Industry
Barbara Mazzolai Wants to Build a New Field of Robotics
Throughout her career, roboticist Barbara Mazzolai has turned to nature for inspiration. Now she wants to ensure the technology she builds gives back to the environment, too.
News
Wire
Every funding round, launch and paper, as it's reported.
Business
Boston Dynamics opens Atlas training center at Hyundai's Georgia plant as Hyundai targets 25,000 humanoids
Boston Dynamics opened the Robotics Metaplant Application Center at Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America, where Atlas is training on parts sequencing ahead of assembly work by 2030. The company said Hyundai plans to deploy 25,000 Atlas units and build a US facility able to make 30,000 robots a year, while Hyundai targets Atlas on its Georgia line from 2028.
Research
Video Friday: Two Birotors Make a Quadrotor
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months.
Funding
Watney raises $80 million Series A to put dexterous robots on hyperscale data-centre floors
Watney has raised an $80 million Series A co-led by the Valor Atreides AI Fund and Hummingbird Ventures, taking its total funding past $100 million. The San Francisco company runs dexterous robots for hyperscale cloud operators and claims better than 99.99% reliability over hundreds of thousands of operating hours, but it disclosed no customer names, valuation or founders.
Funding
D-Robotics raises US$400 million to sell its Sunrise chips as the compute layer for China's robot makers
D-Robotics, the robot-chip business Horizon Robotics stopped consolidating in March, said on 17 September 2026 it had closed a US$400 million Series C without naming a single investor or a valuation. The company says it has shipped more than 8 million Sunrise chips and that its newest S600 part won more than 20 robot customers within six months, including UBTECH, Fourier and Booster Robotics.
Business
Rethinking Robot Safety in the Age of AI
This article is brought to you by VicOne . Robot safety has traditionally asked: Can a machine remain safe when something goes wrong?
BusinessSingle source
Robots are waiting for a ChatGPT moment: Nvidiaโs Les Karpas explains why at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026
The robotics industry is still waiting for their breakthrough into day-to-day life. Nvidia's Les Karpas has an answer as to why at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026.
IndustrySingle source
Next wave of VCs judging Startup Battlefield 200 contenders at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 revealed
Meet the next five top-tier investors judging the Startup Battlefield 200 contenders live at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026. Register before September 25 to save up to $200 and don't miss a moment of the ultimate startup pitch competition.
Business
Agility unveils Digit 5 humanoid for barrier-free work, with $300 million in orders tied to contractual milestones
Agility Robotics unveiled Digit 5 on September 15, 2026, a humanoid it says can work beside people without safety fences. The company reported more than $300 million in multi-year Digit 5 orders as of May 2026, subject to contractual milestones, while general availability is set for the end of 2027 as its Churchill Capital Corp XI listing heads for a fourth-quarter close.
Funding
Shipyard humanoid maker Persona AI reports $65.4 million sold toward a $142 million private offering
Houston-based Persona AI disclosed in an SEC Form D filed on September 14, 2026 that it has sold $65,363,626 of a planned $141,964,814 private offering to 46 investors, with the first sale on August 28. The company, which builds humanoid robots for shipyard welding and other skilled trades and has a deployment agreement with HD Hyundai, raised $27 million in a pre-seed round in May 2025.
Product
Universal Robots launches Gen 7 cobot platform as Teradyne takes its fight with Chinese rivals to Europe's patent court
Universal Robots unveiled its seventh-generation platform on September 14, 2026, with three new g-Series arms, a CB7 controller offering 40% more compute in a 30% smaller footprint, and native ROS 2 support. Two weeks earlier its parent Teradyne Robotics sued the German subsidiary of China's JAKA at the Unified Patent Court, its second European IP action against a Chinese cobot maker this year.
Product
FANUC to ship AI Welding Agent that reads drawings and writes robot weld programs, built on Google's Gemini Enterprise
FANUC said on Sept. 11 it will begin shipping an AI Welding Agent at the end of December 2026. The system photographs a part drawing with the CRX tablet teach pendant and generates welding conditions and robot motion without manual teaching, using Google Cloud's Gemini Enterprise. Price was not disclosed.
Business
Skild AI says it passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue as its S1 model learns tasks from one video
Skild AI said on September 10 that it crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue ten months after its first commercial deployment, with more than 60 paying customers. The figure follows the August 18 launch of S1, a robot foundation model that the company says can pick up a new task from a single video demonstration without retraining.
Policy
Korea plans more than fivefold rise in humanoid core-parts budget to 62 billion won for 2027
South Korea's finance ministry said the 2027 budget proposal raises spending on sensors, actuators and humanoid batteries to 62 billion won from 11.6 billion won, after the three were named super-innovation leading projects in July. The money will fund technology development and field demonstrations, inside an industry ministry budget that rises 40.5% to 13.2573 trillion won.
Funding
Service robot maker Excelland lists in Hong Kong at the bottom of its range as institutions leave the book short
Excelland Robotics (Wuxi), ranked third in China's commercial service robot market, began trading in Hong Kong on 9 September 2026 after pricing 45 million H shares at HK$14.45, the bottom of its range, for gross proceeds of HK$650.2 million. Retail investors subscribed 140.02 times while the international tranche was covered only 0.99 times, and the prospectus shows a 2025 loss of RMB110.8 million on revenue of RMB317.7 million.
Business
XPeng's IRON humanoid rolls off its first production line after robotics unit raises US$900 million
XPeng said on September 8, 2026 that its IRON humanoid robot has started coming off a production line with more than 80% of core processes automated, ahead of mass production at the end of 2026 and deliveries in 2027. Two weeks earlier its robotics subsidiary Dogotix agreed to raise more than US$900 million at a post-money valuation above US$6.3 billion, including US$600 million from IDG Capital, Alibaba, Tencent and Gaorong Ventures.
Funding
Agility Robotics files S-4 for Nasdaq listing, showing $1.8 million in 2025 sales against a $138 million loss
Churchill Capital Corp XI filed a Form S-4 with the SEC on September 4, 2026 for its $2.5 billion merger with Agility Robotics, the maker of the Digit humanoid, which plans to trade on Nasdaq as AGLT. The filing discloses 2025 net sales of $1.78 million, a net loss of $138.1 million, a $100 million SAFE raised in July 2026 and a single customer commitment of $300 million for Digit v5.
Policy
ARM Institute wins nearly $90 million from the Department of War to put robots, AI and drones into 12 military manufacturing sites
The Pittsburgh-based ARM Institute said on Sept. 3, 2026 that the Department of War's manufacturing technology office awarded it nearly $90 million for ten projects under the Organic Industrial Base Modernization Challenge. Fifteen member organizations must deliver working robotics and AI solutions at 12 military manufacturing sites within two years, each paired with a workforce plan.
Partnership
Figure commits $3.5 billion to Nscale for up to 100,000 Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs to train its Helix robot model
Figure AI said on September 3, 2026 that it signed a strategic partnership with Nscale for up to 100,000 GPUs on Nvidia's Vera Rubin platform in Barstow, Texas, starting with a $3.5 billion compute commitment that the companies intend to scale beyond $6 billion. Nscale is also making a strategic investment in Figure, which says the capacity will train Helix on data from its crowdsourced Index program.
Funding
Mech-Mind raises HK$2.35 billion at the top of its range as Hong Kong retail demand for the 3D vision supplier hits 3,835 times
Mech-Mind Robotics Technologies priced its Hong Kong listing at HK$101.70 per H share, the top of its HK$95.30 to HK$101.70 range, raising gross proceeds of HK$2,353.4 million before any over-allotment, according to its allotment results announcement. The Hong Kong public tranche was subscribed 3,835.36 times and the international tranche 13.39 times, and dealings in stock code 09615 were set to begin at 9:00 a.m. on September 1, 2026.