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Jan 29, 2026
FundingDE

Munich's RobCo raises $100 million Series C led by Lightspeed and Exor's Lingotto to take factory robots it rents out to the US

RobCo, which builds AI-driven industrial robots and leases them to manufacturers, raised $100 million in a Series C round co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Lingotto Innovation on January 29, 2026. The Munich-founded company will use the money for its Physical AI roadmap, larger enterprise deployments and a bigger US presence, but disclosed no valuation or deployment figures.

3 sourcesRobCoBMW GroupStandard BotsImitation Learning
Jan 29, 2026
BusinessCH

ABB Robotics ends its last full year under ABB with sales up 2.8% and fourth-quarter operating income halved

ABB's robotics division, now reported as a discontinued operation ahead of its USD 5.375 billion sale to SoftBank Group, booked 2025 revenue of USD 2,331 million and income from operations of USD 294 million, ABB disclosed with its fourth-quarter results on 29 January 2026. Fourth-quarter operating income fell to USD 37 million from USD 71 million as expenses rose 48%, while gross margin improved.

4 sourcesABBABB RoboticsSoftBank Group
Jan 29, 2026
BusinessUS

Tesla sets end-2026 start for its first Optimus line and a 1 million-robot capacity goal as car profits shrink

Tesla said in its fourth-quarter 2025 update that it will unveil a mass-production Gen 3 Optimus in the first quarter of 2026 and start production on a first line before year end, with eventual capacity of 1 million robots a year. The plan came as 2025 net income fell 46% to $3.79 billion and Tesla agreed to invest about $2 billion in xAI.

2 sourcesTeslaFigure AISkild AIDexterous ManipulationElectric Actuators
Jan 28, 2026
ResearchUS

Figure's Helix 02 hands a humanoid's whole body to one neural network, deleting 109,504 lines of control code

Figure AI on Jan. 27, 2026 released Helix 02, a robot foundation model that runs a humanoid from camera pixels and fingertip touch down to joint commands at 1 kHz, replacing 109,504 lines of hand-written C++ with a 10-million-parameter learned controller. The company showed a Figure 03 unloading and reloading a dishwasher across a full kitchen in a four-minute, 61-action run it says had no resets and no teleoperation.

6 sourcesFigure AIPhysical IntelligenceNVIDIARobot Foundation ModelsVLA
Jan 26, 2026
BusinessJP

FANUC robot orders rise 21% as China and Europe pick up, and its CRX cobot draws more than 1,000 physical AI orders after iREX

FANUC said robot division orders rose 20.9% to ¥98.8 billion in the October to December quarter, while robot sales grew 21.9% to ¥96.6 billion. The Japanese robot and CNC maker raised its full-year sales forecast to ¥840.7 billion but trimmed its operating profit outlook by ¥3.0 billion, and said it had taken orders for more than 1,000 CRX collaborative robots linked to physical AI since the iREX show in December.

5 sourcesFANUCYaskawa ElectricTeradyneROS 2
Jan 23, 2026
MarketJP

Japan's robot exports jump 36% in 2025 as home demand shrinks, JARA data show

Orders for industrial robots from Japan Robot Association members rose 27.8% in value to ¥925.8 billion in 2025, driven by a 36.2% rise in exports while domestic shipments fell 8.9%. The association expects all-industry orders to grow only 3.2% to ¥1.03 trillion in 2026, citing AI-linked demand from semiconductor and electronics makers.

2 sourcesKawasaki Heavy IndustriesFANUCYaskawa Electric
Jan 23, 2026
BusinessUS

Intuitive passes $10 billion in revenue as da Vinci 5 takes half of its robot shipments, but guides procedure growth lower

Intuitive reported on January 22, 2026 that 2025 revenue rose about 21% to $10.06 billion as surgeons performed 3.153 million da Vinci procedures, and da Vinci 5 made up 870 of the 1,721 systems it placed. The company guided 2026 da Vinci procedure growth to 13% to 15%, down from about 18%, and put the tariff cost to its gross margin at about 1.2% of revenue.

7 sourcesIntuitiveMedtronicMicroPort MedBotEdge AI Compute
Jan 22, 2026
ProductUS

Microsoft enters the robot model race with Rho-alpha, a Phi-based model that adds touch and learns from human corrections

Microsoft Research on January 21, 2026 introduced Rho-alpha, its first robotics model, derived from the Phi vision-language family and trained partly on synthetic data from NVIDIA Isaac Sim on Azure. The model adds tactile sensing and learning from operator corrections to the usual vision-language-action recipe, and is offered through a research early access program ahead of a later Microsoft Foundry release.

1 sourceMicrosoftNVIDIAUniversal RobotsVLARobot Foundation Models
Jan 21, 2026
FundingUS

Zipline raises more than $600 million at a $7.6 billion valuation as its drone deliveries pass 2 million

Zipline said on January 21, 2026 that it raised more than $600 million at a $7.6 billion valuation from investors including Fidelity, Baillie Gifford, Valor Equity Partners and Tiger Global. The drone delivery operator has passed two million commercial deliveries, says US volumes grew about 15% a week for seven months, and will launch in Houston and Phoenix before entering at least four new states in 2026.

5 sourcesZiplineShield AISaronic TechnologiesFleet Orchestration SoftwareEdge AI Compute
Jan 20, 2026
M&AUS

Serve Robotics buys hospital robot maker Diligent for $29 million in stock, taking its sidewalk autonomy indoors

Serve Robotics agreed on January 19, 2026 to acquire Diligent Robotics, maker of the Moxi hospital delivery robot, for Serve common stock valued at $29.0 million including a potential $5.3 million earnout, and closed the deal on January 27. SEC filings show that a $19.0 million cash payment for Diligent's debt cut the stock actually issued at closing to 32,835 shares.

6 sourcesServe RoboticsDiligent RoboticsBear RoboticsFleet Orchestration SoftwareEdge AI Compute
Jan 15, 2026
FundingUS

Ex-Tesla team's Mytra raises $120 million Series C led by Avenir Growth after signing a warehouse deal 60 times its largest so far

Mytra, the material-handling robotics company led by former Tesla Bot chief Chris Walti, raised a $120 million Series C led by Avenir Growth, with cold-storage operator Lineage and Ryder's venture arm among strategic backers. The company says it has signed a deployment 60 times the size of its biggest earlier installation and now serves a Fortune 100 food company and a Fortune 500 industrial distributor.

3 sourcesMytraExotecLocus RoboticsFleet Orchestration Software
Jan 14, 2026
FundingUS

Skild AI raises $1.4 billion in SoftBank-led Series C, lifting its valuation past $14 billion on a bet that one model can run any robot

Skild AI said on 14 January 2026 it had closed a $1.4 billion Series C led by SoftBank Group, valuing the company at more than $14 billion. NVIDIA's venture arm, Macquarie Capital and Bezos Expeditions joined, alongside new strategic backers LG, Schneider Electric, CommonSpirit and Salesforce Ventures. The start-up, founded in 2023, said its Skild Brain software went from no revenue to about $30 million within a few months of 2025.

1 sourceSkild AINVIDIAFigure AIRobot Foundation ModelsSynthetic Data Generation
Jan 13, 2026
PartnershipDE

Schaeffler signs on as both actuator supplier and customer of London's Humanoid, planning several hundred robots in its plants over five years

Schaeffler and UK start-up Humanoid agreed on 13 January 2026 a five-year technology partnership that combines a supply contract for Schaeffler strain wave gear actuators with a purchase arrangement for humanoid robots. The German motion technology group said it would integrate several hundred humanoids into its global production network, and within a week Humanoid published pilot results from Siemens in Erlangen and Ford in Cologne.

8 sourcesHumanoidSchaefflerNVIDIAHarmonic / Strain-Wave GearsElectric Actuators
Jan 12, 2026
ProductUS

1X puts a 14-billion-parameter video model in charge of its NEO home humanoid, trading robot data for internet video

1X Technologies said on January 12, 2026 that its NEO humanoid now runs on the 1X World Model, a 14-billion-parameter video generator that imagines a task before an inverse dynamics model turns the clip into joint commands. The system was mid-trained on 900 hours of first-person human video and fine-tuned on only 70 hours of NEO data. 1X's own trials show it working on simple household tasks and failing on fine ones such as pouring cereal, months before the first $20,000 NEOs were due in US homes.

2 sources1X TechnologiesFigure AIPhysical IntelligenceWorld ModelsRobot Foundation Models
Jan 8, 2026
MarketCN

Edge Medical lists in Hong Kong after retail demand of 1,092 times, betting its surgical robots on export markets

Shenzhen Edge Medical raised HK$1,198.7 million in a Hong Kong IPO priced at HK$43.24 a share and began trading on 8 January 2026, with the retail tranche 1,091.94 times subscribed. Its first annual results showed revenue up 184.8% to RMB455.7 million and 50 of 72 robots delivered in 2025 going overseas.

4 sourcesEdge MedicalMicroPort MedBotIntuitiveTeleoperation
Jan 8, 2026
PartnershipKR

Hyundai Mobis wins first robotics customer as Atlas actuator supplier to Boston Dynamics

Hyundai Mobis will supply actuators for the production version of Boston Dynamics' Atlas humanoid under a framework announced at CES on January 7, 2026, its first robotics customer. The Hyundai parts maker says actuators make up more than 60% of a humanoid's material cost, and plans to extend the tie-up to grippers, sensors, controllers and battery packs as Hyundai Motor Group targets 30,000 robots a year by 2028.

3 sourcesHyundai MobisBoston DynamicsHyundai Motor GroupElectric ActuatorsHarmonic / Strain-Wave Gears
Jan 7, 2026
ProductUS

Johnson & Johnson files Ottava surgical robot with the FDA, seeking a De Novo route into general surgery

Johnson & Johnson has submitted its Ottava soft-tissue surgical robot to the US Food and Drug Administration in a De Novo classification request covering several upper abdominal procedures, backed by a 32-patient gastric bypass study at six US hospitals. The filing comes weeks after Medtronic and CMR Surgical won US clearances, widening the field challenging Intuitive's 10,763-system da Vinci base.

8 sourcesJohnson & JohnsonIntuitiveMedtronicTeleoperation
Jan 6, 2026
M&AIL

Mobileye pays $900 million for Mentee Robotics, the humanoid start-up chaired by its own chief executive

Mobileye agreed on 5 January 2026 to buy Israeli humanoid developer Mentee Robotics for $900 million in cash and stock and closed the deal on 3 February. Its filings show chief executive Amnon Shashua, Mentee's chairman and co-founder, receives about $341 million and chief technology officer Shai Shalev-Shwartz about $118 million, with 90% of the founders' stock released only after two and four years. Mentee targets autonomous customer pilots in 2026 and series production in 2028.

6 sourcesMentee RoboticsMobileyeSkild AISim-to-Real TransferRL
Jan 6, 2026
ProductUS

Boston Dynamics starts building the production Atlas as Hyundai targets 30,000 robots a year and a Georgia line debut in 2028

Boston Dynamics unveiled the production version of its electric Atlas humanoid at CES 2026 on January 5 and said manufacturing begins immediately in Boston, with all 2026 units already committed to Hyundai Motor Group and Google DeepMind. Hyundai set a goal of a production system able to build 30,000 robots a year by 2028, when Atlas is due to start parts sequencing at its Georgia Metaplant, moving into assembly by 2030. Hyundai Mobis will supply the actuators and Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics models are to supply the cognition.

10 sourcesBoston DynamicsHyundai Motor GroupGoogle DeepMindRobot Foundation ModelsVLA
Jan 6, 2026
ProductUS

NVIDIA brings Blackwell robot brains down to $1,999 with Jetson T4000 and opens GR00T N1.6 and Cosmos Reason 2 at CES

NVIDIA used CES 2026 to launch the Jetson T4000, a Blackwell robot computer priced at $1,999 at 1,000-unit volume, and to release the GR00T N1.6 humanoid model and the Cosmos Reason 2 reasoning model as open models. Qualcomm answered a day earlier with its Dragonwing IQ10 robot processor and named Figure as a partner, setting up a fight for the compute socket inside humanoids.

7 sourcesNVIDIAHugging FaceBoston DynamicsVLARobot Foundation Models