulcan, its first robot with a sense of touch, to pick and stow about 75% of warehouse items

Amazon introduced Vulcan at its Delivering the Future event in Dortmund, Germany, on May 7, 2025, a fulfillment robot whose grippers carry force sensors so it can feel its way into crowded storage bins. The company said Vulcan can handle about 75% of the item types in its fulfillment centers and was already working in Spokane, Washington, and Hamburg, Germany, with wider rollout in Europe and the United States planned over the next couple of years.

Apr 23, 2025
ResearchUS

Physical Intelligence's π0.5 cleans kitchens and bedrooms in homes it never saw in training, with 97.6% of its data from other sources

Physical Intelligence on 22 April 2025 published π0.5, a vision-language-action model that drove mobile manipulators through 10- to 15-minute cleaning jobs in three homes absent from its training set. The San Francisco start-up says co-training on data from other robots, web tasks and spoken coaching, rather than more home-robot data alone, is what lets the model generalise, and its own ablations show which ingredients matter most.