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

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Feb 21, 2025
ProductUS

Figure unveils Helix, its own vision-language-action model that drives a humanoid's entire upper body from two onboard GPUs

Figure AI on 20 February 2025 introduced Helix, a vision-language-action model that pairs a 7-billion-parameter vision-language model running at 7 to 9 Hz with an 80-million-parameter control policy running at 200 Hz across 35 degrees of freedom. Figure says the model was trained on about 500 hours of teleoperation data and runs entirely on two low-power embedded GPUs inside the robot.

Feb 14, 2025
FundingUS

Apptronik raises US$350 million Series A led by B Capital and Capital Factory, with Google joining, to scale its Apollo humanoid

Austin humanoid maker Apptronik said on 13 February 2025 it had raised a US$350 million Series A co-led by B Capital and Capital Factory, with Google participating. The round is more than 12 times the US$28 million the company had raised before and will fund Apollo production, new robot iterations and wider deployments in 2025.

Jan 16, 2025
M&AUS

Symbotic buys Walmart's robotics unit for $200 million and wins a 400-system store pickup order backed by $520 million in Walmart development fees

Symbotic agreed on January 15, 2025 to buy Walmart's Advanced Systems and Robotics business for $200 million in cash, plus two contingent payments of $175 million each tied to Walmart's Accelerated Pickup and Delivery (APD) program. Walmart committed to buy 400 APD systems for its stores, subject to performance metrics, and to pay Symbotic $520 million in development fees, a package Symbotic said could add more than $5 billion to its backlog. The deal closed on January 27, 2025.

Jan 7, 2025
ProductUS

NVIDIA opens its Cosmos world models to robot and car makers at CES 2025, with Figure, Agility, XPENG and Uber among the first users

NVIDIA on 6 January 2025 launched Cosmos, a platform of world foundation models, video tokenizers and data-curation tools that generate physics-aware video for training robots and autonomous vehicles, releasing the first models under a licence that permits commercial use. It named 14 robotics and self-driving developers plus Uber as early adopters, and the same day unveiled an Isaac GR00T Blueprint that turns a few human demonstrations into large synthetic motion datasets for humanoids.