MEKAWIRE
News

Wire

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

307 stories
AllBreakingAnalysisFundingM&AResearchProductPolicyGlobalUSCNKRSG
Jul 1, 2025
FundingFR

Genesis AI raises $105 million seed from Eclipse and Khosla to build a universal robot brain on its own simulation engine

Genesis AI, a physical AI lab based in Paris and Palo Alto, came out of stealth on July 1, 2025 with $105 million co-led by Eclipse and Khosla Ventures, with Bpifrance, HSG, Eric Schmidt and Xavier Niel also investing. The company, which later called the round seed funding, plans a universal robotics foundation model trained on a data engine that mixes in-house physics simulation, generative modelling and real robot data, and did not disclose a valuation.

6 sourcesGenesis AISkild AIPhysical IntelligenceRobot Foundation ModelsSynthetic Data Generation
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%.

7 sourcesAmazonGeek+ (Beijing Geekplus Technology)SymboticRobot Foundation ModelsFleet Orchestration Software
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.

3 sourcesGoogle DeepMindApptronikGoogleVLARobot Foundation Models
Jun 24, 2025
FundingCN

Galbot raises RMB 1.1 billion in a round led by CATL and Puquan Capital, lifting two-year funding above RMB 2.4 billion

Beijing embodied AI start-up Galbot completed a RMB 1.1 billion financing in June 2025 led by battery maker CATL and Puquan Capital, with China Development Bank's CDB Science and Technology Innovation, the Beijing Robotics Industry Fund and GGV Capital also investing, according to the Zhongguancun Science City administration. The deal took the company's funding over two years past RMB 2.4 billion and gave its synthetic data approach to robot learning a strategic industrial backer.

2 sourcesGalbotApptronikGenesis AIVLARobot Foundation Models
Jun 18, 2025
ProductSE

Hexagon unveils AEON, a measurement-led industrial humanoid, with Schaeffler and Pilatus lined up as first pilot sites

Swedish measurement group Hexagon launched AEON, a humanoid robot for inspection, machine tending, manipulation and reality capture, at its Hexagon LIVE Global conference on 17 June 2025. Schaeffler and Pilatus will pilot the robot, which runs on NVIDIA Jetson Orin computers and swaps its own batteries, and Hexagon plans six months of production deployments before a wider commercial rollout.

4 sourcesHexagonSchaefflerPilatus AircraftSim-to-Real TransferRL
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.

6 sourcesGecko RoboticsANYboticsFieldAIFleet Orchestration SoftwareEdge AI Compute
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.

4 sourcesSkydioZiplineSaronic TechnologiesFleet Orchestration Software
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.

4 sourcesNVIDIAAeiROBOTAgility RoboticsRobot Foundation ModelsVLA
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.

4 sourcesAmazonDexterityNimble RoboticsTactile SensingDexterous Manipulation
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.

3 sourcesPhysical IntelligenceGoogleFigure AIVLARobot Foundation Models
Apr 17, 2025
BusinessCH

ABB plans to spin off its US$2.3 billion robot business as a separate listed company in 2026

ABB said on 17 April 2025 it will propose a full spin-off of its Robotics division at its 2026 AGM, with trading in the new company planned for the second quarter of 2026. The division, which ABB calls the global number two in robotics, had about US$2.3 billion of 2024 revenue and a 12.1% operational EBITA margin, while its business area's first-quarter margin fell to 9.9% even as orders rose 14%.

6 sourcesABBABB RoboticsFANUCFleet Orchestration Software
Apr 14, 2025
M&AFR

Hugging Face buys Bordeaux humanoid maker Pollen Robotics and starts selling its $70,000 open-source Reachy 2

Hugging Face said on 14 April 2025 that it had acquired Pollen Robotics, the French maker of the Reachy humanoid robots, its fifth acquisition. It will sell Pollen's Reachy 2 at US$70,000 as its first robot and tie the hardware to its open-source LeRobot software; the price and terms of the deal were not disclosed.

4 sourcesHugging FacePollen RoboticsNVIDIATeleoperationImitation Learning
Apr 10, 2025
PolicyKR

Korea forms K-Humanoid Alliance of about 40 groups, targeting a shared robot brain and sub-60kg, 50-joint humanoids by 2028

South Korea's Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy launched the K-Humanoid Alliance in Seoul on 10 April 2025, with about 40 companies, universities and other organisations signing a cooperation agreement aimed at making Korea the world's leading humanoid nation by 2030. The ministry expects more than 1 trillion won of public and private investment by 2030 and set 2028 targets for a shared robot AI foundation model and for humanoids under 60kg with more than 50 degrees of freedom.

3 sourcesRainbow RoboticsAeiROBOTHoliday RoboticsRobot Foundation ModelsElectric Actuators
Mar 24, 2025
BusinessKR

Hyundai pledges US$21 billion for America and puts Boston Dynamics in a US$6.3 billion future-industries bucket

Hyundai Motor Group said on March 24, 2025 it will invest US$21 billion in the United States from 2025 to 2028, lifting US vehicle capacity to 1.2 million units and building a 2.7 million-ton steel mill in Louisiana. US$6.3 billion goes to future industries and energy, including faster commercialisation at Boston Dynamics and reinforcement-learning robot work with the RAI Institute, though the group did not say how much is earmarked for robots.

4 sourcesHyundai Motor GroupBoston DynamicsNVIDIARLFleet Orchestration Software
Mar 19, 2025
ProductUS

NVIDIA opens Isaac GR00T N1, a 2.2-billion-parameter humanoid robot model, at GTC 2025 and teams with Google DeepMind and Disney Research on the Newton physics engine

NVIDIA on 18 March 2025 released Isaac GR00T N1, a dual-system vision-language-action model for humanoid robots, as downloadable weights on Hugging Face and GitHub, with 1X, Agility Robotics, Boston Dynamics, Mentee Robotics and NEURA Robotics named as early-access partners. It also announced Newton, an open-source physics engine under development with Google DeepMind and Disney Research, a synthetic manipulation-data blueprint and a 15-terabyte open physical AI dataset.

5 sourcesNVIDIAGoogle DeepMind1X TechnologiesRobot Foundation ModelsVLA
Mar 15, 2025
IndustryUS

Figure opens BotQ humanoid factory with a first line built for 12,000 robots a year and plans robots on its own assembly line

Figure AI said on 15 March 2025 it has set up BotQ, a vertically integrated factory whose first-generation line can build up to 12,000 humanoids a year. The company redesigned its next robot around molded, cast and stamped parts, built its own factory software, and says its supply chain can scale to 100,000 robots in four years.

0 sourcesFigure AIBMW GroupApptronikElectric ActuatorsBattery Systems
Mar 12, 2025
ProductGB

Google DeepMind launches Gemini Robotics, turning Gemini 2.0 into a robot controller and signing Apptronik as its humanoid partner

Google DeepMind on 12 March 2025 introduced Gemini Robotics, a vision-language-action model built on Gemini 2.0 that issues motor commands, and Gemini Robotics-ER, a spatial reasoning model for robot makers. The lab said the action model more than doubles performance on a generalization benchmark against other leading models, named Apptronik as its humanoid partner and opened Gemini Robotics-ER to four trusted testers including Boston Dynamics and Agility Robotics.

2 sourcesGoogle DeepMindGoogleApptronikVLARobot Foundation Models
Mar 5, 2025
PolicyCN

China writes embodied AI into its Government Work Report for the first time, naming it a future industry

Premier Li Qiang's 2025 Government Work Report, delivered to the National People's Congress on March 5, lists embodied AI alongside biomanufacturing, quantum technology and 6G as future industries Beijing will cultivate, and pledges a funding growth mechanism for them. The same report calls for intelligent robots as a new generation of smart terminals, a year after the 2024 report made no mention of embodied AI.

4 sourcesUBTECH RoboticsUnitree RoboticsAgiBotRobot Foundation Models
Feb 21, 2025
ProductUS

1X unveils NEO Gamma, a quieter home humanoid in a knitted suit, and begins internal home testing

1X Technologies on Feb. 21, 2025 unveiled NEO Gamma, a redesigned version of its NEO home humanoid that the company says is 10 decibels quieter and ten times more reliable than before, wears a seamless knitted nylon suit and walks with a controller learned from human motion capture. The Palo Alto company said the design lets it start internal home testing, but disclosed no price, delivery date or physical specifications.

4 sources1X TechnologiesFigure AIApptronikRLTeleoperation
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.

2 sourcesFigure AIPhysical IntelligenceGoogle DeepMindVLARobot Foundation Models