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14 days ago
Partnership—Single source

SoftBank puts $225 million behind ASI's brand-agnostic autonomy for heavy construction fleets

SoftBank Group is providing $225 million to Autonomous Solutions Inc. (ASI) under a joint venture to commercialize autonomous heavy equipment for large infrastructure projects, The Robot Report reported on Sept. 30. ASI, founded in 2000 and based in Mendon, Utah, makes the Mobius fleet orchestration system, which works across equipment brands and runs haul trucks, dozers, loaders and compactors. The partners are targeting roadways, airports, railways, waste management, earthmoving and vertical construction. ASI CEO Mel Torrie said labor-intensive methods are struggling to keep up with the speed and complexity of today's large infrastructure builds.

1 source
14 days ago
FundingUS

Gradient leads US$7.6 million round for Feather, which sells a US$29,990 two-armed robot and lets buyers pick the brain

Feather Robotics, a US startup selling an open-hardware wheeled robot with two arms for US$29,990, raised US$7.6 million in a round led by Gradient, the lead investor said on 30 September 2026. Gradient said Feather has already passed US$1 million in revenue, with robots at work in manufacturing and food service.

3 sourcesFeather Robotics1X TechnologiesInbolt
14 days ago
Funding—

Andreessen Horowitz leads $7.5 million pre-seed for Aleph Surgical, which wants robots to operate without a surgeon at the controls

Aleph Surgical, which is building autonomous surgical robots on embodied foundation models, said on 30 September 2026 that it raised $7.5 million in a pre-seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz. The company says its first system is already learning surgical tasks from demonstrations, but it has published no success rates.

3 sourcesAleph SurgicalInboltDestro AIRobot Foundation ModelsImitation Learning
14 days ago
MarketDE

Service robot sales jump 24% on logistics machines while humanoids sold about 7,000 units in 2025, IFR says

Shipments of professional service robots rose 24% to almost 250,000 units in 2025, led by 117,500 transport and logistics robots, the International Federation of Robotics said on 30 September 2026. The IFR counted about 7,000 full-size humanoids sold worldwide and 174 humanoid makers, more than half of them in China, and said most humanoid uses still rely on teleoperation.

1 sourceUBTECH RoboticsUnitree RoboticsAgiBotFleet Orchestration SoftwareTeleoperation
14 days ago
PartnershipIT

Eni offers Italy's Generative Bionics its plants, polymers and supercomputers in a humanoid robot pact

Eni signed a memorandum of understanding with Genoa start-up Generative Bionics on 30 September 2026 to test the GENE.01 humanoid in inspection and remote assistance and to study producing, testing and recycling the robots' batteries at Eni sites. Chemicals arm Versalis and its subsidiary Finproject will work on the robot's feet, and Eni will assess opening its high-performance computing to Physical AI training. No financial terms were disclosed.

6 sourcesGenerative BionicsEniAMDTactile SensingTeleoperation
14 days ago
FundingFR

Paris-based Inbolt raises $12.5 million to take its AI robot vision from car plants to data centres

Inbolt, which sells 3D vision and AI software that lets industrial robots correct their motions in real time, said on 30 September 2026 it raised $12.5 million in a round led by Shift4Good. The money funds expansion in the US and Asia-Pacific and a move into data centres and electronics manufacturing, taking total funding to $34 million.

2 sourcesInboltFANUCYaskawa ElectricDepth Vision
14 days ago
PartnershipJP

Hitachi and FANUC pair edge AI chips with industrial robots, aiming for a global physical AI rollout from fiscal 2027

Hitachi and FANUC signed a strategic partnership on Sept. 30 to commercialize physical AI jointly, combining Hitachi's HMAX Industry software and in-house edge AI semiconductor with FANUC robots. Trials start in Hitachi's Ibaraki-area plants as “Customer Zero,” with global sales planned from fiscal 2027. No financial terms were disclosed.

4 sourcesFANUCHitachiYaskawa ElectricEdge AI ComputeDepth Vision
14 days ago
PolicyKR

Korea plans to put 200,000 AI robots into service by 2030, starting with more than 1,700 government purchases in 2027

South Korea's National Advanced Strategic Industry Committee adopted a plan on September 30 to deploy 200,000 AI robots by 2030, about 15,000 through public procurement and 185,000 through private adoption. The state will buy more than 1,700 units in 2027 for public safety, labour-short sites and education, and will widen purchases to public enterprises and local governments from 2028.

0 sourcesHyundai Motor GroupRainbow RoboticsDoosan RoboticsRobot Foundation ModelsFleet Orchestration Software
14 days ago
PolicySG

Singapore opens a humanoid robot centre for police and emergency work, aiming to put a robot beside officers by 2028

Singapore's Ministry of Home Affairs opened the Home Team Humanoid Robotics Centre (H2RC) on Sept. 30, 2026, with the goal of having a humanoid robot working alongside officers in a real operational setting by 2028. Run by the agency HTX and backed by a S$100 million commitment announced in 2025, the centre will work with ST Engineering on robot platforms and with Singtel's RE:AI on computing.

10 sourcesST EngineeringSingtelNVIDIARobot Foundation Models
14 days ago
FundingJP

Tokyo's Qibitech raises about ¥600 million in Series B to sell one control layer for robots from any maker

Qibitech, the Tokyo developer of HATS vendor-agnostic robot control software, said on 30 September 2026 it raised about ¥600 million in a Series B through a third-party share allotment to funds managed by JIC Venture Growth Investments and Sumitomo Corporation Venture Partners. The money goes to HATS development, sales and hiring.

2 sourcesQibitechInboltDestro AIFleet Orchestration Software
14 days ago
FundingCN

Direct Drive Tech and Camsense raise HK$1.76 billion in back-to-back Hong Kong listings, putting the parts inside cheap robots on the market

Direct Drive Tech, which makes direct-drive motor modules for household and wheel-legged robots, raised HK$1,080.0 million when it listed in Hong Kong on 29 September 2026. Robot-vacuum sensor supplier Camsense followed on 30 September with HK$682.0 million after retail investors oversubscribed its public tranche 3,546.91 times. Both companies depend on five customers for more than 80% of sales, their filings show.

6 sourcesDirect Drive TechCamsenseAmicro TechnologyElectric ActuatorsLiDAR
15 days ago
Business—Single source

Flourish opens orders for $3,555 home robot that learns chores from a phone demonstration

Flourish, a San Francisco and Paris startup founded in January 2026 by Antoine Marcel, has opened sales of Flourish One, a six-wheeled, two-armed home robot priced at $3,555, The Robot Report reported. Owners teach a chore by moving their smartphone through the task, using the phone's motion sensors, and a cloud model is fine-tuned for that home in under 30 minutes; the robot runs on a Raspberry Pi rather than an onboard GPU, which Marcel said would double the cost. Each arm lifts 1.5 kg, the arms run for 12 hours per charge, and the first 50 hand-built units are due to ship before Christmas 2026.

1 source
15 days ago
FundingUS

General Intuition raises $220 million at a $6.2 billion valuation, betting gameplay clips can teach robots to act

General Intuition, which trains AI models on action-labelled gameplay clips from the Medal platform, said on 29 September 2026 that it had raised $220 million at a $6.2 billion valuation from investors including Khosla Ventures and General Catalyst. The figure is 2.7 times the $2.3 billion it disclosed with its Series A 96 days earlier, and the company has opened a waitlist for partners in robotics, simulation and games.

4 sourcesGeneral IntuitionSkild AIPhysical IntelligenceWorld ModelsImitation Learning
15 days ago
PartnershipJP

Hitachi and Agile Robots agree to build a shared physical AI brain for factories, sold through HMAX Industry

Hitachi has reached a basic agreement with Munich's Agile Robots to fuse their AI models into a robot "brain" for factory work and pair it with Hitachi's edge AI chips, then sell the results globally through HMAX Industry. No financial terms or launch dates were disclosed, and the deal came a day before Hitachi's separate physical AI partnership with FANUC.

11 sourcesHitachiAgile RobotsFANUCRobot Foundation ModelsEdge AI Compute
15 days ago
MarketCN

Humanoid shipments jump 432% to nearly 25,000 in the first half as Chinese makers take over 95% of the market, IDC says

Global humanoid robot shipments reached nearly 25,000 units in the first half of 2026, up 432.1% year on year, with market value above $740 million, IDC said on September 29. China took about 77.9% of shipments, Chinese vendors supplied more than 95%, and IDC raised its 2030 forecast by about 50% to more than 750,000 units.

2 sourcesUBTECH RoboticsUnitree RoboticsAgility RoboticsRobot Foundation ModelsElectric Actuators
15 days ago
ProductSG

Sharpa brings a touch-covered robot, a lighter 21-joint hand and a haptic glove to IROS, building its own data loop for dexterity

Singapore-based Sharpa launched three products at IROS 2026 in Pittsburgh: the D01 robot with whole-body electronic skin, the W02 hand with 21 active degrees of freedom at under 750 grams, and the AE01 haptic glove for teleoperation and data capture. Together they give the company the hardware to collect, replay and learn from touch-rich manipulation data.

7 sourcesSharpaNVIDIAUnitree RoboticsDexterous ManipulationTactile Sensing
15 days ago
PartnershipUSSingle source

Gecko Robotics adopts NVIDIA's agent safety stack to fence in the AI that drives its inspection robots

Gecko Robotics is integrating NVIDIA's Open Agent Safety Platform into its infrastructure inspection robots, The Robot Report reported on Sept. 28. The platform pairs open-source OpenShell software, which enforces policy limits on NVIDIA Vera CPUs while agents run, with Sentry, a reference design on BlueField-4 data processing units that watches agents and quarantines those breaking policy within milliseconds. In Gecko's systems, AI agents start and stop data collection, plan robot paths and raise or lower payloads but do not handle data uploads. The robots inspect fuel tanks, nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers for Fortune 100 energy companies, the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy.

1 sourceNVIDIA