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

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AllBreakingAnalysisFundingM&AResearchProductPolicyGlobalUSCNKRSG
Jul 17, 2026
BusinessUS

Intuitive places 468 da Vinci robots as upgrades to da Vinci 5 accelerate, and raises its margin outlook for a second time

Intuitive placed 468 da Vinci systems in the second quarter of 2026, up from 395 a year earlier, including 246 da Vinci 5 units, and revenue rose 19% to $2.89 billion, the company said on 16 July. It lifted its 2026 non-GAAP gross margin outlook to 68% to 69% of revenue, the second increase this year, while holding da Vinci procedure growth guidance at 13.5% to 15.5% and pointing to the midpoint.

6 sourcesIntuitiveMedtronicJohnson & JohnsonTeleoperationHarmonic / Strain-Wave Gears
Jul 16, 2026
PartnershipJP

Fujitsu enlists FANUC, Yaskawa and Kawasaki to build a sovereign physical AI platform on NVIDIA technology

Fujitsu said on July 16 it had begun exploring physical AI businesses with three of Japan's largest robot makers, FANUC, Yaskawa Electric and Kawasaki Heavy Industries, using NVIDIA Cosmos, Omniverse, Isaac and the Newton physics engine. Fujitsu will build a common software platform and hardware interfaces, with manufacturing, retail and logistics, and healthcare as first targets. No timeline or financial terms were given.

4 sourcesFujitsuFANUCYaskawa ElectricWorld ModelsSim-to-Real Transfer
Jul 15, 2026
FundingUS

Toyota research spinout Walden Robotics launches with $300 million seed at a $1.1 billion valuation

Walden Robotics, spun out of Toyota Research Institute in January 2026, emerged from stealth on July 15, 2026 with a $300 million seed round at a $1.1 billion valuation co-led by Toyota and Deviation Capital. The Cambridge, Massachusetts company says its robots, driven by large behavior models, have been doing production work at a Toyota plant in North America since February, and on July 28 it added Samsung SDS as a manufacturing partner.

5 sourcesWalden RoboticsNVIDIASkild AIRobot Foundation ModelsImitation Learning
Jul 15, 2026
PartnershipJP

Yaskawa puts Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics ER 1.6 inside MOTOMAN NEXT to build an agentic industrial robot

Yaskawa Electric said on July 15 it had developed an agentic robot system with Google DeepMind that uses Gemini Robotics ER 1.6 as the decision layer for its MOTOMAN NEXT robot. The system plans and executes tasks from high-level instructions without detailed teaching and recovers from errors on its own. Applications and delivery timing will be announced later.

1 sourceYaskawa ElectricGoogleFANUCRobot Foundation ModelsVLA
Jul 9, 2026
FundingCN

Rokae lists in Hong Kong at HK$38 and raises about HK$1.01 billion including the over-allotment after retail investors cover its offer 156 times

Rokae (Shandong) Robotics Group began trading on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange Main Board under code 3752 on 9 July 2026 after selling 23,031,900 H shares at a fixed HK$38.00, for gross proceeds of HK$875.2 million. The Hong Kong public tranche was subscribed 156.58 times and the international tranche 11.96 times, and a full over-allotment exercise on 5 August took the total raised to about HK$1,006.5 million.

7 sourcesRokae RoboticsHuayan RoboticsEstun AutomationTactile SensingElectric Actuators
Jul 8, 2026
ProductUS

Hugging Face ships LeRobot 0.6 with world models and NVIDIA's GR00T N1.7, deepening an open robotics alliance

Hugging Face released version 0.6.0 of its open-source LeRobot robotics library on July 7, adding three world-model policies, five vision-language-action models including NVIDIA's GR00T N1.7, two reward models and six simulation benchmarks. NVIDIA said a day earlier that it is bringing GR00T, Isaac Teleop, Isaac Lab-Arena, Jetson Thor support and, soon, Cosmos 3 into LeRobot.

4 sourcesHugging FaceNVIDIAPhysical IntelligenceVLARobot Foundation Models
Jul 2, 2026
M&ACA

Kraken Robotics closes C$615 million Covelya deal and lifts its 2026 revenue outlook to as much as C$320 million

Kraken Robotics completed its acquisition of UK-based Covelya Group, the parent of Sonardyne, EIVA, Forcys, Voyis and Chelsea Technologies, on July 2, 2026 for about C$615 million in cash and shares. The Canadian sonar and subsea battery maker raised its 2026 revenue guidance to C$290 million to C$320 million from C$165 million to C$175 million.

7 sourcesKraken RoboticsCovelya GroupSaronic TechnologiesBattery SystemsLiDAR
Jul 1, 2026
BusinessUS

Figure puts its F.03 humanoid on BMW's Spartanburg floor after a 24-fold production ramp and a first Brookfield-linked retail deal

Figure AI said on June 30, 2026 that its Figure 03 humanoid is now working in Hall 52 of BMW Group Plant Spartanburg, sequencing parts with its Helix 02 model. The move follows Figure's April 29 disclosure that its BotQ factory went from one robot a day to one an hour in under 120 days and had delivered more than 350 units, and a May 26 agreement with JCPenney owner Catalyst Brands.

3 sourcesFigure AIApptronikAgility RoboticsVLARobot Foundation Models
Jun 29, 2026
PolicyKR

Korea makes physical AI one of three national mega projects, aiming for global top three in AI robots by 2030

Seoul on June 29 named physical AI alongside semiconductors and AI data centres as a national mega project and set out a '3M' plan for AI robots. The plan targets ten industry-specific humanoids commercialised by 2028, 1,000 robot deployments a year, data factories for ten sectors and a robot foundry in Saemangeum tied to Hyundai Motor Group investment.

4 sourcesHyundai Motor GroupNVIDIAGoogleRobot Foundation ModelsWorld Models
Jun 24, 2026
M&AUS

Agility Robotics agrees to go public through Churchill Capital XI at a $2.5 billion pre-money value, with Foxconn leading a $200 million PIPE

Agility Robotics, maker of the Digit humanoid, signed a definitive agreement on June 24, 2026 to merge with the blank-check company Churchill Capital Corp XI in a deal that values Agility at $2.5 billion before the money comes in. The transaction is expected to bring in more than $620 million of gross proceeds, including about $200 million from a PIPE led by Foxconn, and the combined company plans to trade on Nasdaq as AGLT.

2 sourcesAgility RoboticsFigure AIApptronikFleet Orchestration SoftwareElectric Actuators
Jun 16, 2026
BusinessCH

ANYbotics opens a Barcelona engineering hub as the Swiss inspection-robot maker builds out AI talent for its ANYmal fleet

Zurich-based ANYbotics said on June 16, 2026 it had opened an office at the DFactory Barcelona Industry 4.0 campus to expand engineering in computer vision, machine learning, software, mechatronics and DevOps. The site becomes its third hub after Zurich and San Francisco, following a Yokogawa software partnership in February and the hiring of a chief revenue officer in March.

5 sourcesANYboticsBoston DynamicsUnitree RoboticsDepth VisionFleet Orchestration Software
Jun 11, 2026
FundingES

Barcelona's THEKER raises US$85 million Series A led by CRV for factory generalist robots

Barcelona-based THEKER has raised US$85 million in a Series A led by CRV, with Samsung, LVMH, Henkel, Mercadona and others joining, according to investor Cathay Innovation. The four-year-old company builds AI-native generalist robots that it says already run in live European production lines, but it has not named customers or disclosed a valuation.

3 sourcesTHEKERHumanoidSereactDexterous Manipulation
Jun 10, 2026
FundingDE

NEURA Robotics raises up to $1.4 billion in Series C as Tether, Amazon, Qualcomm, Bosch and the EIB back Germany's physical AI bet

Metzingen-based NEURA Robotics said on June 10, 2026 that it had secured a Series C of up to $1.4 billion, which it called the largest round ever raised by a full-stack robotics company. Backers include Tether, Qualcomm Technologies, Amazon, NVIDIA, Bosch, Schaeffler and the European Investment Bank, and the company put its order book and deployment pipeline above $1 billion. No valuation was disclosed.

1 sourceNeura RoboticsNVIDIAKawasaki Heavy IndustriesRobot Foundation ModelsEdge AI Compute
Jun 9, 2026
FundingUS

Standard Bots raises US$200 million at a US$1 billion valuation to build AI-taught factory robots in New York

Standard Bots said on 9 June 2026 that it had raised a US$200 million Series C led by RoboStrategy, with existing investors including General Catalyst, at a valuation of US$1 billion. The Glen Cove, New York, robot maker is expanding its plant to 70,000 square feet and says it is on pace to supply 10% of new US industrial robot deployments by 2027.

3 sourcesStandard BotsAmazonSamsung ElectronicsElectric ActuatorsImitation Learning
Jun 8, 2026
PolicyCN

China orders every province and central state firm to put humanoids to work in real sites, targeting 100 use cases and 10,000-unit deployment capacity by end-2026

China's industry ministry and its state-asset regulator have launched a 2026 special action that requires each provincial region to open at least 20 real-world training scenes and each central state-owned enterprise at least 10. The notice, dated June 3 and published June 8, sets a year-end goal of more than 100 high-value application scenarios and the ability to deploy humanoid and embodied AI robots at a scale of tens of thousands of units.

1 sourceUBTECH RoboticsUnitree RoboticsTeleoperationEdge AI Compute
Jun 5, 2026
ResearchUS

Amazon FAR's OmniRetarget takes ICRA 2026's top paper prize for turning human motion into humanoid training data

OmniRetarget, a motion retargeting method from Amazon's Frontier AI & Robotics team and university collaborators, won both the Best Conference Paper Award and the Best Paper Award on Robot Manipulation and Locomotion at IEEE ICRA 2026 in Vienna. The method preserves contacts between body, objects and terrain, and the authors used it to generate more than 8 hours of trajectories that trained a Unitree G1 to perform parkour and box carrying in the real world without real-robot fine-tuning.

7 sourcesAmazonUnitree RoboticsBoston DynamicsRLSim-to-Real Transfer
Jun 4, 2026
BusinessUS

Amazon unveils a next-generation Proteus robot that takes spoken instructions, tied to a €10 billion upgrade of its European warehouses

Amazon unveiled a next-generation version of its Proteus autonomous mobile robot that employees can direct in natural language, at its Delivering the Future event in London on June 4, 2026. The company said it will invest more than €10 billion over the coming years to expand and modernize its European fulfillment network, deploy the new Proteus in Europe in the first half of 2027, expand its STARK tote-handling system to 15 European sites by 2027 and add 25,000 fulfillment jobs in Europe.

6 sourcesAmazonAutoStoreSymboticFleet Orchestration SoftwareTactile Sensing
Jun 1, 2026
ProductUS

NVIDIA sets a reference humanoid for labs, pairing Unitree's H2 Plus with Sharpa hands and a Jetson Thor brain

NVIDIA announced at GTC Taipei on June 1, 2026 an Isaac GR00T reference humanoid for academic research, built on Unitree's H2 Plus body with two 22-degree-of-freedom Sharpa Wave tactile hands and a Jetson AGX Thor T5000 computer. Unitree will sell it from late 2026; Ai2, ETH Zurich, Stanford and UC San Diego are the first named research users. No price was given.

1 sourceNVIDIAUnitree RoboticsSkild AIRobot Foundation ModelsTeleoperation
May 29, 2026
IndustryKR

Korea's AI robot alliance reaches 280 members in its first year, with shipyard and refinery humanoids aimed at 2027 and 2028

Korea's trade ministry said on May 29 that the AI robot division of its M.AX manufacturing alliance now has about 280 members and is running industrial humanoid pilots with HD Hyundai Heavy Industries, SK Energy and BGF. It also highlighted Korean robot foundation models, a 13 km/h humanoid lower body from KAIST and plans for a 500 billion won fund with a mandatory humanoid share.

0 sourcesRobotisHoliday RoboticsRainbow RoboticsVLARobot Foundation Models
May 22, 2026
BusinessJP

Yaskawa targets record ¥100 billion operating profit by 2029, betting on physical AI and humanoid actuators after missing its last plan

Yaskawa Electric unveiled a 2035 vision and a four-year plan, Dash 35, on May 22 that aims to more than double operating profit from ¥47.3 billion to ¥100 billion by fiscal 2029 on revenue of ¥650 billion. The plan makes physical AI one of five pillars, with the MOTOMAN NEXT autonomous robot and new actuators for humanoid robots, backed by ¥250 billion of investment. It follows a year in which net profit fell 38.2% and the previous plan's targets were missed.

2 sourcesYaskawa ElectricFANUCKawasaki Heavy IndustriesElectric Actuators