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

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6 days ago
Business—Single source

Helm.ai says it signed $70M in contracts in 12 months as its driving models move into robots and mining

Helm.ai said in a press release on Oct 8 that it signed $70 million in commercial contracts over the past 12 months with automotive OEMs, Tier 1 suppliers, industrial automation and robotics companies, and that it is on a path to operating breakeven. The Redwood City company, founded in 2016 and led by CEO Vladislav Voroninski, sells perception, full-stack driving for L2+ to L4 programs, automated data labeling and generative simulation, and said the same foundation-model architecture now runs on industrial machines such as open-pit mining equipment and on robot platforms. It named no customers. The figure is booked contracts, not funding or revenue; MEKAWIRE has no verified Helm.ai rounds on file, so the company's capital history cannot yet be compared with the $150 million Series C SiMa.ai raised for physical AI chips last month.

1 sourceFoundation
6 days ago
Research—Single source

AWS publishes an open-source Physical AI Toolchain built around NVIDIA Isaac, GR00T and Cosmos

Amazon Web Services introduced the Physical AI Toolchain on AWS in a blog post on Oct 7, a public set of reference architectures, infrastructure-as-code templates and deployment automation for building industrial robots, autonomous mobility and humanoids; Amazon described it again in a company post on Oct 8. The pipeline covers synthetic data generation, training, simulation and validation, edge deployment and continuous improvement, pairing SageMaker, EC2 GPU instances, S3 and IoT Greengrass with NVIDIA Isaac Sim, Isaac Lab, Isaac GR00T, Cosmos and OSMO. The code sits in the aws-samples GitHub organisation under the Apache 2.0 license, and customers can use the whole stack or single pieces. It is the second open physical-AI stack tied to NVIDIA in two weeks that MEKAWIRE has covered, after NVIDIA's open agent safety platform on Sep 28.

1 sourceSynthetic Data Generation
6 days ago
ResearchCH

ETH Zurich turns an off-the-shelf robot hand into a robot that walks on its fingertips

Researchers at ETH Zurich's Soft Robotics Lab describe in an arXiv preprint (2609.17172) a commercial Wuji Technology robot hand fitted with an 80-gram backpack holding a battery, an IMU and a Raspberry Pi Zero, which crawls on its fingertips with no arm attached, IEEE Spectrum reported on Oct 8. The controller was trained with reinforcement learning in simulation, using virtual springs to hold a crawling posture; the hand walked on 14 surfaces at about 9 cm per second, turned both ways, righted itself in 21 of 25 trials and pushed a 41-gram cube to targets up to 40 cm away in 15 consecutive trials. Lead author Amirhossein Kazemipour is a Ph.D. candidate in the lab. The work is a preprint and has not been peer reviewed.

1 source
6 days ago
BusinessGBSingle source

Mecka raises $60M Series B led by Sequoia for human-demonstration robot data

Mecka said in a company post on Oct 7 that it closed a $60 million Series B led by Sequoia Capital, with NVIDIA, Microsoft's M12, Qualcomm Ventures and Samsung joining and Kindred, Framework Ventures and Neo returning. The startup builds multi-sensor capture hardware, runs fleets that record people doing everyday work, and turns the footage into training data and post-trained models for robot deployments; it said run-rate revenue passed $100 million in June and that it aims for $300 million by year end. The money goes to data infrastructure, its research lab and commercial robot deployments, the company said. In MEKAWIRE's database the round would be the sixth-largest of 12 robotics Series B rounds recorded in 2026, behind Sereact's $110 million.

1 sourceHumanoid
6 days ago
M&A—Single source

Schneider Electric agrees to buy PTC for $205 a share, a $23.7B bet on design-to-factory software

PTC and Schneider Electric said in a joint announcement on Oct 5 that Schneider will acquire PTC for $205 per share in cash, valuing its equity at about $22.6 billion and the enterprise at $23.7 billion, a 42.3% premium to PTC's last close. The deal needs PTC shareholder and regulatory approval and is expected to close by the third quarter of 2027; Schneider plans to fund it with a committed bridge from Morgan Stanley and Société Générale, about EUR5 billion to EUR6 billion of new equity and EUR16 billion to EUR17 billion of new debt. Interact Analysis argued in a commentary carried by The Robot Report that PTC's CAD, PLM and service software gives Schneider a digital thread from design to operations to rival Siemens, provided it can integrate the data. At $23.7 billion it is almost three times the roughly $8.2 billion AMD agreed to pay for World Labs, the largest physical-AI deal MEKAWIRE covered last month.

1 source
7 days ago
BusinessUSSingle source

Teradyne Robotics and Elite Robots end their cobot software fight with a confidential settlement

Teradyne Robotics, the Teradyne unit that owns Universal Robots, said in a news post on Oct 1 that its legal dispute with Chinese cobot maker Elite Robots has been resolved by mutual agreement on confidential terms. Chief legal officer Jette Withers said the settlement is not an admission by Elite Robots of liability, infringement or the validity of any intellectual property right, and that both sides wanted to avoid the cost of further proceedings. The post does not say whether Elite Robots will change its products or how the German case is closed. MEKAWIRE reported on Apr 28 that Universal Robots had won a preliminary injunction in Hamburg against Elite Robots Deutschland over its software, which this agreement now ends.

1 sourceTeradyneElite Robots
7 days ago
FundingUS

Mecka's $60 million Series B: Sequoia, NVIDIA and Samsung back a robot-data supplier claiming a $100 million revenue run rate

Mecka said in a company post dated Oct 7 that it raised a $60 million Series B led by Sequoia Capital, with NVIDIA, M12, Qualcomm Ventures and Samsung joining and Kindred, Framework Ventures and Neo returning. The company, which records human demonstrations with its own sensor rigs and sells the data and post-trained models, says it passed a $100 million revenue run rate in June and aims for $300 million by year end.

1 sourceMeckaNVIDIAMultiply LabsImitation LearningRobot Foundation Models
7 days ago
BusinessUSSingle source

Boston Dynamics hands the CEO job to former Amazon Alexa and AGI chief Rohit Prasad

Boston Dynamics said in a press release on Oct 6 that Rohit Prasad becomes chief executive effective Oct 7, filling the post Robert Playter left in February. Prasad spent 12 years at Amazon, where he ran Alexa and the company's artificial general intelligence work and led the Nova foundation model family, after nearly 14 years of machine-learning research at Raytheon BBN Technologies. Hyundai Motor Group vice chair Jaehoon Chang, who chairs the Boston Dynamics board, said Prasad's record of commercialising AI products fits the push to scale Spot, Stretch and the electric Atlas. The hire puts an AI executive in charge as Atlas moves toward factory work: MEKAWIRE reported on Sep 21 that Boston Dynamics opened an Atlas training center at Hyundai's Georgia plant while Hyundai targets 25,000 humanoids.

1 sourceBoston Dynamics
7 days ago
Business—Single source

TwelveLabs aims Pegasus 1.6 at first-person video to speed up robot training data

TwelveLabs said in a press release on Oct 6 that Pegasus 1.6 is its first video model trained to understand egocentric, first-person footage, a category earlier versions handled poorly. The model supports workflows including timestamped action segmentation and labeling, dense captioning and quality scoring, aimed at turning recordings of human work into structured datasets for robotics and other physical-AI developers; the company cited an estimate that one hour of raw video takes about 155 hours of manual labeling. Customers and pricing for the robotics use were not named. The launch targets the same human-demonstration data supply that Mecka is building with the $60 million Series B MEKAWIRE covered on Oct 7.

1 source
7 days ago
FundingUS

Multiply Labs raises $75 million led by Patrick Soon-Shiong to scale robots that make cell and gene therapies

Multiply Labs said in a press release on Oct 6 that it raised a $75 million Series B led by Patrick Soon-Shiong, with AstraZeneca, Lingotto, Teradyne and Strange Ventures joining as new investors. The San Francisco company, which automates GMP manufacturing of cell and gene therapies, said total funding now exceeds $100 million and the money goes to manufacturing capacity, product work and engineering, regulatory and commercial hiring.

1 sourceMultiply LabsTeradyneSereact
9 days ago
Business—Single source

FCC robot restrictions could accelerate shift to local AI

Companies deploying physical AI today need to decide which AI workloads belong on the robot, what can remain in the cloud, and whether the underlying technology stack can meet rising expectations for security, safety, and supply-chain transparency.

1 source
9 days ago
FundingUS

SafeWorld leaves stealth with $12.2 million from Shine Capital and a16z speedrun to stress-test robots around people in simulation

SafeWorld said in a press release on Oct 5 that it emerged from stealth with a $12.2 million seed round co-led by Shine Capital and a16z speedrun, joined by Box Group, the Carnegie Mellon University Endowment, Innovation Endeavors and SV Angel. Co-founded by Carnegie Mellon safe-AI professor Ding Zhao, it sells software that runs robots through thousands of simulated encounters with reactive human motion before and after deployment.

2 sourcesSafeWorldRobrosSim-to-Real TransferSynthetic Data Generation
11 days ago
Industry—Single source

Inside Omron’s next-generation LD mobile robots

In mobile robotics, software, safety, and fleet management are becoming just as important as the robot itself, according to an OMROM project manager.

1 source