{ "source": "humanoid.observer", "license": "CC BY 4.0", "url": "https://humanoid.observer/data/", "count": 109, "data": [ { "slug": "1x", "name": "1X Technologies", "aliases": [ "1X", "Halodi Robotics" ], "country": "US", "city": "Palo Alto, California (engineering in Moss, Norway)", "founded": "2014", "founders": [ "Bernt Oivind Bornich" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://www.1x.tech", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [ "OpenAI Startup Fund", "EQT Ventures", "Samsung NEXT", "Tiger Global", "Sandwater" ], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "1x-eve", "1x-neo", "1x-neo-beta", "1x-neo-gamma" ], "summary": "1X, founded in Norway in 2014 as Halodi Robotics and renamed in 2023, builds the EVE wheeled humanoid and the NEO home humanoid. It opened consumer preorders for NEO at USD 20,000 in October 2025 and is backed by the OpenAI Startup Fund and EQT.", "sources": [ { "title": "1X Technologies", "url": "https://www.1x.tech/", "date": null, "publisher": "1X" }, { "title": "1X Technologies", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1X_Technologies", "date": null, "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "1X struck a deal to send its 'home' humanoids to factories and warehouses", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/11/1x-struck-a-deal-to-send-its-home-humanoids-to-factories-and-warehouses/", "publisher": "TechCrunch" }, { "title": "SoftBank in Talks for Majority Stake in 1X at $6 Billion", "url": "https://www.humanoidsdaily.com/news/softbank-in-talks-for-majority-stake-in-1x-at-6-billion-below-the-10-billion-it-sought-last-year", "publisher": "Humanoids Daily" }, { "title": "1X Secures $100M in Series B Funding", "url": "https://www.1x.tech/discover/1x-secures-100m-in-series-b-funding", "publisher": "1X" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "1X Technologies started in 2014 as Halodi Robotics in Moss, Norway, founded by Bernt Oivind Bornich, and later moved its headquarters to Palo Alto, California, keeping engineering in Norway. Its first product was EVE, a wheeled humanoid pitched at security patrol, logistics and healthcare, deployed in small numbers.\n\nIt raised a USD 23.5 million Series A2 led by the OpenAI Startup Fund in March 2023 and a USD 100 million Series B led by EQT Ventures in January 2024, taking disclosed funding past USD 130 million. In September 2025 it was reported to be seeking up to USD 1 billion at a USD 10 billion valuation; no close was announced. In August 2026 The Information, summarised by Reuters, reported SoftBank was in talks to buy a majority stake at about USD 6 billion.\n\nIts current product is NEO, a bipedal home humanoid shown as NEO Beta in August 2024 and NEO Gamma in February 2025. Preorders opened in October 2025 at USD 20,000 or USD 499 per month, with deliveries promised for 2026. Early units rely on VR teleoperation. In December 2025 1X agreed to supply up to 10,000 NEO units to EQT portfolio companies between 2026 and 2030, a shift from homes to industrial sites. As of late August 2026 no customer deliveries had been publicly confirmed." }, { "slug": "addverb", "name": "Addverb Technologies", "aliases": [ "Addverb" ], "country": "IN", "city": "Noida, Uttar Pradesh", "founded": "2016", "founders": [ "Sangeet Kumar" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://addverb.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": 1000, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [ "Reliance Retail" ], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "addverb-heal" ], "summary": "Addverb is an Indian warehouse automation company majority owned by Reliance Retail that announced the Heal humanoid.", "sources": [ { "title": "Addverb", "url": "https://addverb.com", "date": null, "publisher": "Addverb" }, { "title": "About Addverb", "url": "https://addverb.com/about-us/", "publisher": "Addverb" }, { "title": "Reliance Acquires 54% Stake In Addverb Technologies For $132 Million", "url": "https://addverb.com/press-release/reliance-acquires-54-stake-in-addverb-technologies-for-132-million/", "publisher": "Addverb" }, { "title": "Addverb Unveils India's First Humanoid Robot: A Conversation with CEO Sangeet Kumar", "url": "https://addverb.com/press-release/addverb-unveils-indias-first-humanoid-robot-a-conversation-with-ceo-sangeet-kumar/", "publisher": "Addverb" }, { "title": "Reliance-Backed Addverb Robotics to Launch India's First Humanoid Robot With Healthcare Applications by 2025", "url": "https://www.digitalhealthnews.com/reliance-backed-addverb-robotics-to-launch-india-s-first-humanoid-robot-with-healthcare-applications-by-2025", "publisher": "Digital Health News" }, { "title": "Reliance-backed Addverb to launch next-gen humanoid robots in 2025", "url": "https://www.business-standard.com/companies/start-ups/reliance-backed-addverb-to-launch-next-gen-humanoid-robots-in-2025-124111900952_1.html", "publisher": "Business Standard" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Addverb Technologies was founded in 2016 in Noida, on the outskirts of Delhi, as a warehouse automation company. It sells mobile robots, sorters, shuttle systems and the software to run them; its own site claims more than 350 clients and over 500 automated warehouses. In January 2022 Reliance Retail Ventures bought a 54 percent stake for USD 132 million, valuing the company at USD 270 million, so Addverb is effectively a Reliance subsidiary with a minority of founder and early-investor holdings. Sangeet Kumar is CEO and co-founder.\n\nThe humanoid is a recent add-on to that core business. In November 2024 Kumar told Indian media that Addverb would launch a humanoid in 2025, built with Reliance's Jio for connectivity and AI, aimed at healthcare, defence, retail and energy work, and that the company was looking at both legged and wheeled forms. On 31 January 2025 Addverb published a press release describing the unveiling of what it called India's first humanoid.\n\nWhat has been shown so far is a prototype described in terms of intended capabilities rather than field results. Addverb has published no customer deployment, unit count or price for the humanoid. The company page states a headcount of more than 1,000 people, most of them working on conventional intralogistics automation, which is where its revenue comes from." }, { "slug": "agibot", "name": "AgiBot", "aliases": [ "Zhiyuan Robotics", "Shanghai Zhiyuan Xinchuang" ], "country": "CN", "city": "Shanghai", "founded": "2023-02", "founders": [ "Peng Zhihui", "Deng Taihua" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://www.agibot.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [ "Hillhouse", "Tencent", "BYD", "Sequoia China", "CATL", "Lightspeed China", "LG Electronics", "Mirae Asset" ], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "agibot-genie-g1", "agibot-genie-g2", "agibot-lingxi-x1", "agibot-lingxi-x2", "agibot-raise-a1", "agibot-yuanzheng-a2" ], "summary": "AgiBot was founded in 2023 by former Huawei engineer Peng Zhihui and became one of China's largest humanoid makers by shipments within two years. In 2025 it bought control of STAR-listed Swancor Advanced Materials and released the AgiBot World dataset and GO-1 model.", "sources": [ { "title": "AgiBot official site", "url": "https://www.agibot.com", "date": null, "publisher": "AgiBot" }, { "title": "AgiBot", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AgiBot", "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "AgiBot Begins Hong Kong IPO Process as China's Embodied-AI Startups Race to List", "url": "https://www.caixinglobal.com/2026-07-24/agibot-begins-hong-kong-ipo-process-as-chinas-embodied-ai-startups-race-to-list-102467856.html", "publisher": "Caixin Global" }, { "title": "AgiBot starts Hong Kong IPO process", "url": "https://technode.com/2026/07/27/agibot-starts-hong-kong-ipo-process/", "publisher": "TechNode" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "AgiBot, registered as Shanghai Zhiyuan Xinchuang and renamed AgiBot Innovation (Shanghai) Technology ahead of its listing, was set up in February 2023 by Deng Taihua, who serves as CEO, and Peng Zhihui, a former Huawei engineer who left that company in December 2022 and acts as CTO. Early backers included HongShan, Hillhouse and BYD. Tencent led a round in March 2025 and JD.com and SAIC Motor joined in May 2025, when Caixin put the valuation above 20 billion yuan.\n\nThe first robot, RAISE A1, was shown in August 2023, followed by the Yuanzheng A2 and the open-source Lingxi X1 in August 2024 and the industrial G2 in October 2025. A Shanghai factory opened in January 2024. The company said it had built 962 units by mid-December 2024 and its 1,000th robot in January 2025, and later claimed more than 5,100 humanoids shipped in 2025 and 15,000 units completed by June 2026. These are company figures, not audited ones.\n\nIn July 2025 AgiBot took a controlling stake in STAR-listed Swancor Advanced Materials, and in July 2026 it confirmed it had started a Hong Kong IPO process. Its software line includes the AgiBot World dataset (late 2024), the GO-1 model (March 2025) and Lingqu OS (July 2025)." }, { "slug": "agile-robots", "name": "Agile Robots", "aliases": [], "country": "DE", "city": "Munich, Germany", "founded": "2018", "founders": [ "Zhaopeng Chen", "Peter Meusel" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://www.agile-robots.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": 3200, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "agile-robots-agile-one" ], "summary": "Agile Robots, a Munich unicorn founded by DLR alumni in 2018, makes force-controlled industrial arms and announced the Agile ONE humanoid at Automatica in June 2025.", "sources": [ { "title": "Agile Robots", "url": "https://www.agile-robots.com/", "date": null, "publisher": "Agile Robots" }, { "title": "About us", "url": "https://www.agile-robots.com/en/about-us/", "publisher": "Agile Robots" }, { "title": "Agile Robots AG completes Series C financing", "url": "https://www.agile-robots.com/en/news/detail/series-c-financing-led-by-softbank-vision-fund-2/", "publisher": "Agile Robots" }, { "title": "SoftBank is reportedly in early talks to back an $800m Agile Robots round", "url": "https://thenextweb.com/news/softbank-agile-robots-800m-funding-talks", "publisher": "The Next Web" }, { "title": "SoftBank in early talks to back $800M Agile Robots round", "url": "https://dealroom.co/news/130905-softbank-in-early-talks-to-back-800m-agile-robots-round/", "publisher": "Dealroom" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Agile Robots was founded in Munich in 2018 by Zhaopeng Chen and Peter Meusel together with eight colleagues from the DLR Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics. Its first product was Diana 7, a torque-controlled seven-axis arm from 2019, followed by the Thor arms, the Agile Hand, mobile robots and the AgileCore software layer. The company lists sites in Germany (Munich, Kaufbeuren, Gemmingen), Palo Alto, four Chinese cities and two Indian cities, and bought the voice-AI firm audEERING in 2025 and India's XNG Automation in 2026.\n\nSoftBank Vision Fund 2 led a Series C in September 2021, reported at USD 220 million, which made Agile Robots the first German robotics company valued above USD 1 billion. Hillhouse and Sequoia China also invested. In June 2026 Bloomberg reported that SoftBank was in early talks to put more than USD 300 million into a new round of about USD 800 million; neither side confirmed it. The same report put headcount above 3,200 across Germany, China and India.\n\nThe Agile ONE humanoid is a late addition to an arm-and-AMR business. The company's own timeline dates its announcement to November 2025, with mass production planned at a Bavarian factory for early 2026. No customer deployments or unit numbers have been published, and the humanoid remains a small part of what the company actually sells." }, { "slug": "agility-robotics", "name": "Agility Robotics", "aliases": [], "country": "US", "city": "Salem, Oregon", "founded": "2015", "founders": [ "Jonathan Hurst", "Damion Shelton", "Mikhail Jones" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://www.agilityrobotics.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [ "DCVC", "Playground Global", "Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund", "Schaeffler", "WP Global Partners" ], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "agility-cassie", "agility-digit", "agility-digit-v4" ], "summary": "Agility Robotics, an Oregon State University spin-off, makes the Digit humanoid for warehouse tote handling and runs the RoboFab factory in Salem, Oregon. Its GXO deployment in 2024 was the first paid multi-year humanoid deployment. CEO Peggy Johnson joined in 2024.", "sources": [ { "title": "Agility Robotics", "url": "https://www.agilityrobotics.com/", "date": null, "publisher": "Agility Robotics" }, { "title": "Agility Robotics", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agility_Robotics", "date": null, "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "Agility Robotics to Go Public Through Merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI", "url": "https://www.agilityrobotics.com/content/agility-robotics-to-go-public-through-merger-with-churchill-capital-corp-xi", "publisher": "Agility Robotics" }, { "title": "This humanoid robotics company is going public, but its CEO isn't promising a robot in your home anytime soon", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/05/this-humanoid-robotics-company-is-going-public-but-its-ceo-isnt-promising-a-robot-in-your-home-anytime-soon/", "publisher": "TechCrunch" }, { "title": "Agility Robotics reportedly raising $400M for humanoid warehouse robots", "url": "https://www.geekwire.com/2025/agility-robotics-reportedly-raising-400m-for-humanoid-warehouse-robots/", "publisher": "GeekWire" }, { "title": "Agility Robotics Raises $150M Series B Led By DCVC and Playground Global", "url": "https://www.agilityrobotics.com/content/agility-robotics-raises-150m-series-b-led-by-dcvc-and-playground-global", "publisher": "Agility Robotics" }, { "title": "Agility Robotics news", "url": "https://www.agilityrobotics.com/news", "publisher": "Agility Robotics" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Agility Robotics was founded in 2015 by Jonathan Hurst, Damion Shelton and Mikhail Jones as a spin-off from Oregon State University's Dynamic Robotics Laboratory, home of the ATRIAS biped. Cassie, a legs-only research platform, came first; Digit, a full humanoid, was first tested with Ford. The company is based in Salem, Oregon, where the RoboFab plant announced in 2023 has a stated capacity of 10,000 robots a year, far above output to date.\n\nIt raised a USD 150 million Series B led by DCVC and Playground Global, later added Amazon's Industrial Innovation Fund and Schaeffler as investors, and in 2025 was reported by GeekWire to be raising USD 400 million led by WP Global with SoftBank at a USD 1.75 billion pre-money valuation. Peggy Johnson became CEO in 2024. The company rebranded as Agility in March 2026.\n\nOn 24 June 2026 it agreed to go public through a merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI at a USD 2.5 billion pre-money value and over USD 620 million in expected proceeds. Digit had then logged more than 65,000 hours at nine customer sites (GXO, Schaeffler, Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada, Mercado Libre) and the company claimed over USD 300 million in multi-year contracted orders for Digit v5. Unit counts are undisclosed. Johnson puts home humanoids ten or more years out." }, { "slug": "aist", "name": "AIST (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology)", "aliases": [ "AIST", "Sangyo Gijutsu Sogo Kenkyusho" ], "country": "JP", "city": "Tsukuba, Ibaraki", "founded": "2001", "founders": [], "type": "research-institute", "website": "https://www.aist.go.jp", "status": "active", "employees_est": 2949, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "hrp-2", "hrp-3", "hrp-4", "hrp-4c", "hrp-5p" ], "summary": "AIST led Japan's national Humanoid Robotics Project and developed the HRP series with Kawada, from HRP-2 in 2003 to the construction-oriented HRP-5P in 2018.", "sources": [ { "title": "AIST official site", "url": "https://www.aist.go.jp/index_en.html", "date": null, "publisher": "AIST" }, { "title": "National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Institute_of_Advanced_Industrial_Science_and_Technology", "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "HRP-2", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HRP-2", "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "HRP-4C", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HRP-4C", "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "Development of a humanoid robot prototype, HRP-5P, capable of heavy labor", "url": "https://phys.org/news/2018-11-humanoid-robot-prototype-hrp-5p-capable.html", "publisher": "Phys.org / AIST" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "AIST is Japan's national applied-research organisation. It took its present form in 2001, when older industrial laboratories (with roots going back to 1882) were merged into one Independent Administrative Institution under METI. Its head office is in Tokyo, but most of its staff work in Tsukuba Science City. Wikipedia gives a headcount of 2,949 as of April 2012, of whom 2,288 were researchers.\n\nAIST's humanoid work grew out of the Humanoid Robotics Project that METI and NEDO funded from 1998 to 2003. The manufacturing partner was Kawada Industries, later spun into Kawada Robotics. HRP-2 (2002 to 2003, 154 cm, 58 kg, 30 degrees of freedom, list price JPY 26 million) became a standard research platform for a decade and was known for being able to get up after a fall. HRP-3 followed in 2007, HRP-4 in 2010, and HRP-4C in 2009, a 158 cm woman-shaped robot that walked and sang with Vocaloid.\n\nThe last major machine was HRP-5P, demonstrated in November 2018 fixing gypsum board to a wall at a mock construction site: 182 cm, 101 kg, 37 degrees of freedom. AIST described it as a research platform for construction, aircraft and shipbuilding labour, not a product. No commercial successor has appeared; the series is a government-funded research lineage, not a shipped product." }, { "slug": "akinrobotics", "name": "Akinrobotics", "aliases": [ "AkinSoft Robotics" ], "country": "TR", "city": "Konya", "founded": "2017", "founders": [ "Ozgur Akin" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://www.akinrobotics.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "akinrobotics-ada-gh5" ], "summary": "Akinrobotics is a Turkish humanoid company spun out of software firm AkinSoft that opened a humanoid production facility in Konya in 2017.", "sources": [ { "title": "Akinrobotics", "url": "https://www.akinrobotics.com", "date": null, "publisher": "Akinrobotics" }, { "title": "Turkey's first humanoid robotics factory opens in Konya province", "url": "https://www.dailysabah.com/technology/2017/11/04/turkeys-first-humanoid-robotics-factory-opens-in-konya-province", "publisher": "Daily Sabah" }, { "title": "Turkey opens its first humanoid robotics factory", "url": "https://www.aa.com.tr/en/science-technology/turkey-opens-its-first-humanoid-robotics-factory-/956696", "publisher": "Anadolu Agency" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Akinrobotics is the robotics arm of AkinSoft, a Konya software house that has operated since 1995 and is chaired by Ozgur Akin. It is privately held and has not announced outside investors. The company presents itself as Turkey's robotics brand.\n\nIts main claim to attention is a factory in Konya that opened on 4 November 2017 and was reported by Anadolu Agency and Daily Sabah as Turkey's first humanoid robot plant. At the opening Akin said mass production of the Ada GH5 had started and that no other robot factory in the world had reached that stage, a statement that was not checked by the reporting outlets. The Ada GH5 is a wheeled service humanoid with speech, face recognition and internet access, pitched at malls, fairs, airports, hospitals and homes.\n\nNo shipment numbers, revenue or headcount have been published in sources that could be verified for this profile, and the company website blocks automated access. This profile found no independently documented paid deployments." }, { "slug": "aldebaran", "name": "Aldebaran", "aliases": [ "Aldebaran Robotics", "SoftBank Robotics Europe" ], "country": "FR", "city": "Paris, France", "founded": "2005", "founders": [ "Bruno Maisonnier" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://www.aldebaran.com", "status": "acquired", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "aldebaran-nao", "aldebaran-romeo" ], "summary": "Aldebaran, founded in Paris in 2005, created NAO and designed Pepper; SoftBank bought it (2012 to 2015) and renamed it SoftBank Robotics Europe, then sold it to United Robotics Group in 2022. It entered insolvency proceedings in February 2025 and was taken over later in 2025.", "sources": [ { "title": "Aldebaran", "url": "https://www.aldebaran.com/", "date": null, "publisher": "Aldebaran" }, { "title": "Aldebaran (company)", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldebaran_(company)", "date": null, "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "Aldebaran, maker of Pepper and Nao robots, put in receivership", "url": "https://www.therobotreport.com/aldebaran-pepper-nao-robots-receivership/", "publisher": "The Robot Report" }, { "title": "Maxvision buys core robot assets of Aldebaran, including Nao and Pepper", "url": "https://www.therobotreport.com/maxvision-buys-core-robot-assets-including-nao-pepper-aldebaran/", "publisher": "The Robot Report" }, { "title": "Pepper and Nao rescued: Maxvision buys insolvent robotics company Aldebaran", "url": "https://www.heise.de/en/news/Pepper-and-Nao-rescued-Maxvision-buys-insolvent-robotics-company-Aldebaran-10495554.html", "publisher": "heise online" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Aldebaran Robotics was set up in Paris in 2005 by Bruno Maisonnier, with work on the small NAO humanoid already under way from 2004. The first production NAO shipped to RoboCup teams in 2008 and to the public in 2011. Intel Capital led a USD 13 million round in 2011. SoftBank bought control in 2012 for about USD 100 million, had it design the wheeled Pepper launched in Japan in 2014, and renamed it SoftBank Robotics Europe in 2015.\n\nThe Robot Report puts lifetime sales at about 20,000 NAO units and 17,000 Pepper units across 70 countries, but Pepper production stopped around 2020 or 2021 and neither robot had a major hardware update after 2018. In 2022 SoftBank sold the unit, then about 330 people, to Germany's United Robotics Group, which cut nearly half the staff and restored the Aldebaran name.\n\nURG stopped funding the business in 2024 after an operating loss reported at USD 29 million. Aldebaran filed for insolvency in mid February 2025, cut nearly half its remaining staff in April and was placed in receivership on 2 June 2025. In July 2025 the Chinese company Maxvision Technology bought the core NAO and Pepper assets and IP and set up a French subsidiary, Maxtronics, which builds and supports NAO6 with some former staff. Pepper is not back in production." }, { "slug": "android-technics", "name": "Android Technics", "aliases": [ "NPO Androidnaya Tekhnika" ], "country": "RU", "city": "Magnitogorsk", "founded": "2009", "founders": [], "type": "startup", "website": "https://npo-at.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": 146, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "fedor-skybot-f-850" ], "summary": "Android Technics is the Russian developer of the FEDOR humanoid, built with the Advanced Research Foundation and flown to the ISS in 2019.", "sources": [ { "title": "FEDOR, Wikipedia", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FEDOR", "date": null, "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "A humanoid robot from Magnitogorsk is being prepared for work on the ISS", "url": "https://www1.ru/en/news/2026/03/06/celovekopodobnogo-robota-iz-magnitogorska-gotoviat-k-rabote-na-mks.html", "publisher": "www1.ru" }, { "title": "Teledroid is being prepared for launch to the ISS: it may fly as early as this year", "url": "https://www1.ru/en/news/2026/04/10/teledroida-gotoviat-k-otpravke-na-mks-mozet-poletet-uze-v-etom-godu.html", "publisher": "www1.ru" }, { "title": "Russian cosmonauts begin spacewalk training with robot assistant", "url": "https://interfax.com/newsroom/top-stories/116369/", "publisher": "Interfax" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "NPO Androidnaya Tekhnika, or Android Technics, is a Russian robotics contractor set up in 2009 in Magnitogorsk. Per the Wikipedia entry on FEDOR, the company says it has built over 110 robotic systems for medicine, education and space and employs 146 specialists; Yevgeny Dudorov is its executive director. Its main partners are the state bodies Advanced Research Foundation, Roscosmos and Rosatom.\n\nIts best known machine is FEDOR, a 182 cm, 106 kg teleoperated humanoid built between 2015 and 2019, first as Avatar, a rescue robot funded by the Ministry of Emergency Situations. As Skybot F-850 it flew to the ISS on Soyuz MS-14 in August 2019, matched plug connectors in orbit and returned on 6 September 2019. Dudorov later said the robot could not replace a human on a spacewalk. A lunar robot project with Japan's GITAI, announced in December 2019, has shown no visible result.\n\nThe follow-on is Teledroid, a legless torso robot intended for work outside the ISS, driven through an exoskeleton and VR headset. Cosmonauts Pyotr Dubrov and Anna Kikina began training on it in February 2026; in April 2026 Dudorov said a launch was planned for the third or fourth quarter of 2026. That report titled him deputy general director of Corporation Robotics, which suggests a restructuring. No launch had happened by September 2026." }, { "slug": "ant-group", "name": "Ant Group (Robbyant)", "aliases": [ "Robbyant", "Ant Lingbo Technology" ], "country": "CN", "city": "Shanghai (Ant Group HQ Hangzhou)", "founded": "2024-12", "founders": [], "type": "big-tech", "website": "https://www.antgroup.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "robbyant-r1" ], "summary": "Robbyant is the embodied-AI subsidiary of fintech company Ant Group, set up in late 2024. It showed the R1 humanoid in September 2025.", "sources": [ { "title": "Ant Group newsroom", "url": "https://www.antgroup.com/en/news-media", "date": null, "publisher": "Ant Group" }, { "title": "Unit of China's Ant Group unveils first humanoid robot, entering segment led by Unitree", "url": "https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3325222/unit-chinas-ant-group-unveils-first-humanoid-robot-entering-segment-led-unitree", "publisher": "South China Morning Post" }, { "title": "Ant Group", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_Group", "publisher": "Wikipedia" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Ant Group is the Hangzhou fintech company behind Alipay. It was spun out of Alibaba in October 2014, Alibaba still holds about a third of it, and its planned USD 34.5 billion IPO was halted by Chinese regulators in November 2020. Since then it has pushed into AI and, from late 2024, into robots.\n\nThe robotics arm is Shanghai Ant Lingbo Technology, branded Robbyant, registered at the end of 2024 and formally launched in Pudong, Shanghai, in March 2025; a second entity was set up in Hangzhou in August 2025. Robbyant's CEO is Zhu Xing. Alongside hardware it publishes robot foundation models under the LingBot name that it says are meant for other manufacturers' robots as well as its own.\n\nIts first machine, the R1, was shown at the Inclusion Conference on the Bund in Shanghai on 11 September 2025 and at IFA in Berlin the same month. It is a wheeled, two-armed humanoid of 110 kg, 1.6 to 1.75 m tall, with 34 degrees of freedom, demonstrated cooking and guiding visitors. SCMP reported the Shanghai History Museum had received units; no price, volume or wider customer list has been published. Ant is a late entrant behind Unitree and UBTech; the parent's deep pockets are the main reason to watch it." }, { "slug": "anybots", "name": "Anybots", "aliases": [], "country": "US", "city": "Mountain View, California", "founded": "2001", "founders": [ "Trevor Blackwell" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://www.anybots.com", "status": "dormant", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "dexter" ], "summary": "Anybots was founded by Y Combinator co-founder Trevor Blackwell to build balancing robots. Its Dexter biped of 2007 was an early dynamically balancing humanoid; the company later sold QB telepresence robots.", "sources": [ { "title": "Anybots", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anybots", "date": null, "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "Anybots starts shipping QB telepresence robot", "url": "https://spectrum.ieee.org/anybots-starts-shipping-qb-telepresence-robot", "publisher": "IEEE Spectrum" }, { "title": "Anybots' Bipedal and Armed Robots On Hold While Telepresence Launches", "url": "https://singularityhub.com/2010/07/12/anybots-bipedal-and-armed-robots-on-hold-while-telepresence-launches-video/", "publisher": "Singularity Hub" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Anybots was started in 2001 by Trevor Blackwell, a Harvard computer science PhD who had worked on Viaweb and went on to co-found Y Combinator. It was a small private company in Silicon Valley, with around ten staff in 2010 according to Singularity Hub and Blackwell as CEO. David Rogan took over as CEO in July 2012.\n\nIts humanoid work was research rather than product. Dexter was a human-sized biped driven by pneumatic cylinders that walked and jumped with active balance, unusual for its time, and Monty was a wheeled upper-body robot with an 18 degree of freedom hand controlled through a glove and suit. Blackwell said in 2010 that the difficulty of getting Dexter to walk reliably pushed the company toward something it could sell sooner, and both projects were put on hold.\n\nThe product that resulted was QB, a self-balancing two-wheeled telepresence robot shown at CES 2009 as the QA prototype and sold from 2010 at 15,000 US dollars, with first deliveries in February 2011. A QX line with larger screens followed in 2013. No unit volumes or revenue were ever published. The company has not announced new products since and is treated here as dormant." }, { "slug": "apptronik", "name": "Apptronik", "aliases": [], "country": "US", "city": "Austin, Texas", "founded": "2016", "founders": [ "Jeff Cardenas", "Nick Paine", "Luis Sentis" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://apptronik.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": 300, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [ "B Capital", "Capital Factory", "Google", "Mercedes-Benz", "Jabil" ], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "apptronik-apollo", "apptronik-astra" ], "summary": "Apptronik spun out of the University of Texas at Austin's Human Centered Robotics Lab after work on NASA's Valkyrie and builds the Apollo humanoid. It raised a USD 350 million Series A in February 2025 led by B Capital and Capital Factory with Google, and pilots Apollo with Mercedes-Benz, GXO and Jabil.", "sources": [ { "title": "Apptronik", "url": "https://apptronik.com/", "date": null, "publisher": "Apptronik" }, { "title": "Press releases", "url": "https://apptronik.com/company/press-releases", "publisher": "Apptronik" }, { "title": "Apptronik Closes Over $935 Million Series A", "url": "https://apptronik.com/news-collection/apptronik-closes-over-935-million-series-a", "publisher": "Apptronik" }, { "title": "Humanoid robot startup Apptronik has now raised $935M at a $5B valuation", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/11/humanoid-robot-startup-apptronik-has-now-raised-935m-at-a-5b-valuation/", "publisher": "TechCrunch" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Apptronik is a University of Texas at Austin spin-out, formally founded in 2016 by Jeff Cardenas, Nick Paine and Luis Sentis after lab work on NASA's Valkyrie. It spent its first years on exoskeletons, actuators and contract robotics before unveiling the Apollo humanoid in August 2023.\n\nMost of what is public about Apollo is partnerships rather than sales. Mercedes-Benz announced what Apptronik called the first commercial deployment in March 2024, GXO started a proof of concept in June 2024, and Jabil signed on in February 2025 both to test Apollo and to manufacture it. Google DeepMind became a strategic partner in December 2024. Apptronik has not published how many Apollo units exist or how many are working at customer sites.\n\nThe money is large. A Series A of USD 350 million in February 2025, co-led by B Capital and Capital Factory with Google, grew to USD 415 million. A USD 520 million extension in February 2026 brought the Series A above USD 935 million and total capital to nearly USD 1 billion, with AT&T Ventures, John Deere and the Qatar Investment Authority joining. TechCrunch put the post-money valuation at about USD 5.3 billion. The company said it had nearly 300 employees and would ramp production of a new Apollo version." }, { "slug": "astribot", "name": "Astribot", "aliases": [ "Stardust Intelligence", "Xingchen Zhineng" ], "country": "CN", "city": "Shenzhen, Guangdong", "founded": "2022", "founders": [ "Lai Jie" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://www.astribot.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "astribot-s1" ], "summary": "Astribot is the humanoid brand of Shenzhen's Stardust Intelligence, founded by former Tencent and Baidu roboticist Lai Jie. Its wheeled S1 became known in 2024 for fast household manipulation videos.", "sources": [ { "title": "Astribot official site", "url": "https://www.astribot.com", "date": null, "publisher": "Astribot" }, { "title": "Astribot official site", "url": "https://www.astribot.com/", "publisher": "Astribot" }, { "title": "Shenzhen's Stardust Intelligence Secures Over 1B Yuan in Series B Financing, Valued at Over 10B Yuan", "url": "https://eu.36kr.com/en/p/3836068296209537", "publisher": "36Kr" }, { "title": "Seeds | Astribot Completes Over 1 Billion Yuan Series B Financing Round", "url": "https://autonews.gasgoo.com/articles/news/seeds-astribot-completes-over-1-billion-yuan-series-b-financing-round-2062155019816882177", "publisher": "Gasgoo" }, { "title": "China's S1 robot displays 'human-like' speed and precision", "url": "https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/chinese-robot-shows-human-like-speed", "publisher": "Interesting Engineering" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Astribot is the product brand of Stardust Intelligence, registered in Shenzhen as Astribot Artificial Intelligence Technology Co. and founded in 2022 by Lai Jie, a roboticist who had worked at Tencent's Robotics X lab, at Baidu's Xiaodu robot unit and at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. An early Pre-A round of tens of millions of dollars was led by Matrix Partners China.\n\nThe company became known in 2024 through videos of its S1, a wheeled robot with cable-driven arms, folding laundry, pouring drinks and flipping food at speed; it was shown in public at the World Robot Conference in Beijing in August 2024. Much of the footage is teleoperated or scripted and independent verification has been thin. In 2025 the company released its own Lumo-1 reasoning model and a DuoCore fast-slow control system, and said the S1 entered limited commercial availability late that year.\n\nIn June 2026 36Kr reported a Series B of over CNY 1 billion at a valuation above CNY 10 billion, with Bohua Capital, Thundersoft and Guoke Investment among the backers. The company said its cheaper T1 model, priced from CNY 89,900, began deliveries in the thousands at the end of 2025 and that Thundersoft had placed a thousand-unit order for industrial and commercial service use. Those figures are the company's own and unconfirmed." }, { "slug": "boardwalk-robotics", "name": "Boardwalk Robotics", "aliases": [], "country": "US", "city": "Pensacola, Florida", "founded": "2017", "founders": [], "type": "startup", "website": "https://www.boardwalkrobotics.com", "status": "acquired", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "boardwalk-alex" ], "summary": "Boardwalk Robotics is an IHMC spin-off in Pensacola that co-developed the Nadia humanoid and revealed the Alex upper-body humanoid for industry in August 2024.", "sources": [ { "title": "Boardwalk Robotics", "url": "https://www.boardwalkrobotics.com/", "date": null, "publisher": "Boardwalk Robotics" }, { "title": "Boardwalk Robotics Alex humanoid", "url": "https://spectrum.ieee.org/boardwalk-robotics-alex-humanoid", "publisher": "IEEE Spectrum" }, { "title": "Humanoid Robot Design", "url": "https://robots.ihmc.us/humanoid-design", "publisher": "IHMC Robotics" }, { "title": "An SF startup is pitching Trump on militarizing humanoid robots", "url": "https://sfstandard.com/2025/08/13/humanoid-robots-military-foundation-terminator/", "publisher": "The San Francisco Standard" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Boardwalk Robotics was a small Pensacola, Florida company founded in 2017 alongside the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC), the lab that took second place at the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge with an Atlas. IHMC lists Boardwalk, together with Morfey and H4 Labs, as a collaborator on its Nadia research humanoid, and the two organisations shared staff and know-how. Michael Morin, previously at Barrett Technology and Vicarious Surgical, was CEO.\n\nIts own product, Alex, was revealed on 22 August 2024: a legless upper-body humanoid with 19 degrees of freedom, a 10 kg payload and actuators designed in house, meant to be bolted to a stand or a mobile base for manufacturing, logistics and maintenance. At launch it was offered to researchers and was in early pilots in aviation, food processing and logistics; legs were described as on the road map with IHMC's help. Funding was never disclosed beyond federal research awards.\n\nThe company did not stay independent for long. Foundation Robotics Labs of San Francisco bought Boardwalk in late 2024 for an undisclosed price, moved the team to California and renamed Alex as Phantom, the robot Foundation now pitches to factories and the US military. Boardwalk therefore no longer exists as a standalone humanoid maker, and its history continues under the Foundation record." }, { "slug": "booster-robotics", "name": "Booster Robotics", "aliases": [ "Booster" ], "country": "CN", "city": "Beijing", "founded": "2023", "founders": [ "Cheng Hao" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://www.booster.tech", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "booster-k1", "booster-t1" ], "summary": "Booster Robotics makes robust mid-size humanoids for research and competitions; its T1 is the official platform of RoboCup humanoid leagues.", "sources": [ { "title": "Booster Robotics official site", "url": "https://www.boosterobotics.com", "date": null, "publisher": "Booster Robotics" }, { "title": "About Us | Booster Robotics", "url": "https://www.booster.tech/about-us/", "publisher": "Booster Robotics" }, { "title": "Booster Robotics", "url": "https://www.booster.tech/", "publisher": "Booster Robotics" }, { "title": "Booster Robotics: Advancing RoboCup's Vision and Our Path Forward", "url": "https://2025.robocupap.org/2025/04/02/booster-robotics-advancing-robocups-vision-and-our-path-forward/", "publisher": "RoboCup Asia-Pacific 2025" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Booster Robotics was founded in Beijing in 2023 by Cheng Hao, a Tsinghua automation graduate who had earlier built the Zhaoxi Calendar app, sold it to ByteDance and become a product vice president at Lark. Much of the team comes from Tsinghua's robot control lab and its Hephaestus RoboCup team, which is why the company has aimed its robots at robot football from the start.\n\nThe T1, a child-sized biped built to survive falls on a RoboCup pitch, was shown at the World Robot Conference in August 2024. In December 2024 Booster became an official RoboCup partner, and by RoboCup 2026 the company said 38 of 59 teams were using its robots. The smaller K1 followed in October 2025, priced from 5,999 US dollars, and a larger T2 running Nvidia's Thor computer was launched in July 2026.\n\nUnlike most humanoid startups the customers are mostly universities and research groups, not factories. The company reported more than 700 deliveries to over 200 customers by November 2025, with over half going abroad, and said in December 2025 that monthly operating cash flow had turned positive. It closed a Series A+ round in July 2025 and puts total funding at roughly 150 million US dollars as of April 2026. All these figures come from the company itself." }, { "slug": "boston-dynamics", "name": "Boston Dynamics", "aliases": [], "country": "US", "city": "Waltham, Massachusetts", "founded": "1992", "founders": [ "Marc Raibert" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://bostondynamics.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": 1000, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": 1100000000, "valuation_date": "2021-06", "key_investors": [ "Hyundai Motor Group (about 80 percent)", "SoftBank Group (about 20 percent)" ], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "boston-dynamics-atlas-electric", "boston-dynamics-atlas-hydraulic", "boston-dynamics-petman" ], "summary": "Boston Dynamics, spun out of MIT in 1992, built PETMAN and the hydraulic Atlas and in 2024 introduced an all-electric Atlas for factory work. Owned by Hyundai Motor Group since 2021, it plans to deploy Atlas in Hyundai plants and works with Toyota Research Institute and Google DeepMind on robot AI.", "sources": [ { "title": "Atlas", "url": "https://bostondynamics.com/atlas/", "date": null, "publisher": "Boston Dynamics" }, { "title": "Boston Dynamics", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Dynamics", "date": null, "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "Optimus Schmoptimus: Boston Dynamics' humanoid robot is already in mass production", "url": "https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/06/boston_dynamics_atlas_production/", "publisher": "The Register" }, { "title": "CES 2026: Boston Dynamics Set to Ship First Atlas Humanoids This Year", "url": "https://www.automate.org/robotics/industry-insights/boston-dynamics-to-begin-production-on-redesigned-atlas-humanoid-in-2026", "publisher": "A3 Automate" }, { "title": "CES 2026: Hyundai Motor Group leverages Group capabilities to lead AI Robotics", "url": "https://www.hyundaimotorgroup.com/en/story/hyundai-motor-group-ai-robotics-ces-2026", "publisher": "Hyundai Motor Group" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Boston Dynamics started in 1992 as an MIT spin-off led by Marc Raibert. For two decades it lived on DARPA and military contracts (BigDog, PETMAN, the hydraulic Atlas from 2013) and changed hands repeatedly: Google bought it in December 2013, sold it to SoftBank in June 2017, and Hyundai Motor Group took an 80 percent stake in a deal announced in December 2020 that valued the company at about USD 1.1 billion, closing in June 2021. SoftBank kept about 20 percent; headcount is about 1,000. CEO Robert Playter retired in February 2026 and Amanda McMaster became interim CEO.\n\nThe company's revenue has come from Spot, sold since June 2020 at USD 74,500, and the Stretch warehouse robot announced in 2021, not from humanoids. The hydraulic Atlas was retired in April 2024 and replaced the same month by an all-electric Atlas aimed at factory work.\n\nAt CES in January 2026 Boston Dynamics said it had begun production of the electric Atlas at its Massachusetts site, that every unit planned for 2026 was committed to Hyundai's Robot Metaplant Application Center and to Google DeepMind, with outside customers to follow in early 2027. Hyundai wants a plant able to build 30,000 robots a year and Atlas on its Georgia line by 2028. Gemini Robotics models are being integrated into Atlas. Unit counts have not been disclosed." }, { "slug": "caltech", "name": "California Institute of Technology", "aliases": [ "Caltech", "CAST" ], "country": "US", "city": "Pasadena, California", "founded": "1891", "founders": [], "type": "university", "website": "https://www.caltech.edu", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "leonardo" ], "summary": "Caltech's Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies built LEONARDO, a small bipedal robot that combines legs with thrusters, published in Science Robotics in 2021.", "sources": [ { "title": "LEONARDO news release", "url": "https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/leonardo-the-bipedal-robot-can-ride-a-skateboard-and-walk-a-slackline", "date": "2021-10-06", "publisher": "Caltech" }, { "title": "Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies", "url": "https://cast.caltech.edu/", "publisher": "Caltech" }, { "title": "Caltech and Technology Innovation Institute Demo Multirobot Response Team", "url": "https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/caltech-and-technology-innovation-institute-demo-multirobot-response-team", "publisher": "Caltech" }, { "title": "AMBER Lab", "url": "http://www.bipedalrobotics.com/", "publisher": "AMBER Lab" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "The California Institute of Technology in Pasadena is a private research university founded in 1891. Its legged-robot work sits in the Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies (CAST), endowed by Foster and Coco Stanback, and in the AMBER Lab of Aaron Ames, who directs CAST and is known for control barrier functions, a method for formal safety guarantees on legged robots.\n\nCaltech's one named humanoid-type robot is LEONARDO, a 2.5 foot biped with two three-joint legs and four propeller thrusters at its shoulders, developed by Soon-Jo Chung's group with Kyunam Kim and Patrick Spieler and funded by the Gary Clinard Innovation Fund and CAST. It was the October 2021 cover story in Science Robotics after walking a slackline and riding a skateboard by balancing with its thrusters. It is a research prototype; the stated follow-on goal was legged landing gear for Mars rotorcraft, not a humanoid.\n\nSince then Caltech has used commercial humanoids as platforms instead of building its own. In October 2025 the Ames and Gharib groups, with the Technology Innovation Institute of Abu Dhabi, demonstrated a modified Unitree G1 carrying Caltech's M4 flying and driving robot as a backpack across campus in a mock emergency response. The value is in the control theory, not hardware, and nothing has been commercialised." }, { "slug": "cartwheel-robotics", "name": "Cartwheel Robotics", "aliases": [], "country": "US", "city": "Reno, Nevada", "founded": "2022", "founders": [ "Scott LaValley" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://www.cartwheelrobotics.com", "status": "defunct", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "cartwheel-yogi" ], "summary": "Cartwheel Robotics, founded by former Disney Research and Boston Dynamics engineer Scott LaValley, is developing small character-driven humanoids for homes and entertainment, including the Yogi prototype shown in 2025.", "sources": [ { "title": "Cartwheel Robotics", "url": "https://www.cartwheelrobotics.com/", "date": null, "publisher": "Cartwheel Robotics" }, { "title": "Cartwheel Robotics' Scott LaValley: Today's robots too scary", "url": "https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/13/to_make_a_humanoid_robot/", "publisher": "The Register" }, { "title": "Humanoid Global Reports Progress on Cartwheel Robotics' Flagship Humanoid Yogi", "url": "https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2025/10/16/3167651/0/en/Humanoid-Global-Reports-Progress-on-Cartwheel-Robotics-Flagship-Humanoid-Yogi.html", "publisher": "GlobeNewswire / Humanoid Global" }, { "title": "Cartwheel Robotics Shuts Down, Joining the Humanoid Startup Valley of Death", "url": "https://www.humanoidsdaily.com/news/cartwheel-robotics-shuts-down-joining-the-humanoid-startup-valley-of-death", "publisher": "Humanoids Daily" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Cartwheel Robotics was a small Nevada company set up around 2022 by Scott LaValley, who spent seven years as a hardware lead at Boston Dynamics (Petman, early Atlas), moved with it to Google, and then led Project Kiwi at Walt Disney Imagineering from 2016 to 2021. His sister Samantha was co-founder. The premise was that industrial humanoids are frightening and a home robot has to be a character first, with a big head, soft skin and toddler proportions.\n\nThe company came out of stealth in early 2025 with Yogi, a compact bipedal companion robot. In September 2025 LaValley told The Register that a debut was planned for December 2025 or March 2026, with a slow rollout to universities and healthcare pilots and consumer sales perhaps four years away. In October 2025 the listed investor Humanoid Global said Cartwheel had opened a seed round and was building a facility in Reno, Nevada.\n\nThe capital did not come. On 6 February 2026 LaValley announced on LinkedIn that Cartwheel was shutting down, saying it had not found the right partner to bridge the gap between progress and potential. By his account a team of seven built the walking prototype in under a year on about USD 3 million of outside money. No Yogi was ever sold." }, { "slug": "casbot", "name": "CASBOT", "aliases": [ "Lingbao CASBOT" ], "country": "CN", "city": "Beijing", "founded": "2023-08", "founders": [], "type": "startup", "website": "https://casbot.tech", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "casbot-01" ], "summary": "CASBOT is a Beijing humanoid startup spun out of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, with the CASBOT 01 full-size robot revealed in 2024.", "sources": [ { "title": "CASBOT official site", "url": "https://www.casbot.com", "date": null, "publisher": "CASBOT" }, { "title": "灵宝CASBOT", "url": "https://casbot.tech/", "publisher": "CASBOT" }, { "title": "「灵宝CASBOT」完成超亿元天使轮融资，加速推进人形机器人", "url": "https://eu.36kr.com/zh/p/3170949892205056", "publisher": "36Kr" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "CASBOT is the brand of Beijing Zhongke Huiling Robot Technology, a company registered in Beijing in August 2023 according to 36Kr. The 'Zhongke' in its name and the CAS in its branding point to a link with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the company says its core team comes from CAS, Tsinghua and the Beijing Institute of Technology, but neither its website nor the funding coverage spells out a formal spin-out arrangement. Zhang Miao is named as COO; the founder has not been identified in the sources used here.\n\nIts first full-size biped, CASBOT 01, nicknamed Wednesday, was launched in November 2024 with a claimed 52 degrees of freedom and over four hours of battery life. A CASBOT 02 aimed at exhibitions, museums, malls and car dealerships and a wheeled W1 are listed on the company site as of 2026.\n\nIn February 2025 the company announced an angel round of more than 100 million yuan from Lenovo Ventures, the state-backed China Investment Innovation Fund and a Henan asset fund, with plans to start mass production and deliveries during 2025. No delivery numbers, revenue or headcount have been published, so the scale of actual use is unknown." }, { "slug": "chery", "name": "Chery", "aliases": [ "Chery Automobile", "AiMOGA Robotics" ], "country": "CN", "city": "Wuhu, Anhui", "founded": "1997", "founders": [ "Yin Tongyue" ], "type": "automaker", "website": "https://www.cheryinternational.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": 48000, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": "HKEX: 9973", "robots": [ "chery-mornine" ], "summary": "Chery is a Chinese car maker whose AiMOGA robotics unit builds the Mornine showroom humanoid deployed in dealerships in China and abroad.", "sources": [ { "title": "Chery International", "url": "https://www.cheryinternational.com", "date": null, "publisher": "Chery" }, { "title": "Exclusive: Chery's robot affiliate AiMOGA eyes IPO, targets overseas market", "url": "https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/exclusive-cherys-robot-unit-eyes-071303391.html", "publisher": "Reuters via Yahoo Finance" }, { "title": "Chery-Backed AiMOGA Puts Humanoid Robot Up for Sale Online at $41,860", "url": "https://chinaevhome.com/2026/04/13/chery-backed-aimoga-puts-humanoid-robot-up-for-sale-online-at-41860/", "publisher": "ChinaEVHome" }, { "title": "Chery", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chery", "publisher": "Wikipedia" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Chery Automobile was set up in January 1997 in Wuhu, Anhui, by a group of city officials as a state-owned car maker, with Yin Tongyue running it from the start. It built 2,806,393 vehicles in 2025 and employs about 48,000 people. On 25 September 2025 it listed in Hong Kong, raising about USD 1.2 billion at a valuation near USD 23 billion; the Wuhu city investment arm remains the largest shareholder.\n\nIts humanoid work sits in AiMOGA Robotics, incubated by Chery in January 2025 and about 77 percent owned by it, run by Zhang Guibing, who is also president of Chery International. Its first product, Mornine, is a showroom humanoid that greets customers and explains cars. A Mornine went into service at a Malaysian dealership in March 2025, and in April 2026 the Mornine M1 was listed on JD.com at CNY 285,800 (about USD 41,860) with deliveries from late May.\n\nReuters reported in August 2026 that AiMOGA had delivered more than 3,000 robots, 2,000 of them outside China in over 60 countries, and had 110 police-style robots on traffic and crowd duty in Chinese cities, with a target of 10,000 deliveries the following year. Those are company figures. Zhang said the unit was talking to exchanges about an IPO; AiMOGA then said it had taken no substantive steps toward one." }, { "slug": "clone-robotics", "name": "Clone Robotics", "aliases": [ "Clone" ], "country": "PL", "city": "Wroclaw, Poland", "founded": "2021", "founders": [ "Dhanush Radhakrishnan", "Lukasz Kozlik" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://clonerobotics.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "clone-alpha", "clone-protoclone" ], "summary": "Clone Robotics, based in Wroclaw with US ties, builds musculoskeletal androids using water-driven artificial muscles. Its Protoclone video went viral in February 2025 and it has announced Clone Alpha for a first batch of 279 units.", "sources": [ { "title": "Clone Robotics", "url": "https://clonerobotics.com/", "date": null, "publisher": "Clone Robotics" }, { "title": "Clone Robotics Unveils Protoclone, A Milestone in Musculoskeletal Android Technology", "url": "https://circuitdigest.com/news/clone-robotics-unveils-protoclone-a-milestone-in-musculoskeletal-android-technology", "publisher": "Circuit Digest" }, { "title": "Clone Alpha Price 2026: Can You Buy It, Cost & Is It Real?", "url": "https://blog.robozaps.com/b/clone-protoclone-review", "publisher": "RoboZaps" }, { "title": "Clone Alpha: a humanoid robot built with synthetic organs and artificial muscles", "url": "https://industryinsider.eu/automation-and-production-lines/clone-alpha-a-humanoid-robot/", "publisher": "Industry Insider" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Clone Robotics was founded in late 2021 by Dhanush Radhakrishnan, who acts as CEO, and Lukasz Kozlik, its CTO. Engineering is done in Wroclaw, Poland, with a US corporate presence that by 2026 included an office in Mountain View, California. Instead of motorised joints it builds skeletons pulled by bundles of artificial muscle it calls Myofibers, first air-driven and now water-driven.\n\nIts first product was the Clone Hand, a tendon-driven robotic hand offered to researchers in 2023 at a listed price of USD 2,800. Bench-mounted torsos with two arms followed, and a Torso 3 with joint-angle feedback was shown in March 2026. The company reached a wide audience on 20 February 2025 with a video of Protoclone V1, a full anatomical android hanging from a gantry and twitching its muscles. The company claims over 200 degrees of freedom, 1,000 Myofibers and 500 sensors.\n\nAt the same time Clone announced Clone Alpha, a household android limited to 279 units with preorders promised for 2025. As of mid 2026 the reservation page carried no price, deposit or checkout, and no independent evidence had appeared of a Clone android standing, walking or completing a household task, let alone shipping. Funding has come from angels including Trevor Blackwell; no verified total has been disclosed." }, { "slug": "dataa-robotics", "name": "Dataa Robotics", "aliases": [ "CloudMinds", "Da Ta" ], "country": "CN", "city": "Shanghai", "founded": "2015", "founders": [ "Bill Huang", "Robert Zhang" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://www.dataarobotics.com", "status": "dormant", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [ "SoftBank Vision Fund" ], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "dataa-ginger" ], "summary": "Dataa Robotics, formerly CloudMinds, pioneered cloud-controlled service humanoids in China but ran into financial difficulty in 2024 after a failed US listing and loss of funding.", "sources": [ { "title": "Dataa Robotics official site", "url": "https://www.dataarobotics.com", "date": null, "publisher": "Dataa Robotics" }, { "title": "CloudMinds", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CloudMinds", "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "Chinese humanoid robot unicorn Dataa Robotics in turmoil despite fresh partnership deal", "url": "https://en.jiemian.com/article/12548182.html", "publisher": "Jiemian Global" }, { "title": "Dataa Robotics company history", "url": "https://www.dataarobotics.com/en/about/history/id/37", "publisher": "Dataa Robotics" }, { "title": "CloudMinds pushes back $500m US listing", "url": "https://www.globalcapital.com/article/28msrwf3i64sdcctlydaq/asia/cloudminds-pushes-back-500m-us-listing", "publisher": "GlobalCapital" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Dataa Robotics started life in March 2015 as CloudMinds, founded by Bill Huang (Huang Xiaoqing) with Robert Zhang. Its pitch was cloud robotics: thin robots controlled by a remote brain over mobile networks. Early backers were SoftBank, Foxconn, Walden and Keytone, and Jiemian puts total money raised over the company's life at CNY 5.4 billion, roughly USD 745 million, making it one of China's best-funded robot startups of its era. It moved its headquarters from Beijing to Shanghai around 2020.\n\nThe flagship robot was Ginger (XR-1), a wheeled service humanoid with dexterous hands shown in 2018 and 2019 and sold at more than CNY 200,000 for reception, retail and exhibition work; Cloud Ginger 2.0 and a bipedal XR4 followed in 2022 and 2023, along with the HARIX robot operating system and a RobotGPT model. In July 2019 CloudMinds postponed a USD 500 million NYSE listing, and in May 2020 the US Commerce Department put it on the Entity List, ending the US route. A 2023 Hong Kong listing plan also stalled.\n\nBy 2024 the money had run out. In March 2025 Jiemian reported wages withheld since early 2024, layoffs, more than 20 lawsuits, a CNY 21.76 million enforcement order and a vacated headquarters, weeks after a partnership signing with Xiamen Solex. The company is effectively dormant." }, { "slug": "devanthro", "name": "Devanthro", "aliases": [ "Roboy" ], "country": "DE", "city": "Munich, Germany", "founded": "2018-05", "founders": [ "Rafael Hostettler", "Alona Pammer" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://devanthro.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "devanthro-robody", "devanthro-roboy" ], "summary": "Devanthro is a Munich company that grew out of the Roboy tendon-driven humanoid research project and builds Robody, a teleoperated care avatar for nursing homes.", "sources": [ { "title": "Devanthro", "url": "https://devanthro.com/", "date": null, "publisher": "Devanthro" }, { "title": "About us", "url": "https://www.devanthro.com/about-us/", "publisher": "Devanthro" }, { "title": "Conclusion of the Teleskoop Research Project: Robotics for Future Care", "url": "https://www.fzi.de/en/2025/01/23/closing-of-teleskoop-research-project-robotics-for-future-care/", "publisher": "FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Devanthro was founded in Munich in May 2018 by Rafael Hostettler, who is CEO, and Alona Pammer (formerly Kharchenko), who is CTO. It is the commercial continuation of Roboy, a tendon-driven humanoid research effort that started at the University of Zurich in March 2013 and moved to a TU Munich student team in October 2014. Roboy 2.0 was finished in April 2018 and entered the Deutsches Museum's permanent collection in July 2022.\n\nIn May 2023 the company says it pivoted from research to home care. Its product, Robody, is a wheeled humanoid driven remotely through a VR headset by carers or relatives; the pitch is remote human presence rather than autonomy. Home pilots with seniors began in March 2024 and a new generation was shown in November 2024. The company says Robody was tried in more than 12 care locations with hundreds of elderly users during 2025.\n\nPublic money has come through research projects such as Teleskoop, a three-year study with FZI and Charite funded by the German education ministry with 690,000 euros, in which Robody worked 23 days in private households. No private funding round, revenue, pricing or headcount has been published, and deployments so far are pilots rather than paid rollouts, which the company itself schedules for 2026 onward." }, { "slug": "dobot", "name": "Dobot", "aliases": [ "Shenzhen Yuejiang Technology" ], "country": "CN", "city": "Shenzhen, Guangdong", "founded": "2015", "founders": [ "Liu Peichao", "Lang Xulin" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://www.dobot-robots.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": "HKEX: 2432", "robots": [ "dobot-atom" ], "summary": "Dobot is a Shenzhen collaborative-robot maker listed in Hong Kong in December 2024 that entered humanoids with Atom in 2025.", "sources": [ { "title": "Dobot official site", "url": "https://www.dobot-robots.com", "date": null, "publisher": "Dobot" }, { "title": "Dobot", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dobot", "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "HK-listed Shenzhen Dobot soars on launch of humanoid Dobot Atom", "url": "https://www.tradingview.com/news/reuters.com,2025:newsml_L1N3Q204I:0-hk-listed-shenzhen-dobot-soars-on-launch-of-humanoid-dobot-atom/", "publisher": "Reuters via TradingView" }, { "title": "DOBOT Debuted Global Delivery of Humanoid Robot", "url": "https://www.dobot-robots.com/insights/news/dobot-debuted-global-delivery-of-humanoid-robot.html", "publisher": "Dobot" }, { "title": "Shenzhen Dobot: Revenue up 31.7% to RMB492.2m, net loss narrowed", "url": "https://www.tradingview.com/news/urn:summary_document_report:quartr.com:3207670:0-shenzhen-dobot-revenue-up-31-7-to-rmb492-2m-net-loss-narrowed-and-r-d-investment-surged-for-global-growth/", "publisher": "TradingView" }, { "title": "Dobot taps Shenzhen market to fund its bet on humanoid robots", "url": "https://thebambooworks.com/dobot-taps-shenzhen-market-to-fund-its-bet-on-humanoid-robots/", "publisher": "Bamboo Works" }, { "title": "Chinese robotics firm Shenzhen Dobot excites investors with US$27,500 humanoid", "url": "https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3302868/chinese-robotics-firm-shenzhen-dobot-excites-investors-us27500-humanoid", "publisher": "South China Morning Post" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Shenzhen Dobot Corp was founded in June 2015 by Liu Peichao and Lang Xulin and grew up on desktop and educational robot arms, starting with the Magician in 2016, before moving into factory cobots. It listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange on 23 December 2024, raising HKD 681 million. Revenue was CNY 286.75 million in 2023 and CNY 492.2 million in 2025, up 31.7 percent, with the net loss narrowed to CNY 84.0 million.\n\nDobot entered humanoids in March 2025 with Atom, a full-size biped priced at CNY 199,000, about USD 27,500, well below Western rivals at the time. Reuters reported the shares jumping on the launch; within months of the IPO the stock had more than tripled to a market value above HKD 30 billion before giving most of that back. Dobot claims straight-knee walking and 0.05 mm arm repeatability for tasks such as soldering, based on its own demonstrations.\n\nOn 27 June 2025, at an event in Nagoya, Japan, the company said Atom had entered mass production and handed over a first batch to customers, without stating how many units or naming buyers. In 2026 Dobot planned a secondary listing in Shenzhen to raise about CNY 1.2 billion, with CNY 250 million earmarked for humanoids. Atom unit sales are not broken out in its reports." }, { "slug": "enchanted-tools", "name": "Enchanted Tools", "aliases": [], "country": "FR", "city": "Paris, France", "founded": "2021", "founders": [ "Jerome Monceaux", "Samuel Benveniste" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://enchanted.tools", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "enchanted-tools-mirokai" ], "summary": "Enchanted Tools is a Paris startup founded in 2021 by Aldebaran co-founder Jerome Monceaux that makes the Mirokai character service robots for hospitals and events.", "sources": [ { "title": "Enchanted Tools", "url": "https://enchanted.tools/", "date": null, "publisher": "Enchanted Tools" }, { "title": "Mirokai, a revolution in robotics", "url": "https://www.maxongroup.com/en-us/knowledge-and-support/blog/mirokai-a-revolution-in-robotics-274558", "publisher": "maxon group" }, { "title": "New-look Mirokai robot assists hospital patients, serves as concierge", "url": "https://interestingengineering.com/ces-2025/new-look-mirokai-robot-assists-patients", "publisher": "Interesting Engineering" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Enchanted Tools was set up in Paris in 2021 by Jerome Monceaux, co-founder of Aldebaran and one of the people behind Nao and Pepper, together with Samuel Benveniste. The idea is a robot that behaves like an animated character rather than a machine, aimed at hospitals and care homes. According to motor supplier maxon it raised EUR 15 million in seed funding and hired about 50 engineers to build the prototype.\n\nThe product is Mirokai, sold as two characters, Miroki and Miroka: 123 cm tall, long-eared, balancing on a single ball, with two arms and a 3 kg payload, made in France. First shown in 2023, the robot was re-engineered for CES in January 2025, with new shells, smaller arms, a fall-prevention ring and voice activation. Early testing took place at AP-HP's Broca geriatric hospital in Paris and at the Montpellier Cancer Institute, where the robot walks children into radiotherapy rooms.\n\nThe company's own site now lists paying deployments: a nursing home in mid 2025, Lyon-Saint Exupery airport in late 2025, and US care sites in Evanston and San Jose in January 2026. Earlier talk of 200 to 300 units in 2025 has not been backed by published numbers, and Enchanted Tools does not disclose revenue or its current headcount." }, { "slug": "engineai", "name": "EngineAI", "aliases": [ "Zhongqing Robotics", "Shenzhen Zhongqing" ], "country": "CN", "city": "Shenzhen, Guangdong", "founded": "2023", "founders": [ "Zhao Tongyang" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://www.engineai.com.cn", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "engineai-pm01", "engineai-se01", "engineai-t800" ], "summary": "EngineAI is a Shenzhen startup known for human-like straight-leg walking and the first humanoid front flip. Its PM01 is one of the lower-priced full humanoids.", "sources": [ { "title": "EngineAI official site", "url": "https://www.engineai.com.cn", "date": null, "publisher": "EngineAI" }, { "title": "Engine AI", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_AI", "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "EngineAI Launches Shenzhen Intelligent Manufacturing Base as First Batch of T800 Humanoid Robots Roll Off the Production Line to Begin Mass Delivery", "url": "https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/engineai-launches-shenzhen-intelligent-manufacturing-base-as-first-batch-of-t800-humanoid-robots-roll-off-the-production-line-to-begin-mass-delivery-302785384.html", "publisher": "PR Newswire" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "EngineAI, or Zhongqing Robotics in Chinese, was set up in Shenzhen in October 2023 by Zhao Tongyang, who is chairman and CEO, with Ren Guowen listed as co-founder. Zhao had co-founded the Pengxing Intelligent robotics venture with XPeng Motors after 2018, and much of the early team came from XPeng's robotics unit. Wikipedia records a 200 million US dollar Series B in April 2026 at a valuation of around 1.5 billion US dollars.\n\nThe company sells cheap, fast bipeds rather than one flagship. The SA01 leg platform appeared in July 2024 at 38,500 yuan, the full-size SE01 in October 2024 and the 138 cm PM01 in December 2024. The PM01 drew attention for a near-human straight-legged gait and, on 23 February 2025, for what the company called the first front flip by a humanoid. A larger T800 was shown doing martial arts moves in December 2025.\n\nOn 29 May 2026 EngineAI opened a 12,000 square metre plant in Honghualing, Shenzhen, saying it could build a robot every 15 minutes and that the first T800 batch was leaving the line. In the same release it described 2025 output as hundreds of PM01 units. It has not published shipment totals, revenue or headcount." }, { "slug": "engineered-arts", "name": "Engineered Arts", "aliases": [], "country": "GB", "city": "Falmouth, Cornwall, United Kingdom", "founded": "2004", "founders": [ "Will Jackson" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://engineeredarts.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "engineered-arts-ameca", "engineered-arts-robothespian" ], "summary": "Engineered Arts of Falmouth has made entertainment humanoids since 2004, including RoboThespian and the expressive Ameca. It raised a USD 10 million seed round in 2023 and expanded to the United States.", "sources": [ { "title": "Engineered Arts", "url": "https://engineeredarts.com/", "date": null, "publisher": "Engineered Arts" }, { "title": "About us", "url": "https://engineeredarts.com/about-us/", "publisher": "Engineered Arts" }, { "title": "Engineered Arts restructures with $10M to create humanoid robots", "url": "https://venturebeat.com/ai/engineered-arts-restructures-with-10m-to-create-humanoid-robots", "publisher": "VentureBeat" }, { "title": "Engineered Arts restructures in US and secures $10M to scale up humanoid robots", "url": "https://siliconangle.com/2024/12/17/engineered-arts-restructures-us-secures-10m-scale-humanoid-robots/", "publisher": "SiliconANGLE" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Engineered Arts was founded in 2004 by Will Jackson in Falmouth, Cornwall, and for most of its life has been a small animatronics workshop rather than a robotics startup. Its first product, RoboThespian, is a life-size actor robot for museums and science centres; Mesmer added silicone-skinned, hyper-realistic figures; and Ameca, the newest, became the company's public face because of its facial expressions and viral videos. Ameca is a presentation and research platform: it does not walk and is not sold as a worker.\n\nThe company says it has deployed more than 250 robots in over 200 installations in more than 30 countries. Named customers include the Sphere in Las Vegas, GSK, the Computer History Museum and the National Robotarium in Edinburgh. Revenue comes from selling and renting these robots to venues, universities and brands.\n\nIn December 2024 Engineered Arts reincorporated as a US company with headquarters in Redwood City, California, keeping the Cornwall factory and a London office, and raised a USD 10 million Series A led by Helium-3 Ventures, bringing total funding to USD 16.2 million. The company said it planned about 20 hires in California over 18 months. Jackson remains CTO with Morgan Roe as COO. The robots are still aimed at entertainment and communication, not factory work." }, { "slug": "field-ai", "name": "Field AI", "aliases": [ "FieldAI" ], "country": "US", "city": "Irvine, California", "founded": "2023", "founders": [ "Ali Agha" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://fieldai.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": 405000000, "valuation_usd": 2000000000, "valuation_date": "2025-08", "key_investors": [ "Bezos Expeditions", "Prysm Capital", "Temasek", "Khosla Ventures", "Intel Capital", "Canaan Partners", "NVentures", "Gates Frontier", "Samsung", "Emerson Collective", "BHP Ventures" ], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [], "summary": "Field AI is an Irvine, California software company founded in 2023 by Ali Agha that sells risk-aware embodied AI models to run other makers' robots, including humanoids and quadrupeds. It disclosed USD 405 million of funding at a USD 2 billion valuation in August 2025.", "profile": "Field AI, written FieldAI by the company, was founded in 2023 in Irvine, California, by Ali Agha, who says he spent decades on autonomy at NASA and MIT. It builds no hardware. Its products are Field Foundation Models, embodied AI models it says are rooted in physics and built around a belief world model that tracks risk, and EDGE, a robot brain that runs on the machine rather than in the cloud. The pitch is one brain for any machine, from quadrupeds and wheeled platforms to humanoids.\n\nOn 20 August 2025 the company disclosed USD 405 million raised across two previously unannounced rounds, the larger a USD 314 million round co-led by Bezos Expeditions, Prysm Capital and Temasek, with Khosla Ventures, Intel Capital, Canaan, NVentures and Emerson Collective, and earlier backers Gates Frontier and Samsung reinvesting. Reports put the valuation at USD 2 billion. Agha said it had added over 100 jobs and planned to double headcount by year end.\n\nField AI says its software is deployed at customer sites in energy, manufacturing, construction, security and inspection across the United States, Japan, Europe, Singapore and Dubai, and in 2026 announced work with Big-D Construction and Caterpillar. Customer names and unit counts for humanoid deployments are undisclosed; most of its field record so far is on quadrupeds and wheeled robots.", "sources": [ { "title": "FieldAI", "url": "https://fieldai.com/", "date": null, "publisher": "Field AI" }, { "title": "FieldAI raises $405M to build universal robot brains", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/20/fieldai-raises-405m-to-build-universal-robot-brains/", "date": "2025-08-20", "publisher": "TechCrunch" }, { "title": "FieldAI raises funds to advance universal brains for humanoid robots", "url": "https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/fieldai-gets-funding-for-universal-robot-brains", "date": "2025-08-21", "publisher": "Interesting Engineering" }, { "title": "Nvidia, Bill Gates-backed robotics startup Field AI hits $2 billion valuation after recent raise", "url": "https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/20/gates-nvidia-fieldai-robotics.html", "date": "2025-08-20", "publisher": "CNBC" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06" }, { "slug": "figure-ai", "name": "Figure AI", "aliases": [ "Figure" ], "country": "US", "city": "San Jose, California", "founded": "2022", "founders": [ "Brett Adcock" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://www.figure.ai", "status": "active", "employees_est": 600, "total_funding_usd": 1750000000, "valuation_usd": 39000000000, "valuation_date": "2025-09-16", "key_investors": [ "Parkway Venture Capital", "Nvidia", "Microsoft", "OpenAI Startup Fund (2024)", "Bezos Expeditions", "Intel Capital", "LG Technology Ventures", "Salesforce", "Qualcomm Ventures", "Brookfield" ], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "figure-01", "figure-02", "figure-03" ], "summary": "Figure AI, founded by Brett Adcock in 2022, builds general-purpose humanoids and the Helix vision-language-action model. It raised over USD 1 billion in a Series C in September 2025 at a USD 39 billion valuation and opened the BotQ factory for Figure 03. BMW was its first announced customer.", "sources": [ { "title": "Figure AI", "url": "https://www.figure.ai/", "date": null, "publisher": "Figure AI" }, { "title": "Figure AI", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figure_AI", "date": null, "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "Figure news", "url": "https://www.figure.ai/news", "publisher": "Figure AI" }, { "title": "Figure CEO: The Robots Have Officially Outnumbered the Humans", "url": "https://robohorizon.com/en-us/news/2026/06/figure-ceo-the-robots-have-officially-outnumbered-the-humans/", "publisher": "RoboHorizon" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Figure AI was founded in 2022 in San Jose, California, by Brett Adcock, who earlier founded Vettery and Archer Aviation and put USD 20 million of his own money into a USD 70 million first round in May 2023. A USD 675 million round in February 2024 at USD 2.6 billion brought in Microsoft, Nvidia, Intel, Amazon and OpenAI. In September 2025 a Series C of over USD 1 billion led by Parkway Venture Capital valued the company at USD 39 billion, a 15x step-up in nineteen months.\n\nHardware went from the tethered Figure 01 prototype to Figure 02 in August 2024 and Figure 03 in October 2025, built for volume at the BotQ plant announced in March 2025 with a target of 12,000 units a year. Control comes from Helix, an in-house vision-language-action model; Helix 02 in January 2026 claimed full-body autonomy.\n\nThe headline customer is BMW's Spartanburg plant, where Figure 02 units loaded parts; Figure says they contributed to 30,000 cars. In April 2026 the company said it had delivered over 350 Figure 03 units, and in June 2026 Adcock said the fleet exceeded 700 robots against about 600 staff. How many sit with paying customers rather than inside Figure is undisclosed. A home leasing offer and a Figure 04 design were announced for later in 2026." }, { "slug": "ihmc", "name": "Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition", "aliases": [ "IHMC" ], "country": "US", "city": "Pensacola, Florida", "founded": "1990", "founders": [ "Kenneth Ford", "Alberto Canas", "Bruce Dunn" ], "type": "research-institute", "website": "https://www.ihmc.us", "status": "active", "employees_est": 120, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "ihmc-nadia" ], "summary": "IHMC is a Florida research institute known for humanoid locomotion and teleoperation work with Atlas and Valkyrie in the DARPA Robotics Challenge, and for its own Nadia humanoid built with Boardwalk Robotics.", "sources": [ { "title": "IHMC Robotics", "url": "https://robots.ihmc.us/", "date": null, "publisher": "IHMC" }, { "title": "Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Institute_for_Human_and_Machine_Cognition", "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "Meet Alex, IHMC's next generation humanoid robot", "url": "https://www.ihmc.us/news20251119/", "publisher": "IHMC" }, { "title": "IHMC honored by Humanoid Robotics Technology as Outstanding Research Organization", "url": "https://www.ihmc.us/news20251105/", "publisher": "IHMC" }, { "title": "Video shows progress of IHMC humanoid robot Nadia", "url": "https://www.ihmc.us/news20221005/", "publisher": "IHMC" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "The Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition was founded in 1990 by Kenneth Ford, Alberto Canas and Bruce Dunn on the University of West Florida campus in Pensacola and became an independent not-for-profit institute of the State University System of Florida by legislation in 2004. It has a second site in Ocala and, per Wikipedia, over 120 researchers and staff. Money comes from DARPA, NASA, the Office of Naval Research, NIH, NSF and corporate sponsors.\n\nIts robotics group, now led by Robert Griffin, made its name writing walking and balance controllers for other people's humanoids. It came first in the DARPA Virtual Robotics Challenge in 2013 and second in the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge finals on a Boston Dynamics Atlas, and worked with NASA on the Valkyrie humanoid.\n\nNadia, a roughly 100 kg humanoid designed with Boardwalk Robotics for stairs, ladders and debris in urban and disaster settings, was its first in-house full humanoid, with progress videos from 2022 and an industry research award in 2025. It was retired in autumn 2025 in favour of Alex, an ONR-funded successor at about 85 kg with custom high-power actuators, unveiled on 19 November 2025 with the stated aim of leaving the lab and reaching human-level speeds. These are research platforms with no commercial sales." }, { "slug": "foundation-robotics", "name": "Foundation Robotics Labs", "aliases": [ "Foundation" ], "country": "US", "city": "San Francisco, California", "founded": "2024-04", "founders": [ "Sankaet Pathak", "Mike LeBlanc", "Arjun Sethi" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://www.foundation.bot", "status": "active", "employees_est": 45, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "foundation-phantom" ], "summary": "Foundation Robotics Labs is a San Francisco startup building the Phantom humanoid for industrial and defense customers, founded in 2024 by former Synapse CEO Sankaet Pathak and Mike LeBlanc.", "sources": [ { "title": "Foundation", "url": "https://www.foundation.bot/", "date": null, "publisher": "Foundation Robotics Labs" }, { "title": "An SF startup is pitching Trump on militarizing humanoid robots", "url": "https://sfstandard.com/2025/08/13/humanoid-robots-military-foundation-terminator/", "publisher": "The San Francisco Standard" }, { "title": "A startup with a bankrupt fintech CEO and a president's son wants to build America's robot army", "url": "https://thenextweb.com/news/foundation-humanoid-robot-soldiers-pentagon", "publisher": "The Next Web" }, { "title": "Ex-Synapse CEO reportedly trying to raise $100M for his new humanoid robotics venture", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/08/ex-synapse-ceo-reportedly-trying-to-raise-100m-for-his-new-humanoid-robotics-venture/", "publisher": "TechCrunch" }, { "title": "Trump-linked robotics startup tests humanoids in Ukraine, targets U.S. military use", "url": "https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/30/humanoid-robots-ukraine-war-foundation-military-ai.html", "publisher": "CNBC" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Foundation (legally Foundation Future Industries, earlier Foundation Robotics Labs) was formed in San Francisco in April 2024 by Sankaet Pathak, whose previous company, the banking-software firm Synapse, went bankrupt in 2024 with customer funds missing; Mike LeBlanc, a former Marine and Cobalt Robotics co-founder; and Arjun Sethi of Tribe Capital, which led an USD 11 million pre-seed round in August 2024. Disclosed funding by April 2026 was about USD 21 million; the company was then reported to be seeking USD 500 million at a valuation above USD 3 billion. Eric Trump is chief strategy adviser.\n\nThe robot is Phantom, which is the Alex upper-body humanoid Foundation acquired when it bought Boardwalk Robotics of Pensacola in late 2024. The MK-1 is 5 ft 9 in, 176 lb, with 19 degrees of freedom and a 44 lb payload, offered at about USD 150,000 or USD 100,000 a year. The San Francisco Standard put the headcount at 45 in August 2025.\n\nFoundation has leaned into defence: USD 24 million in research contracts with the Army, Navy and Air Force, and two MK-1 units sent to Ukraine in February 2026 for logistics and reconnaissance trials. Its stated plan of 40 units in 2025 rising to 10,000 in 2026 has no public evidence behind it, and the company has already had to walk back an overstated General Motors claim." }, { "slug": "fourier", "name": "Fourier", "aliases": [ "Fourier Intelligence", "FFTAI" ], "country": "CN", "city": "Shanghai", "founded": "2015", "founders": [ "Gu Jie", "Zen Koh" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://www.fftai.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [ "Prosperity7 Ventures", "Saudi Aramco", "Guoxin Capital", "Yuanjing Capital" ], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "fourier-gr-1", "fourier-gr-2", "fourier-gr-3", "fourier-n1" ], "summary": "Fourier began in rehabilitation robotics and launched the GR-1 humanoid in 2023, becoming one of the first Chinese companies to ship humanoids in volume to research labs. Its 2025 products include the open-source N1 and the care-focused GR-3.", "sources": [ { "title": "Fourier official site", "url": "https://www.fftai.com", "date": null, "publisher": "Fourier" }, { "title": "Fourier (company)", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_Intelligence", "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "Fourier launches GR-2 humanoid, software platform", "url": "https://www.therobotreport.com/fourier-launches-gr-2-humanoid-software-platform/", "publisher": "The Robot Report" }, { "title": "Fourier Launches First Humanoid Care Robot, Advancing Emotional AI in Robotics", "url": "https://en.tmtpost.com/post/7651669", "publisher": "TMTPost" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Fourier, legally Shanghai Fourier Intelligent Technology and long known as Fourier Intelligence, was founded in Shanghai in 2015 by Gu Jie (Alex Gu), its CEO, with Zen Koh as co-founder. Its original business was rehabilitation hardware: the X1 walking exoskeleton of March 2017, an open EXOPS platform with National Instruments in 2019, and the 2020 purchase of Zhuhai RHK Healthcare, which the company says put its products in more than 2,000 institutions in over 40 countries.\n\nA humanoid unit was started in 2019 and a 1.65 m prototype walked in 2022. The GR-1 was unveiled at the World AI Conference in July 2023 and delivered in small numbers to universities and AI labs, with a production version late that year; the GR-2 (175 cm, 53 degrees of freedom) followed on 30 September 2024. In early 2025 the company released N1, an open-source small humanoid, and on 7 August 2025 the GR-3, a soft-shelled care robot priced above 200,000 yuan and aimed at hospitals and eldercare rather than consumers.\n\nA Series E of about 800 million yuan closed in early 2025, backed by Guoxin Investment and Prosperity7, the Saudi Aramco venture arm. Fourier has not published humanoid unit volumes, revenue or headcount, and remains private." }, { "slug": "foxconn", "name": "Foxconn (Hon Hai)", "aliases": [ "Hon Hai Precision Industry", "Foxconn" ], "country": "TW", "city": "New Taipei", "founded": "1974", "founders": [ "Terry Gou" ], "type": "conglomerate", "website": "https://www.honhai.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": 767062, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": "TWSE: 2317", "robots": [], "summary": "Foxconn is the largest electronics contract manufacturer and both a customer of humanoids (UBTech Walker S1 in Shenzhen) and a developer, planning humanoid deployment with Nvidia at its Houston AI server plant.", "sources": [ { "title": "Hon Hai newsroom", "url": "https://www.honhai.com/en-us/press-center", "date": null, "publisher": "Hon Hai" }, { "title": "Foxconn to deploy humanoid robots at Houston AI server plant", "url": "https://finance.yahoo.com/news/foxconn-deploy-humanoid-robots-houston-013021548.html", "publisher": "Reuters via Yahoo Finance" }, { "title": "Foxconn", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn", "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "UBTECH Walker S1 Humanoid Robot", "url": "https://www.ubtrobot.com/en/humanoid/products/walker-s1", "publisher": "UBTech" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Hon Hai Precision Industry, trading as Foxconn, was founded by Terry Gou on 20 February 1974 and is based in Tucheng, New Taipei. It is the world's largest electronics contract manufacturer, assembling iPhones and, increasingly, AI servers for Nvidia. Revenue reached NTD 8.103 trillion (about USD 259 billion) in 2025 and the group reported 767,062 employees in 2022. Young Liu has been chairman since July 2019. The stock trades in Taipei as 2317.\n\nFoxconn's relationship with humanoids is mostly as a factory operator that lets other people's robots in. UBTech lists Foxconn among the partners for its Walker S1 industrial humanoid alongside BYD, Audi, Geely and SF Express, and UBTech says the robot has worked in Foxconn plants in China. Foxconn has been automating lines since at least 2016, so a humanoid pilot fits a long pattern rather than a new strategy.\n\nOn 29 October 2025 Foxconn said its Houston plant building Nvidia AI servers would be among the first to run humanoid robots using Nvidia's Isaac GR00T N model, with deployment planned for the first quarter of 2026 on tasks such as picking, placing and cable insertion. Which robot maker supplies the hardware, how many units are involved and whether the pilot is running have not been disclosed. Foxconn has no humanoid product of its own on sale." }, { "slug": "gac", "name": "GAC Group", "aliases": [ "Guangzhou Automobile Group" ], "country": "CN", "city": "Guangzhou, Guangdong", "founded": "1997", "founders": [], "type": "automaker", "website": "https://www.gac.com.cn", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": "SSE: 601238, HKEX: 2238", "robots": [ "gac-gomate" ], "summary": "GAC Group is a state-owned car maker that revealed its GoMate wheel-foot humanoid in December 2024 for use in its own plants and dealerships.", "sources": [ { "title": "GAC Group official site", "url": "https://www.gac.com.cn", "date": null, "publisher": "GAC Group" }, { "title": "GAC Group", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAC_Group", "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "GAC unveils humanoid robot GoMate, plans to start small-scale production in 2026", "url": "https://cnevpost.com/2024/12/26/gac-unveils-humanoid-robot-gomate/", "publisher": "CnEVPost" }, { "title": "GAC's new humanoid robot is skipping the factory floor, and here's why", "url": "https://kr-asia.com/gacs-new-humanoid-robot-is-skipping-the-factory-floor-heres-why", "publisher": "KrASIA" }, { "title": "GAC Group launches in-house developed humanoid robot 'GoMate'", "url": "https://autonews.gasgoo.com/articles/news/gac-group-launches-in-house-developed-humanoid-robot-gomate-70035533", "publisher": "Gasgoo" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Guangzhou Automobile Group is a state-owned car maker controlled by the Guangdong provincial government, listed in Hong Kong since 2010 and Shanghai since 2012. It sold 1,916,615 vehicles in 2025, down on earlier years, and leans on its GAC Toyota and GAC Honda joint ventures.\n\nThe humanoid programme is an in-house R&D effort led by Zhang Aimin. GAC showed a little-documented first generation, a second-generation wheeled machine in early December 2024, and on 26 December 2024 the third-generation GoMate. GoMate has 38 degrees of freedom and a wheel-leg base that switches between a 1.4 m four-wheel stance and a 1.75 m two-wheel stance; GAC claims this cuts energy use by over 80 percent against comparable robots and quotes six hours per charge from solid-state batteries. Both are unverified company figures.\n\nGAC's stated plan was to mass-produce components such as hands, servo drives and axial-flux joint motors in 2025, run pilots on its own campuses and with Guangzhou security firms, then move to small-batch robot production in 2026 and larger volumes later. Security patrol, dealership after-sales service and line inspection were named as first uses. No unit numbers, customer contracts or external deployments have been published, so GoMate remains an internal demonstrator rather than a product." }, { "slug": "galbot", "name": "Galbot", "aliases": [ "Galaxy General Robot", "Yinhe Tongyong" ], "country": "CN", "city": "Beijing", "founded": "2023-05", "founders": [ "Wang He" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://www.galbot.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [ "CATL", "Meituan", "Beijing AI Industry Fund", "IDG Capital" ], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "galbot-g1" ], "summary": "Galbot is a Beijing embodied-AI startup founded by Peking University professor Wang He. Its wheeled G1 humanoid runs unmanned retail stores and its grasping models are trained mostly in simulation.", "sources": [ { "title": "Galbot official site", "url": "https://www.galbot.com", "date": null, "publisher": "Galbot" }, { "title": "Galbot Raises $362 Million in Fresh Funding, Eyes Hong Kong IPO", "url": "https://www.caixinglobal.com/2026-03-03/galbot-raises-362-million-in-fresh-funding-eyes-hong-kong-ipo-102418742.html", "publisher": "Caixin Global" }, { "title": "Galbot brings in $300M to scale mobile manipulator deployments", "url": "https://www.therobotreport.com/galbot-brings-in-300m-to-scale-mobile-manipulator-deployments/", "publisher": "The Robot Report" }, { "title": "China's GALBOT Raises Record $150 Million in Humanoid Robotics, Eyes Industrial Rollout with CATL, Bosch", "url": "https://en.tmtpost.com/post/7605038", "publisher": "TMTPost" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Galbot (Beijing Galbot Co., Galaxy General Robotics) was founded in May 2023 by Wang He, a Peking University researcher with a Stanford doctorate. It is a Beijing embodied-AI company rather than a bipedal humanoid maker: its G1 has a human-like torso, two arms and a wheeled base, and is sold for shelf stocking, picking, delivery and packaging.\n\nThe money has come fast. Galbot raised USD 153 million in June 2025 at a valuation above USD 1 billion, then more than USD 300 million in December 2025 at USD 3 billion post-money, with CATL, GGV and CICC among the investors; The Robot Report put cumulative funding at about USD 800 million. In March 2026 Caixin reported a further CNY 2.5 billion (USD 362 million) from the National AI Industry Investment Fund, Citic, Bank of China, SAIC and a China Mobile vehicle, and said Galbot was preparing a Hong Kong listing.\n\nOn deployments Galbot says its unmanned Galbot Stores run in more than 30 Chinese cities, that G1 units have worked warehouses around the clock for over a year, and that it has thousands of cumulative orders through partners including CATL, Bosch, Toyota, Hyundai and Great Wall Motor. These are company figures; no audited unit count or revenue has been published, and the headcount is not disclosed." }, { "slug": "generalist-ai", "name": "Generalist AI", "aliases": [ "Generalist" ], "country": "US", "city": "San Mateo, California", "founded": "2024", "founders": [ "Pete Florence", "Andy Zeng", "Andrew Barry" ], "type": "ecosystem", "website": "https://generalistai.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [], "summary": "Generalist AI builds embodied foundation models trained on very large real-world manipulation datasets, and released GEN-0 in October 2025, trained on over 270,000 hours of manipulation data. It supplies models rather than robots.", "sources": [ { "title": "Generalist AI", "url": "https://generalistai.com/", "date": null, "publisher": "Generalist AI" }, { "title": "Generalist raises $400M to scale its general-purpose AI models", "url": "https://www.therobotreport.com/generalist-raises-400m-to-scale-its-general-purpose-ai-models/", "publisher": "The Robot Report" }, { "title": "Accelerating the Next Phase of Physical AI", "url": "https://generalistai.com/blog/accelerating-the-next-phase-of-physical-ai", "publisher": "Generalist AI" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Generalist AI is a San Mateo, California company founded in 2024 by Pete Florence, its CEO, Andy Zeng, chief scientist, and Andrew Barry, CTO. It does not build robots. Its business is training what it calls embodied foundation models on very large sets of real manipulation data and licensing them to run on other people's arms, hands and humanoids.\n\nThe first public model, GEN-0, came out in November 2025 with a claim that robot learning follows scaling laws like language models. GEN-1 followed in April 2026, trained from scratch on what the company says is half a million hours of real-world data, with a claimed 99 percent success rate on tasks where earlier models reached 64 percent and about an hour of robot data needed per new task. GEN-1.5, announced on 19 August 2026, is pitched as a one-shot learner from as little as 12 seconds of demonstration. These numbers are the company's own.\n\nOn 4 June 2026 it announced a 400 million US dollar round led by Radical Ventures, with 8VC, Union Square Ventures, Hanabi Capital and Norwest joining and Nvidia's NVentures, Boldstart, Spark Capital, Bezos Expeditions and NFDG returning, taking total funding past 500 million US dollars. It has named no paying customers or deployments, and no headcount or valuation has been published." }, { "slug": "dlr", "name": "German Aerospace Center (DLR), Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics", "aliases": [ "DLR RM" ], "country": "DE", "city": "Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany", "founded": "1969", "founders": [], "type": "research-institute", "website": "https://www.dlr.de/en/rm", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "dlr-rollin-justin", "dlr-toro" ], "summary": "DLR's Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics developed the lightweight torque-controlled arm technology behind KUKA's LBR and applied it to the humanoids Rollin' Justin and TORO, and to space telerobotics experiments with the ISS.", "sources": [ { "title": "TORO", "url": "https://www.dlr.de/en/rm/research/robotic-systems/humanoids/toro", "date": null, "publisher": "DLR" }, { "title": "Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics", "url": "https://www.dlr.de/en/rm", "publisher": "DLR" }, { "title": "History of the institute", "url": "https://www.dlr.de/en/rm/about-us/institute/history", "publisher": "DLR" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "The Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics is a research institute of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) at Oberpfaffenhofen near Munich, not a company. It grew out of DLR's work on space teleoperation and six-axis input devices in the late 1970s (the SpaceMouse control ball was patented in 1982), flew the ROTEX robot experiment on the Space Shuttle in 1993 and built its first impedance-controlled lightweight arm, LBR I, in 1995. The third generation LBR was licensed to KUKA in 2004 and became the basis of KUKA's LBR line. Gerd Hirzinger led the institute for decades; Alin Albu-Schäffer took over in 2012. Its new building, occupied in 2015 and 2016, is sized for 300 staff and 80 students.\n\nIts humanoids are research platforms and have never been products. Work on Justin began in 2006 and the wheeled Rollin' Justin was shown at Automatica in 2008. TORO, a 1.74 m, 76 kg biped with 39 degrees of freedom and torque sensors in almost every joint, was first presented in 2013 and is used for walking, balancing and multi-contact control research.\n\nThe institute's main industrial impact has been through licences and spin-offs: it lists 14 to 15, including Agile Robots, founded in 2018 by former DLR staff, and Roboception." }, { "slug": "google-deepmind", "name": "Google DeepMind", "aliases": [ "DeepMind" ], "country": "GB", "city": "London, United Kingdom", "founded": "2010", "founders": [ "Demis Hassabis", "Shane Legg", "Mustafa Suleyman" ], "type": "big-tech", "website": "https://deepmind.google", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": "NASDAQ: GOOGL (Alphabet)", "robots": [], "summary": "Google DeepMind develops the Gemini Robotics family of vision-language-action models (Gemini Robotics in March 2025, On-Device in June 2025, Gemini Robotics 1.5 and ER 1.5 in September 2025) and partners with Apptronik (since December 2024) and Boston Dynamics (from 2026) to run them on humanoids.", "sources": [ { "title": "Gemini Robotics", "url": "https://deepmind.google/models/gemini-robotics/", "date": null, "publisher": "Google DeepMind" }, { "title": "Gemini Robotics", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_Robotics", "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "Google DeepMind says Gemini Robotics 2 enables full body control", "url": "https://www.therobotreport.com/google-deepmind-says-gemini-robotics-2-enables-full-body-control/", "publisher": "The Robot Report" }, { "title": "Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots", "url": "https://deepmind.google/blog/gemini-robotics-2-brings-whole-body-intelligence-to-robots/", "publisher": "Google DeepMind" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Google DeepMind is Alphabet's AI research arm, built on the London lab founded in 2010 by Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman and owned by Google since 2014. It does not build robot hardware. Its role in humanoids is to supply the models that other companies' robots run on, which makes it a supplier and research partner rather than a maker.\n\nThe Gemini Robotics line started on 12 March 2025 with a vision-language-action model and a separate embodied reasoning model, Gemini Robotics ER. Gemini Robotics On-Device followed on 24 June 2025, and 1.5 versions of both models came later in 2025. On 30 July 2026 DeepMind announced Gemini Robotics 2, ER 2 and On-Device 2, demonstrated on Apptronik's Apollo 2 walking, crouching and shelving objects and on a two-arm Franka setup. DeepMind says the model can adapt to a new robot body in a few hours and that it works with more than 100 trusted testers.\n\nHardware partners named on the model page are Agile Robots, Apptronik and Boston Dynamics. Apptronik has been a strategic partner since December 2024 and Boston Dynamics said at CES in January 2026 that Gemini Robotics would go into Atlas, with DeepMind receiving Atlas units in 2026. No DeepMind-powered humanoid is in commercial service; everything public so far is research demos and pilots." }, { "slug": "hanson-robotics", "name": "Hanson Robotics", "aliases": [ "Hanson" ], "country": "HK", "city": "Hong Kong", "founded": "2007", "founders": [ "David Hanson" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://www.hansonrobotics.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "grace-hanson", "sophia" ], "summary": "Hanson Robotics is the Hong Kong company behind Sophia, the expressive-face humanoid, and the healthcare-oriented Grace.", "sources": [ { "title": "Hanson Robotics official site", "url": "https://www.hansonrobotics.com", "date": null, "publisher": "Hanson Robotics" }, { "title": "Hanson Robotics", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanson_Robotics", "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "Sophia the Robot Makers Hanson Robotics to Mass Produce Thousands of Humanoid Machines", "url": "https://www.newsweek.com/sophia-robot-makers-hansen-robotics-mass-produce-thousands-humanoid-machines-1564115", "publisher": "Newsweek" }, { "title": "Sophia Robot 2026: What It Is, Price & What Happened to Her", "url": "https://blog.robozaps.com/b/sophia-review", "publisher": "RoboZaps" }, { "title": "David Hanson, Sophia Robot Founder, appointed Executive Advisor of WorkFar Robotics", "url": "https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/david-hanson-sophia-robot-founder-appointed-executive-advisor-of-workfar-robotics-302241000.html", "publisher": "PR Newswire" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Hanson Robotics was set up in 2007 in Dallas, Texas, by robot designer David Hanson, builder of the Philip K. Dick android, and moved to Hong Kong Science Park in 2013. Its selling point is Frubber, a patented elastomer skin for expressive faces, not walking or manipulation. Earlier robots included Albert Einstein HUBO, Han and Jules; the company's site counts just over 30 robots built in its whole history.\n\nSophia, unveiled in 2016, made the company famous through television and a widely mocked grant of honorary Saudi citizenship in 2017; researchers including Yann LeCun said the presentations overstated scripted software with a face. In January 2021 it announced mass production of four models, aiming at thousands of units that year, and launched Grace, a nurse-style robot, through the Awakening Health venture with SingularityNET. No volume production followed, and by 2026 Grace had been folded into the Sophia platform as a configuration and the venture's domain was parked.\n\nA crowdfunded Little Sophia toy raised USD 481,139 from 2,685 backers in 2019 with delivery promised that December; by mid 2026 none had shipped and the target was a prototype in the third quarter of 2026. Hanson took an advisory role at WorkFar Robotics in September 2024. Sophia is still hired out for appearances and sold to research buyers on inquiry." }, { "slug": "hexagon", "name": "Hexagon AB (Hexagon Robotics)", "aliases": [ "Hexagon Robotics" ], "country": "SE", "city": "Stockholm, Sweden", "founded": "1992", "founders": [], "type": "conglomerate", "website": "https://hexagon.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": 24000, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": "Nasdaq Stockholm: HEXA B", "robots": [ "hexagon-aeon" ], "summary": "Hexagon, the Swedish measurement and software group, formed a robotics division and unveiled the AEON humanoid in June 2025 for industrial inspection and material handling, built on Nvidia platforms.", "sources": [ { "title": "Hexagon Robotics", "url": "https://hexagon.com/company/divisions/robotics", "date": null, "publisher": "Hexagon" }, { "title": "Hexagon AB", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexagon_AB", "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "Hexagon launches AEON humanoid robot for industrial applications", "url": "https://www.therobotreport.com/hexagon-launches-aeon-humanoid-robot-for-industrial-applications/", "publisher": "The Robot Report" }, { "title": "Hexagon Robotics and Schaeffler deploy a fleet of AEON humanoids", "url": "https://robotics.hexagon.com/hexagon-robotics-and-schaeffler-deploy-a-fleet-of-aeon-humanoids/", "publisher": "Hexagon Robotics" }, { "title": "Hexagon launches AEON, a humanoid built for industry", "url": "https://hexagon.com/company/newsroom/press-releases/2025/hexagon-launches-aeon-a-humanoid-built-for-industry", "publisher": "Hexagon" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Hexagon AB is a Stockholm-listed industrial measurement and software group (Nasdaq Stockholm: HEXA B) with roots in a 1970 holding company. Wikipedia gives 2025 revenue of EUR 3.7 billion and about 24,000 employees. Long-time CEO Ola Rollen is now chairman and Anders Svensson became CEO in July 2025; in September 2025 the group agreed to sell its design and engineering software business, including MSC Software, to Cadence for EUR 2.7 billion.\n\nRobotics is a new division, led by president Arnaud Robert. Its humanoid, AEON, was unveiled on 17 June 2025 at HxGN LIVE in Las Vegas. It walks on legs that end in wheels, swaps its own batteries and carries Hexagon's metrology sensors, with Nvidia Isaac GR00T models, Microsoft Azure and maxon actuators supplied by partners. The pitch is machine tending, part inspection and reality capture in factories rather than general-purpose labour.\n\nThe first pilots were with bearing maker Schaeffler and Swiss aircraft builder Pilatus in 2025. On 22 April 2026 Hexagon and Schaeffler said the pilot had been completed and that Schaeffler intends to deploy at least 1,000 AEON units across its plants by 2032, while supplying its own actuators to the robot. That is a plan, not a purchase order, and no delivered unit count or price has been published." }, { "slug": "hitachi", "name": "Hitachi", "aliases": [ "Hitachi Ltd" ], "country": "JP", "city": "Tokyo", "founded": "1910", "founders": [ "Namihei Odaira" ], "type": "conglomerate", "website": "https://www.hitachi.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": "TYO: 6501", "robots": [ "hitachi-emiew" ], "summary": "Hitachi developed the EMIEW wheeled service humanoids between 2005 and 2016, including airport guide trials at Haneda.", "sources": [ { "title": "Hitachi", "url": "https://www.hitachi.com", "date": null, "publisher": "Hitachi" }, { "title": "EMIEW", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMIEW", "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "Humanoid Robot \"EMIEW3\" and Robotics IT Platform for Customer Services", "url": "https://www.hitachi.com/en/press/articles/2016/04/0408/", "publisher": "Hitachi" }, { "title": "Customer Service Robot, EMIEW3 Edges Closer to Commercialization after PoC Testing", "url": "https://www.hitachihyoron.com/rev/archive/2017/r2017_04/eC_EDGE_3/index.html", "publisher": "Hitachi Review" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Hitachi is a Tokyo industrial conglomerate founded in 1910 by Namihei Odaira and listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Humanoids have only ever been a small research line inside it, and the company is included here for the EMIEW family, not for any current product.\n\nThe first EMIEW appeared in 2005: a 130 cm, 70 kg wheeled robot with 14 degrees of freedom and a top speed of 6 km/h, shown as a pair named Pal and Chum with a vocabulary of about 100 words. EMIEW2, announced in 2007, shrank the design to 80 cm and 13 kg. EMIEW3, announced on 8 April 2016, was 90 cm and 15 kg, could get up after a fall and was paired with a cloud 'remote brain' platform so that one operator could watch several robots at once.\n\nThe only documented use was a proof-of-concept run by Hitachi's Building Systems unit with Japan Airport Terminal at Haneda's domestic Terminal 2 from September 2016, testing Japanese and English guidance in a noisy hall. Hitachi's own 2017 review said it would step up work toward commercialisation but set no date, and no EMIEW product, price or sale has been published since. The programme should be read as a finished trial rather than an active humanoid effort." }, { "slug": "hiwonder", "name": "Hiwonder", "aliases": [], "country": "CN", "city": "Shenzhen", "founded": "2015", "founders": [], "type": "supplier", "website": "https://www.hiwonder.com/", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "hiwonder-tonypi-pro", "hiwonder-tonybot" ], "summary": "Shenzhen maker of educational robot kits. Its TonyPi line is one of the most widely used classroom humanoid platforms in the world.", "sources": [ { "title": "Hiwonder humanoid robots", "url": "https://www.hiwonder.com/collections/humanoid-robot", "date": null, "publisher": "Hiwonder" }, { "title": "Hiwonder", "url": "https://robocraze.com/pages/hiwonder", "publisher": "Robocraze" }, { "title": "幻尔科技Hiwonder简介", "url": "https://www.cnpp.cn/pinpai/4115524.html", "publisher": "CNPP" }, { "title": "深圳市幻尔科技有限公司", "url": "https://www.qcc.com/firm/249b29d6ab1cf7f68a440e4ebc686f0b.html", "publisher": "Qichacha" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Shenzhen Hiwonder Technology Co., Ltd. (幻尔科技) is a privately held maker of educational robot kits registered in Shenzhen on 9 January 2015, with its office in the COFCO Business Park in Bao'an district and subsidiaries in Hong Kong and Singapore. Company registry data list Zhang Chenyang as legal representative and registered capital of CNY 5.56 million, which puts it in the small-company bracket rather than among the funded humanoid startups. It sells directly through its own web shop and through resellers such as Alibaba, Tindie and Robocraze.\n\nThe product range is built around serial bus servos and runs from robotic arms and ROS cars to robot dogs and small humanoids. The humanoid line is the TonyPi family: TonyPi and TonyPi Pro are small servo-driven bipeds built on a Raspberry Pi 4B or 5 with a camera and IMU, programmed in Blockly, Scratch, Python or C, and sold as classroom and maker kits. TonyPi Pro adds voice interaction and large-model chat features.\n\nHiwonder's importance to the humanoid field is as a volume educational supplier, not as a developer of working robots. A reseller profile claims use in more than 2,000 schools across over 80 countries and over 300,000 teachers and students; the company's Chinese profile claims more than 50 patents. Neither headcount nor revenue is published." }, { "slug": "honda", "name": "Honda", "aliases": [ "Honda Motor Co" ], "country": "JP", "city": "Tokyo", "founded": "1948", "founders": [ "Soichiro Honda", "Takeo Fujisawa" ], "type": "automaker", "website": "https://global.honda", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": "TYO: 7267, NYSE: HMC", "robots": [ "asimo", "honda-e-series", "honda-p2", "honda-p3" ], "summary": "Honda ran the most influential corporate humanoid program of the 1990s and 2000s, from the secret E series through P2 and ASIMO, before ending ASIMO development in 2018.", "sources": [ { "title": "Honda robotics history", "url": "https://global.honda/innovation/robotics/robot-development-history.html", "date": null, "publisher": "Honda" }, { "title": "ASIMO", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASIMO", "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "Honda Avatar Robot", "url": "https://global.honda/en/tech/Avatar_robot/", "publisher": "Honda" }, { "title": "Honda's Robotics Ambitions Are Taking Shape After ASIMO", "url": "https://www.eweek.com/news/apac-japan-honda-robotics-after-asimo/", "publisher": "eWeek" }, { "title": "P2, the origin of ASIMO, recognized globally as a milestone in humanoid robotics", "url": "https://global.honda/en/stories/025.html", "publisher": "Honda" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Honda Motor Co., founded in 1948 by Soichiro Honda and Takeo Fujisawa and listed in Tokyo and New York, funded humanoid research internally for longer than anyone else, starting in secret in 1986 with the E series of walking test rigs (E0 to E6, 1986 to 1993), followed by the P series (P1 to P3, 1993 to 1997). P2, unveiled in 1996, walked with its own on-board power and no tether, which set the template for the field.\n\nASIMO followed in October 2000: 130 cm tall, 54 kg, with 20 units of the first model built by 2002. The 2011 version ran at 9 km/h with 57 degrees of freedom. ASIMO never became a product; it was used for demonstrations, shows and museums. In July 2018 Honda said it would stop developing and producing ASIMO and in March 2022 retired it from public duty, shifting to remotely operated avatar robots.\n\nThe successor is the Honda Avatar Robot, a teleoperated upper body with a wire-driven 16-joint hand that Honda says exerts five times ASIMO's fingertip force. At a Tokyo summit in May 2026 it threaded a needle and tightened small fasteners under human control with AI assistance. Honda talks of practical use in the 2030s and has named no product, price, customer or deployment date." }, { "slug": "hugging-face", "name": "Hugging Face", "aliases": [], "country": "US", "city": "New York, New York (Paris office)", "founded": "2016", "founders": [ "Clement Delangue", "Julien Chaumond", "Thomas Wolf" ], "type": "ecosystem", "website": "https://huggingface.co", "status": "active", "employees_est": 250, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": 4500000000, "valuation_date": "2023-08", "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "hugging-face-hopejr" ], "summary": "Hugging Face, the AI model hub, entered robotics with the LeRobot open-source library in 2024, acquired Pollen Robotics in April 2025 and announced the low-cost HopeJR humanoid and Reachy Mini in 2025.", "sources": [ { "title": "Hugging Face", "url": "https://huggingface.co/", "date": null, "publisher": "Hugging Face" }, { "title": "Hugging Face", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugging_Face", "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "Hugging Face to sell open-source robots thanks to Pollen Robotics acquisition", "url": "https://huggingface.co/blog/hugging-face-pollen-robotics-acquisition", "publisher": "Hugging Face" }, { "title": "Hugging Face unveils two new humanoid robots", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/29/hugging-face-unveils-two-new-humanoid-robots/", "publisher": "TechCrunch" }, { "title": "New Humanoid AI Robots Stand Out For Being Affordable & Open Source", "url": "https://www.eweek.com/news/hugging-face-robots-reachy-mini-hopejr/", "publisher": "eWeek" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Hugging Face is the New York company that runs the main public hub for open machine-learning models. It was founded in 2016 by three French entrepreneurs, Clement Delangue, Julien Chaumond and Thomas Wolf. Its Series D in August 2023 raised USD 235 million from Salesforce, Google, Nvidia and others at a USD 4.5 billion valuation; Wikipedia gives about 250 employees and USD 150 million revenue for 2025.\n\nRobotics started in 2024 with LeRobot, an open-source library led by former Tesla Optimus scientist Remi Cadene. On 14 April 2025 Hugging Face bought Pollen Robotics of Bordeaux, founded in 2016 by Inria alumni Matthieu Lapeyre and Pierre Rouanet, maker of the USD 70,000 open-source Reachy 2, of which hundreds had gone to labs in more than 20 countries.\n\nOn 29 May 2025 it announced two cheap open-source machines: HopeJR, a full-size humanoid with 66 actuated degrees of freedom built with The Robot Studio at a target price near USD 3,000, and the Reachy Mini desktop robot, later priced at USD 299 to 499. Delangue said first units would ship by the end of 2025. HopeJR is a kit for hobbyists and researchers, not a working labour robot, and Hugging Face has published no sales figures for it." }, { "slug": "humanoid", "name": "Humanoid", "aliases": [ "Humanoid Robotics (UK)" ], "country": "GB", "city": "London, United Kingdom", "founded": "2024", "founders": [ "Artem Sokolov" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://thehumanoid.ai", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "humanoid-hmnd-01" ], "summary": "Humanoid is a London startup founded in 2024 by investor Artem Sokolov to build the HMND 01 general-purpose humanoid in wheeled and bipedal versions for logistics and manufacturing.", "sources": [ { "title": "Humanoid", "url": "https://thehumanoid.ai/", "date": null, "publisher": "Humanoid" }, { "title": "U.K.-based Humanoid secures $152M in Series A funding", "url": "https://www.therobotreport.com/uk-based-humanoid-secures-152m-in-series-a-funding/", "publisher": "The Robot Report" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Humanoid, registered as SKL Robotics Ltd, was founded in London in 2024 by Artem Sokolov, an entrepreneur and investor who is its CEO. Its first robot, the HMND 01, comes in a wheeled and a bipedal version, both pitched at logistics and manufacturing, with a software stack the company calls KinetIQ for fleet control.\n\nThe product that exists today is the HMND 01 Alpha Wheeled, a two-armed manipulator on a mobile base with a claimed 15 kg payload, 29 degrees of freedom and about four hours of runtime, offered to early access customers; beta units are scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2026 and the biped is still in development. Named pilots include Siemens, an SAP and Martur Fompak automotive logistics trial and Schaeffler, which in May 2026 signed for a deployment of up to 2,000 robots over time. Bosch's robotics subsidiary is contracted to manufacture the wheeled model.\n\nOn 21 July 2026 the company announced a 152 million US dollar Series A at a 1.35 billion US dollar post-money valuation, taking total funding to 270 million US dollars, with Schaeffler and Bosch as strategic investors. It has not disclosed headcount or revenue, and deployment numbers so far come from the company alone." }, { "slug": "humanoid-robots-shanghai", "name": "Humanoid Robots (Shanghai) Co", "aliases": [ "National and Local Co-built Humanoid Robot Innovation Center", "OpenLoong" ], "country": "CN", "city": "Shanghai", "founded": "2023", "founders": [], "type": "research-institute", "website": "https://www.openloong.org.cn", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "qinglong" ], "summary": "The Shanghai national humanoid innovation center develops the open-source Qinglong humanoid and the OpenLoong software ecosystem, and runs a humanoid training ground in Pudong.", "sources": [ { "title": "OpenLoong community", "url": "https://www.openloong.org.cn", "date": null, "publisher": "Humanoid Robots (Shanghai) Co" }, { "title": "Qinglong, China's first full-sized general-purpose humanoid robot unveiled at WAIC 2024", "url": "https://technode.com/2024/07/05/qinglong-chinas-first-full-sized-general-purpose-humanoid-robot-unveiled-at-world-artificial-intelligence-conference-2024/", "publisher": "TechNode" }, { "title": "Overview of the latest development of the six major humanoid robot innovation centers in China", "url": "https://cnmra.com/overview-of-the-latest-development-of-the-six-major-humanoid-robot-innovation-centers-in-china/", "publisher": "CMRA" }, { "title": "Forum champions open source for humanoid robotics boom", "url": "https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202502/24/WS67bc1537a310c240449d6e70.html", "publisher": "China Daily" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Humanoid Robots (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. is a state-backed research company rather than a startup. It was established in December 2023 in Pudong with registered capital of CNY 1 billion (about USD 140 million) as the Shanghai Humanoid Robot Manufacturing Innovation Center, and in May 2024 the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology designated it the National and Local Co-built Humanoid Robot Innovation Center. Xu Bin is general manager and Jiang Lei chief scientist.\n\nIts robot is Qinglong, shown at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference on 4 July 2024 as China's first full-size general-purpose humanoid: 185 cm, 80 kg, 43 active degrees of freedom, 400 Nm peak joint torque and 400 TOPS of onboard compute. At the same event the center launched the OpenLoong community, publishing Qinglong's hardware structure and parameters with software to follow, and Jiang said a new zodiac-named model would follow each year. Later releases include the Suzaku embodied brain and Xuanwu cerebellum models, the Gewu simulation platform built on Unity, and MindLoongGPT, a 7B multimodal model for action generation.\n\nThe center's output is reference designs, open-source code and training infrastructure for Shanghai's humanoid cluster, which includes AgiBot and Fourier. It does not sell robots commercially, and no deployment or unit figures for Qinglong have been published." }, { "slug": "inmoov", "name": "InMoov (Gael Langevin)", "aliases": [ "InMoov project" ], "country": "FR", "city": "Paris", "founded": "2012", "founders": [ "Gael Langevin" ], "type": "ecosystem", "website": "https://inmoov.fr", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "inmoov" ], "summary": "InMoov is an open source community project started by French sculptor Gael Langevin in 2012 that publishes the files for a life size 3D printed humanoid built by makers and schools worldwide.", "sources": [ { "title": "InMoov", "url": "https://inmoov.fr/", "date": null, "publisher": "InMoov" }, { "title": "InMoov", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InMoov", "publisher": "Wikipedia" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "InMoov is not a company. It is a personal project of Gael Langevin, a French sculptor and designer who had spent about 25 years making models and props for brands and who began work on a 3D printed hand in September 2011. He posted the first files on Thingiverse in January 2012 and kept adding parts, so that the hand grew into a forearm, arm, shoulders, torso and head. Everything is released under a Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial licence.\n\nThe design is deliberately modest: every piece fits a hobby printer with a 12 cm cube build area, control runs on Arduino boards and the open-source MyRobotLab software, and Wikipedia puts the cost of a full build at around 1,500 US dollars. The result is a life-size humanoid that can see through small cameras, hear, speak and move its arms and head. The prototype was shown at Maker Faire Rome in 2013, where it drew interest as a base for cheap prosthetics.\n\nInMoov's importance is in how many copies exist rather than in any one of them. It has been built by hobbyists, schools and university labs around the world, and inspired the Bionico and e-NABLE prosthetics projects. There is no revenue, headcount or funding to report." }, { "slug": "inria", "name": "Inria", "aliases": [ "Inria Flowers", "Poppy Project" ], "country": "FR", "city": "Bordeaux (Flowers team)", "founded": "1967", "founders": [], "type": "research-institute", "website": "https://www.inria.fr", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "poppy-humanoid" ], "summary": "The Flowers team at Inria Bordeaux, led by Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, created the open source Poppy Humanoid in 2014 as a platform for research on developmental robotics and for education.", "sources": [ { "title": "Poppy Project", "url": "https://www.poppy-project.org/", "date": null, "publisher": "Poppy Project" }, { "title": "Poppy, the 3-D printed robot set to inspire innovation in classrooms", "url": "https://erc.europa.eu/projects-statistics/science-stories/poppy-3-d-printed-robot-set-inspire-innovation-classrooms", "publisher": "European Research Council" }, { "title": "poppy-project/poppy-humanoid", "url": "https://github.com/poppy-project/poppy-humanoid", "publisher": "GitHub" }, { "title": "Poppy Project: Open-Source Fabrication of 3D Printed Humanoid Robot for Science, Education and Art", "url": "https://flowers.inria.fr/LapeyreetalDI2014.pdf", "publisher": "Inria Flowers" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Inria is France's national research institute for computer science, founded in 1967 and funded by the state. Its place in a humanoid database comes from one team, Flowers at Inria Bordeaux Sud-Ouest, led by Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, which studies developmental robotics: how learning depends on a body. Oudeyer's ERC Starting Grant EXPLORERS (awarded in 2009, EUR 1,572,215) paid for the work.\n\nThe Poppy project started in 2012 as Matthieu Lapeyre's PhD, supervised by Oudeyer and completed in 2014. Poppy Humanoid is a child-sized biped whose skeleton is 3D printed and whose 25 Robotis Dynamixel servos account for about 60 percent of a build cost the project puts at USD 8,000 to 9,000. Hardware is released under Creative Commons BY-SA and software under GPL v3, with a web platform for sharing designs. The team says a skilled builder can assemble one in about seven hours. Cheaper variants followed: Poppy Torso for desks and classrooms, and Ergo Jr, a six-motor arm aimed at schools.\n\nPoppy was never a product with a sales channel of its own and was not designed to do useful work; it is a research and teaching tool used in labs, engineering schools, FabLabs and art projects. Inria has not published counts of robots built or users." }, { "slug": "iit", "name": "Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia", "aliases": [ "IIT" ], "country": "IT", "city": "Genoa, Italy", "founded": "2003", "founders": [], "type": "research-institute", "website": "https://www.iit.it", "status": "active", "employees_est": 1900, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "iit-ergocub", "iit-icub", "iit-walk-man" ], "summary": "The Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia in Genoa created the open-source iCub humanoid, the ergoCub with INAIL and the WALK-MAN disaster-response humanoid, making it Europe's most prolific humanoid research institute.", "sources": [ { "title": "iCub", "url": "https://icub.iit.it/", "date": null, "publisher": "IIT" }, { "title": "Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istituto_Italiano_di_Tecnologia", "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "iCub", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICub", "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "Robot umanoidi per sanita e industria: Iit e Inail lanciano l'iniziativa ergoCub", "url": "https://www.corrierecomunicazioni.it/industria-4-0/robot-umanoidi-per-sanita-e-industria-iit-e-inail-lanciano-liniziativa-ergocub/", "publisher": "CorCom" }, { "title": "The humanoid robot WALK-MAN for supporting emergency response teams", "url": "https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/798389", "publisher": "EurekAlert / IIT" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "The Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia is a state-funded research foundation created by Italian law in 2003 and operating since October 2005, headquartered in Genoa with satellite centres around Italy. It receives about EUR 90 million a year from the government and Wikipedia gives a headcount of roughly 1,900. Giorgio Metta, one of the original iCub designers, is scientific director.\n\nIIT's reputation in humanoids rests on iCub, a child-sized open-source research robot that came out of the EU RobotCub project (EUR 8.5 million, September 2004 to January 2010). It is 104 cm tall, 22 kg, with 53 actuated degrees of freedom, built in Genoa at around EUR 250,000 a copy, and about thirty exist in labs, mostly in Europe. Hardware, software and documentation are released under GPL, which is why so much European humanoid research still runs on it.\n\nTwo later machines extended the line. WALK-MAN, an EU-funded full-size disaster robot, was the only European entry at the June 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge finals and in 2016 inspected earthquake-damaged buildings in Amatrice. ergoCub, announced in March 2021 as a three-year, EUR 5 million project with the workplace-injury insurer INAIL under Daniele Pucci, is a sturdier iCub descendant for hospital and factory work. None of these has been commercialised; IIT builds research platforms, not products." }, { "slug": "k-scale-labs", "name": "K-Scale Labs", "aliases": [], "country": "US", "city": "Palo Alto, California", "founded": "2024", "founders": [ "Benjamin Bolte" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://www.kscale.dev", "status": "defunct", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "k-scale-k-bot", "k-scale-z-bot" ], "summary": "K-Scale Labs is an open-source humanoid company founded in 2024 that publishes the hardware and software of its K-Bot and Z-Bot robots and sells them to developers.", "sources": [ { "title": "K-Scale Labs", "url": "https://www.kscale.dev/", "date": null, "publisher": "K-Scale Labs" }, { "title": "K-Scale Labs Cancels K-Bot Orders, Open-Sources All IP After Funding Fails", "url": "https://www.humanoidsdaily.com/news/k-scale-labs-cancels-k-bot-orders-open-sources-all-ip-after-funding-fails", "publisher": "Humanoids Daily" }, { "title": "K-Scale Labs Launches K-Bot, America's First Open-Source Humanoid Robot", "url": "https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/k-scale-labs-launches-k-bot-americas-first-open-source-humanoid-robot", "publisher": "RS DesignSpark" }, { "title": "Exclusive: Humanoid Robotics Startup K-Scale to Shut Down After Exploring Sale to 1X, Bot Co.", "url": "https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/exclusive-humanoid-robotics-startup-k-scale-shut-exploring-sale-1x-bot-co", "publisher": "The Information" }, { "title": "Palo Alto Humanoid Startup K-Scale Labs Shuts Down", "url": "https://mikekalil.com/blog/k-scale-labs-shuts-down/", "publisher": "Mike Kalil" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "K-Scale Labs was a Palo Alto startup founded in 2024 by Benjamin Bolte, who had worked on robotics at Tesla and Meta Reality Labs. It went through Y Combinator's summer 2024 batch and set out to build US-made humanoids with openly published hardware and software. Sam Altman was reported to have pre-ordered a robot and, via a nonprofit he co-founded, given USD 250,000 to the open-source work.\n\nTwo robots came out of it. The Zeroth Bot, or Z-Bot, a roughly 1.5 foot hobbyist humanoid, was launched on Kickstarter in early 2025 at about USD 999. K-Bot, unveiled in July 2025, was a 1.4 m, 34 kg biped priced at USD 8,999 for the first 100 units, with shipping promised for late 2025. A Founder's Edition batch began shipping and a second batch sold out.\n\nOn 4 November 2025 Bolte told customers the company was ceasing operations, cancelling K-Bot orders, refunding deposits and laying off most staff. He said about USD 400,000 remained, no lead investor could be found for the Series A he had been told 100 pre-orders would unlock, and a sale to 1X and Bot Co. had been explored. All hardware was released under CERN-OHL-S-2.0 and software under MIT. The number of K-Bots delivered was never published." }, { "slug": "kaist", "name": "KAIST", "aliases": [ "Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology", "HUBO Lab" ], "country": "KR", "city": "Daejeon", "founded": "1971", "founders": [], "type": "university", "website": "https://www.kaist.ac.kr", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "drc-hubo", "kaist-hubo" ], "summary": "KAIST's HUBO Lab under Oh Jun-Ho built Korea's first humanoid in 2004 and won the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals with DRC-HUBO+.", "sources": [ { "title": "KAIST", "url": "https://www.kaist.ac.kr", "date": null, "publisher": "KAIST" }, { "title": "HUBO", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HUBO", "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "KAIST", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KAIST", "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "Rainbow Robotics", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_Robotics", "publisher": "Wikipedia" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "KAIST is South Korea's national science and engineering university, set up by the government in 1971 in Daejeon. Wikipedia gives 704 faculty and about 12,300 students for 2024. Its place in humanoid history comes from one lab: the Humanoid Robot Research Center under mechanical engineering professor Oh Jun-ho, who started walking-robot work in 2000.\n\nThe lab's line ran from the legs-only KHR-0 in 2001 through KHR-2 in 2004, the first complete humanoid, to HUBO, released in January 2005 with fingers that moved independently, which ASIMO's did not. Albert HUBO, with a Hanson Robotics Einstein head, followed the same year, and the lighter HUBO 2 in 2008 and 2009. Rainbow Robotics, which Oh founded with his students on 10 February 2011, took over manufacturing; by 2012 it had built 15 HUBO 2 Plus units and sold them to labs in Korea, the US, Japan, Singapore and China.\n\nThe high point was 6 June 2015, when Team KAIST's DRC-HUBO+, which walks but can also kneel and roll on wheels in its shins, won the DARPA Robotics Challenge finals and the USD 2 million prize. KAIST itself does not sell robots; the commercial thread continues at Rainbow Robotics (KOSDAQ 277810), where Samsung Electronics became the largest shareholder in early 2025." }, { "slug": "kawada", "name": "Kawada Robotics", "aliases": [ "Kawada Industries" ], "country": "JP", "city": "Tokyo", "founded": "2013-04", "founders": [], "type": "startup", "website": "https://www.kawadarobot.co.jp", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "kawada-nextage" ], "summary": "Kawada Robotics, spun out of Kawada Industries in 2013, built the HRP humanoids for AIST and sells the NEXTAGE dual-arm industrial humanoid.", "sources": [ { "title": "Kawada Robotics", "url": "https://www.kawadarobot.co.jp", "date": null, "publisher": "Kawada Robotics" }, { "title": "Company profile", "url": "https://www.kawadarobot.co.jp/en/company/", "publisher": "Kawada Robotics" }, { "title": "Kawada Technologies Accelerates Development of Full-Body Humanoid Robots that Work Alongside Humans", "url": "https://www.kawada.jp/global/news/2025/pdf/20251128_press.pdf", "publisher": "Kawada Technologies" }, { "title": "HRP-4 - ROBOTS: Your Guide to the World of Robotics", "url": "https://robotsguide.com/robots/hrp4", "publisher": "IEEE Spectrum Robots Guide" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Kawada Robotics was set up on 1 April 2013 as the robot subsidiary of Kawada Industries, a Tokyo bridge and steel construction firm, under the Kawada Technologies holding company. It has capital of 100 million yen, a head office in Taito, Tokyo and a plant in Haga, Tochigi, and Naohito Shiroma is president. Employee numbers are not published.\n\nThe group's humanoid record goes back to the Japanese trade ministry's Humanoid Robotics Project of fiscal 1998 to 2002, in which Kawada built the hardware for the HRP series with the research institute AIST: HRP-2 in 2002, HRP-3 in 2006 and HRP-4 in 2010. These were research machines sold to labs, not products. The commercial outcome was NEXTAGE, an upper-body dual-arm robot on a fixed base released in 2011 for light assembly next to people; the company said in November 2025 it had passed 1,000 cumulative installations.\n\nOn 28 November 2025 Kawada Technologies announced it was restarting full-body humanoid development for factories and construction sites, refitting an old HRP-2 with new sensors, batteries and GPUs for trials at Kawada Construction's equipment centre and starting joint research with five Japanese universities. It described this as a long-term project with no product date, and no funding or sales targets were given." }, { "slug": "kawasaki", "name": "Kawasaki Heavy Industries", "aliases": [ "Kawasaki Robotics" ], "country": "JP", "city": "Tokyo and Kobe", "founded": "1896", "founders": [ "Shozo Kawasaki" ], "type": "conglomerate", "website": "https://kawasakirobotics.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": "TYO: 7012", "robots": [ "kawasaki-friends", "kawasaki-kaleido" ], "summary": "Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Japan's first industrial robot maker, has developed the Kaleido humanoid since 2015 for disaster response and care work.", "sources": [ { "title": "Kawasaki Robotics", "url": "https://kawasakirobotics.com", "date": null, "publisher": "Kawasaki Heavy Industries" }, { "title": "Humanoid Robot: The Evolution of Kawasaki's Challenge", "url": "https://kawasakirobotics.com/asia-oceania/blog/202511_kaleido/", "publisher": "Kawasaki Robotics" }, { "title": "The Current Goals of Kaleido 9 as a Humanoid Robot", "url": "https://kawasakirobotics.com/asia-oceania/blog/20260316_kaleido9/", "publisher": "Kawasaki Robotics" }, { "title": "Human coexistence type humanoid robot the RHP Friends", "url": "https://kawasakirobotics.com/asia-oceania/blog/story_21/", "publisher": "Kawasaki Robotics" }, { "title": "Kawasaki Heavy Industries", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kawasaki_Heavy_Industries", "publisher": "Wikipedia" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Kawasaki Heavy Industries dates from 15 October 1896, when Shozo Kawasaki founded a shipyard in Kobe. Today it is a listed conglomerate (TYO: 7012) headquartered in Tokyo and Kobe with revenue of JPY 1.5 trillion in the year to March 2022, building ships, trains, aircraft parts, motorcycles and industrial robot arms. The humanoid project is a small research line inside Kawasaki Robotics.\n\nWork on bipeds began in 2015. The first Kaleido was shown at iREX in 2017 at 175 cm and 85 kg, doing stand-up motions and pull-ups on a tether. A 2019 version at 178 cm carried its own battery and electronics for stand-alone operation, and 2023 software added real-time footstep correction when balance is disturbed. In 2021 Kawasaki introduced Friends, a slimmer derivative with soft curved styling meant for homes and care settings, with conversation and gesture interaction developed with Osaka University's Nagai laboratory. The newest generation, Kaleido 9, was presented in late 2025.\n\nKawasaki is candid that this is long-range research. Its own roadmap targets factories and controlled environments around 2030, unstructured environments around 2040 and all tasks around 2050, with near-term use limited to remote-operated hazardous work, patrols, transport and communication support in care. No Kaleido has been sold or deployed with a customer." }, { "slug": "keenon", "name": "Keenon Robotics", "aliases": [ "Keenon" ], "country": "CN", "city": "Shanghai", "founded": "2010", "founders": [ "Li Tong" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://www.keenon.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "keenon-xman-r1" ], "summary": "Keenon Robotics is a Shanghai service-robot maker with a large installed base of delivery robots that launched the XMAN humanoid line in 2025 and pursued a Hong Kong listing.", "sources": [ { "title": "Keenon Robotics official site", "url": "https://www.keenon.com", "date": null, "publisher": "Keenon Robotics" }, { "title": "Back to basics: SoftBank-backed Keenon Robotics takes pragmatic approach with humanoids", "url": "https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3319728/back-basics-softbank-backed-keenon-robotics-takes-pragmatic-approach-humanoids", "publisher": "South China Morning Post" }, { "title": "Keenon Robotics raises $200 million in Series D funding", "url": "https://www.therobotreport.com/keenon-robotics-raises-200-million-in-series-d-funding/", "publisher": "The Robot Report" }, { "title": "China's XMAN-L1 humanoid robot with 42 degree of freedom unveiled", "url": "https://interestingengineering.com/ai-robotics/china-service-humanoid-robot-keenon", "publisher": "Interesting Engineering" }, { "title": "KEENON Robotics Unveils its XMAN-R1 Humanoid Robot", "url": "https://humanoidroboticstechnology.com/industry-news/keenon-robotics-unveils-its-xman-r1-humanoid-robot/", "publisher": "Humanoid Robotics Technology" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Keenon Robotics was founded in Shanghai in 2010 by Li Tong, formerly of Microsoft, and spent its first decade on wheeled service robots: DINERBOT and BUTLERBOT delivery machines for restaurants and hotels, and KLEENBOT cleaners. A USD 200 million Series D in September 2021, led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, CICC Alpha and Prosperity7, took total funding to USD 244 million. By 2025 the company said it had sold over 100,000 robots worldwide and cited IDC data giving it close to 23 percent of the global commercial service robot market. It remains private; a much-discussed Hong Kong listing had not been confirmed as filed by September 2026.\n\nHumanoids arrived late and cautiously. The XMAN-R1 was announced in April 2025 as an interaction platform, and two XMAN-F1 bipeds were shown serving drinks and handling food at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai in July 2025. Li Tong told the South China Morning Post the company did not expect to build an all-purpose robot and that humanoid use would grow task by task.\n\nOn 28 May 2026 Keenon unveiled the XMAN-L1, a 136 cm humanoid with 42 degrees of freedom and Doubao and Tencent language models, pitched at reception, guidance and entertainment. No prices, customers or shipment figures for any XMAN model have been published." }, { "slug": "kepler", "name": "Kepler Robotics", "aliases": [ "Kepler", "Kepler Exploration Robot" ], "country": "CN", "city": "Shanghai", "founded": "2023", "founders": [ "Yang Hua", "Hu Debo" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://www.gotokepler.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "kepler-k1", "kepler-k2-bumblebee" ], "summary": "Kepler is a Shanghai humanoid startup whose Forerunner robots use linear actuators and target a price of about USD 30,000 for industrial customers.", "sources": [ { "title": "Kepler official site", "url": "https://www.gotokepler.com", "date": null, "publisher": "Kepler" }, { "title": "Kepler K2 Bumblebee Debuts at ICRA 2025, Captivating Attendees", "url": "https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/kepler-k2-bumblebee-debuts-at-icra-2025-captivating-attendees-302471503.html", "publisher": "PR Newswire / Kepler" }, { "title": "Kepler debuts fifth-gen K2 humanoid robot to boost industrial automation", "url": "https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/kepler-debuts-k2-humanoid-robot", "publisher": "Interesting Engineering" }, { "title": "Kepler Robot Sells 51% Stake to Hangzhou Kelin at approximately $106.3 Million Valuation", "url": "https://finance.biggo.com/news/2jvSSp4BmHHDnbgy1rv1", "publisher": "BigGo Finance" }, { "title": "A-Share Company Controls Kepler, Is Humanoid Robot M&A Opening?", "url": "https://autonews.gasgoo.com/articles/news/a-share-company-controls-kepler-is-humanoid-robot-ma-opening-2057088159425425408", "publisher": "Gasgoo" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Shanghai Kepler Robotics (Kepler Exploration Robot) was founded in 2023 in Pudong by Yang Hua, who earlier founded appliance maker Chunmi, and Hu Debo, a former Huawei and ZTE executive who is CEO. Its distinguishing engineering choice is planetary roller screw linear actuators rather than rotary joints.\n\nThe first Forerunner K1 appeared in November 2023. The fifth-generation Forerunner K2, nicknamed Bumblebee, was unveiled in October 2024 and shown publicly at ICRA in June 2025: 175 cm, 75 kg, 52 degrees of freedom, 15 kg per arm, a claimed eight hours on a one-hour charge, and a base price of USD 30,000. Kepler says the robot began trials at the SAIC-GM plant in Shanghai in April 2025 and describes it as in limited-series production.\n\nThe finances tell a harder story. Disclosures around a May 2026 deal show 2025 revenue of CNY 4.34 million against a net loss of CNY 66.94 million, and a first quarter of 2026 with CNY 2.64 million revenue and a CNY 17.09 million loss, with pending orders above CNY 47 million. Hangzhou Kelin, a Shanghai-listed grid-equipment company (688611), agreed to raise its stake to 51 percent for up to CNY 300 million, valuing Kepler at about CNY 722 million (USD 106 million)." }, { "slug": "kondo", "name": "Kondo Kagaku", "aliases": [ "Kondo" ], "country": "JP", "city": "Tokyo", "founded": "1964-09", "founders": [ "Kinjiro Kondo" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://kondo-robot.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "kondo-khr-3hv" ], "summary": "Kondo Kagaku is a Japanese servo and hobby-robot maker whose KHR humanoid kits have supplied the ROBO-ONE competition scene since 2004.", "sources": [ { "title": "Kondo Kagaku", "url": "https://kondo-robot.com", "date": null, "publisher": "Kondo Kagaku" }, { "title": "KO PROPO", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KO_PROPO", "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "KHR-1", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHR-1", "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "Kondo Kagaku", "url": "https://kondo-robot.com/", "publisher": "Kondo Kagaku" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Kondo Kagaku is a small family firm in Arakawa, Tokyo, founded on 1 September 1964 by Kinjiro Kondo. Its main business has always been radio control gear for model cars under the KO Propo brand, where it claims 32 IFMAR world titles and introduced the pistol-grip transmitter with the Expert EX-1 in 1982. Wikipedia lists 24 employees. It is privately held and publishes no revenue figures.\n\nIts place in humanoid history rests on the KHR-1, released in June 2004 at 128,000 yen (about 1,600 US dollars in the United States), a 34 cm biped with 17 servos that a hobbyist could assemble and program. It was one of the cheapest programmable walking robots of its day and quickly became the standard platform for the lightweight class of the ROBO-ONE fighting competition in Japan; a KHR-1 won the Robo-One Jr category at RoboGames in 2004. The KHR-2HV and the current KHR-3HV followed, the latter now sold as version 3.1 with 22 servos.\n\nThe company still sells the KHR-3HV, KXR modular kits, multi-legged kits, the RCB-4HV controller and its own KRS, B3M and PMX servo lines, and released the KRS-9300 servo series and a KRC-6FS wireless controller recently. Unit sales have never been disclosed. It is a supplier to the hobby and education market, not a builder of full-size humanoids." }, { "slug": "leju", "name": "Leju Robotics", "aliases": [ "Leju", "Shenzhen Leju Robot Technology" ], "country": "CN", "city": "Shenzhen, Guangdong", "founded": "2016", "founders": [ "Leng Xiaokun" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://www.lejurobot.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [ "Huawei Hubble", "Shenzhen Capital Group" ], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "leju-kuavo" ], "summary": "Leju Robotics builds the Kuavo humanoid line and is part of the Huawei ecosystem, using Huawei's Pangu models and OpenHarmony. It began preparing a domestic IPO in 2025.", "sources": [ { "title": "Leju Robotics official site", "url": "https://www.lejurobot.com", "date": null, "publisher": "Leju Robotics" }, { "title": "Tencent-backed Leju Robot Files for an IPO in Shenzhen", "url": "https://www.tmtpost.com/7997435.html", "publisher": "TMTPost" }, { "title": "Founder of Leju Robotics: bringing robots into every household", "url": "https://ysln.ycwb.com/content/2025-05/04/content_53391794.html", "publisher": "Yangcheng Evening News" }, { "title": "Leju Robot", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leju_Robot", "publisher": "Wikipedia" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Leju (Shenzhen) Robotics Technology was founded in 2016 by Leng Xiaokun, a Harbin Institute of Technology PhD, together with fellow alumni who moved south to Shenzhen. The full-size Kuavo line was unveiled in December 2023 and has moved through Kuavo 3 (2023), Kuavo 4 and 4 Pro (2024) and Kuavo 5 and the wheeled 5-W (2025). The company says over 90 percent of components are Chinese-made and it sits in Huawei's orbit.\n\nSales figures come from the IPO prospectus. Leju sold 32 full-size Kuavo units in 2024 and 577 in 2025; revenue was CNY 54 million in 2023, CNY 56 million in 2024 and CNY 258 million in 2025, with net losses of CNY 41.1 million, CNY 59.2 million and CNY 69.8 million respectively. Omdia and Counterpoint both ranked it fourth worldwide by 2025 shipments. A Foshan plant with partner Dongfang Precision opened in March 2026 with a stated capacity of about 10,000 robots a year, far above current volume.\n\nBloomberg reported a USD 200 million raise in October 2025. On 19 May 2026 Leju filed for a listing on the Shenzhen ChiNext board seeking CNY 2.6 billion; Tencent holds 7.32 percent via a subsidiary and Huawei's Hubble fund is also a shareholder. The company is still loss-making." }, { "slug": "limx-dynamics", "name": "LimX Dynamics", "aliases": [ "LimX", "Zhuji Dynamics" ], "country": "CN", "city": "Shenzhen, Guangdong", "founded": "2022", "founders": [ "Wei Zhang", "Li Zhang" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://www.limxdynamics.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "limx-cl-1", "limx-oli", "limx-tron-1" ], "summary": "LimX Dynamics is a Shenzhen legged-robot company that sells the modular TRON 1 biped and the Oli humanoid to research and developer customers.", "sources": [ { "title": "LimX Dynamics official site", "url": "https://www.limxdynamics.com", "date": null, "publisher": "LimX Dynamics" }, { "title": "LimX Dynamics official site", "url": "https://www.limxdynamics.com/en", "publisher": "LimX Dynamics" }, { "title": "LimX Dynamics Secures $200M Pre-IPO Round, Unveils Fully Autonomous Oli in Uncut Demo", "url": "https://www.humanoidsdaily.com/news/limx-dynamics-secures-200m-pre-ipo-round-unveils-fully-autonomous-oli-in-uncut-demo", "publisher": "Humanoids Daily" }, { "title": "LimX Dynamics $200M Pre-IPO Financing | 15B Yuan Post-Money Valuation", "url": "https://eu.36kr.com/en/p/3893976502287618", "publisher": "36Kr" }, { "title": "'Listing is a must': Chinese humanoid startups are rushing to launch IPOs", "url": "https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/13/chinese-humanoid-startups-ipo-limx-unitree.html", "publisher": "CNBC" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "LimX Dynamics was founded in Shenzhen in January 2022 by Wei Zhang and Li Zhang, the latter a former COO of the autonomous-driving firm WeRide. It began with legged research platforms: the CL-1 biped and TRON 1, a modular robot sold to universities and developers that swaps between point, flat and wheeled feet, now succeeded by TRON 2.\n\nIts humanoids are Oli, a full-size general-purpose model, and Luna, a fabric-covered version aimed at stage and interaction work that launched on 26 May 2026 and, the company says, reached batch deliveries within a month. In July 2026 LimX published one uncut video of Oli crossing a room and doing chores with no teleoperation, calling it the first full-size Chinese humanoid to finish long-horizon home tasks autonomously; it is one take in one room, unreplicated by outsiders. It also ships COSA, an agent operating system at version 0.5, and an open FluxVLA engine.\n\nA USD 200 million Series B closed in February 2026 and a pre-IPO round of about USD 200 million on 14 July 2026 valued the company at CNY 15 billion, about USD 2.2 billion, with IDG Capital, Lens Technology, Stone Venture, SAIC's Shangqi Capital and NIO Capital among investors. LimX claims thousands of orders, over half from overseas, without a delivered-unit figure. A listing is planned." }, { "slug": "magiclab", "name": "MagicLab", "aliases": [ "Magic Atom", "Mofa Yuanzi" ], "country": "CN", "city": "Wuxi, Jiangsu", "founded": "2024-01", "founders": [], "type": "startup", "website": "https://www.magiclab.top", "status": "active", "employees_est": 100, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [ "Dreame Technology" ], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "magiclab-magicbot", "magiclab-z1" ], "summary": "MagicLab is a humanoid and quadruped maker incubated by appliance company Dreame Technology, with MagicBot humanoids piloted in factories.", "sources": [ { "title": "MagicLab official site", "url": "https://www.magiclab.top", "date": null, "publisher": "MagicLab" }, { "title": "MagicLab announces completion of RMB 150 million angel round", "url": "https://www.magiclab.top/en/news/54", "publisher": "MagicLab" }, { "title": "Seeds | MagicLab Officially Announces 500 Million Yuan New Funding", "url": "https://autonews.gasgoo.com/articles/icv/seeds-magiclab-officially-announces-500-million-yuan-new-funding-2031616054575349761", "publisher": "Gasgoo" }, { "title": "MagicLab Humanoid Robots Reach IFA 2026: VLA Models Deployed, Spy Law Applies", "url": "https://www.techtimes.com/articles/326650/20260904/magiclab-humanoid-robots-reach-ifa-2026-vla-models-deployed-spy-law-applies.htm", "publisher": "Tech Times" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "MagicLab (Mofa Yuanzi, legally Magiclab Robotics Technology (Wuxi) Co.) was founded in January 2024 as the robot arm of Dreame Technology, the Suzhou maker of robot vacuums and other appliances. It sits in Wuxi, Jiangsu, and builds both humanoids and quadrupeds, with its own joint modules, reducers, actuators, controllers and a dexterous hand. At the end of 2024 it said it had about 100 staff, more than 80 percent of them in R&D.\n\nOn 25 December 2024 the company announced a CNY 150 million angel round led by Zhuichuang Venture Capital with Yipu Fund, and said mass production would start in 2025 with a next-generation MagicBot due in the first quarter. The line now runs from the full-size MagicBot Gen1 for factory and service tasks to the small, fast MagicBot Z1 for research and education, and a wheeled D1 that MagicLab says works materials handling at Dreame's own plant. A further strategic round of several hundred million yuan was announced in May 2025, and Gasgoo later reported a CNY 500 million round.\n\nThe company's stated plan was several hundred humanoids delivered in 2025 and thousands in 2026, and it showed at IFA in Berlin in September 2026. Most named deployments are inside the Dreame group, which is both incubator and buyer, so outside demand is hard to judge from public information." }, { "slug": "mit", "name": "Massachusetts Institute of Technology", "aliases": [ "MIT", "MIT CSAIL", "MIT Biomimetic Robotics Lab" ], "country": "US", "city": "Cambridge, Massachusetts", "founded": "1861", "founders": [], "type": "university", "website": "https://www.mit.edu", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "cog", "mit-humanoid" ], "summary": "MIT's AI Lab built the Cog humanoid in the 1990s under Rodney Brooks, and the Biomimetic Robotics Lab under Sangbae Kim built the MIT Humanoid in the 2020s from its Cheetah actuator technology.", "sources": [ { "title": "Cog (project)", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cog_(project)", "date": null, "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "The MIT Humanoid Robot", "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.09025", "date": "2021-04", "publisher": "arXiv" }, { "title": "Sangbae Kim", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sangbae_Kim", "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "MIT Biomimetic Robotics Lab", "url": "https://biomimetics.mit.edu/", "publisher": "MIT" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, chartered in 1861 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has produced two humanoids of note, both research machines that never left the campus. The first was Cog, started in 1993 in the AI Lab's Humanoid Robotics Group under Rodney Brooks and Lynn Andrea Stein. Cog was an upper body on a fixed base with moving trunk, head and arms, built on the argument that human-level intelligence must be learned through a body interacting with people. Development stopped by 2003; Marvin Minsky said the money would have been better spent on software. Cog is now in the MIT Museum.\n\nThe second is the MIT Humanoid from the Biomimetic Robotics Lab, which Sangbae Kim ran from 2009 to 2025 and which is best known for the Cheetah quadrupeds and their proprioceptive actuators. A 2021 paper by Chignoli, Kim, Stanger-Jones and Kim laid out the design, two new actuators and a model-predictive controller, with back flips and spinning jumps shown in simulation. Later work added self-collision avoidance with control barrier functions and, in 2025 and 2026, reinforcement learning blended with GPU-parallel MPC and reactive grasping.\n\nKim is on leave at Meta as a robotics architect on its humanoid effort. MIT sells no robots; its contribution is people and methods." }, { "slug": "mentee-robotics", "name": "Mentee Robotics", "aliases": [], "country": "IL", "city": "Herzliya, Israel", "founded": "2022", "founders": [ "Amnon Shashua", "Lior Wolf", "Shai Shalev-Shwartz" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://www.menteebot.com", "status": "acquired", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "mentee-menteebot" ], "summary": "Mentee Robotics is an Israeli humanoid startup founded in 2022 by Mobileye founder Amnon Shashua with AI researchers Lior Wolf and Shai Shalev-Shwartz. It revealed Menteebot in 2024 and a production-intent V3 in January 2025.", "sources": [ { "title": "Mentee Robotics", "url": "https://www.menteebot.com/", "date": null, "publisher": "Mentee Robotics" }, { "title": "Mobileye to acquire Mentee Robotics for $900M in bid to dominate physical AI", "url": "https://www.therobotreport.com/mobileye-to-acquire-mentee-robotics-for-900m-bid-dominate-physical-ai/", "publisher": "The Robot Report" }, { "title": "Mobileye To Acquire Mentee Robotics to Accelerate Physical AI Leadership", "url": "https://www.mobileye.com/news/mobileye-to-acquire-mentee-robotics-to-accelerate-physical-ai-leadership/", "publisher": "Mobileye" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Mentee Robotics was founded in Herzliya, Israel in 2022 by Amnon Shashua, the Mobileye founder who chaired it, Lior Wolf, who became CEO, and Shai Shalev-Shwartz as chief scientist. It came out of stealth in 2024 with a first Menteebot prototype and showed a production-intent V3 version in January 2025. The design choice that sets it apart is camera-only sensing and in-house electric motors, with training done largely in simulation through what the company calls a Real2Sim2Real pipeline.\n\nNothing has been sold. Mobileye's announcement in January 2026 said the first on-site proof-of-concept deployments with customers were expected in 2026, with an experimental manufacturing batch in 2027 and series production and commercial deployment targeted for 2028, and a home version only around the end of the decade.\n\nOn 7 January 2026 Mobileye agreed to buy the company for about 900 million US dollars, roughly 612 million in cash plus up to 26.2 million Mobileye Class A shares, with closing expected in the first quarter of 2026. Because Shashua leads both companies, the deal was handled by a committee of independent directors and Intel, Mobileye's largest shareholder, and he abstained. Mentee now trades as Mentee by Mobileye. Its pre-acquisition funding and headcount were not disclosed." }, { "slug": "midea", "name": "Midea Group", "aliases": [ "Midea" ], "country": "CN", "city": "Foshan, Guangdong", "founded": "1968", "founders": [ "He Xiangjian" ], "type": "conglomerate", "website": "https://www.midea-group.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": "SZSE: 000333, HKEX: 0300", "robots": [ "midea-humanoid" ], "summary": "Midea Group, the appliance maker that owns KUKA, revealed its own humanoid in 2025 and uses it in its factories.", "sources": [ { "title": "Midea Group official site", "url": "https://www.midea-group.com", "date": null, "publisher": "Midea Group" }, { "title": "Midea Sets Timeline for Humanoid Robot Rollout: Factory Integration in May, Retail Launch Mid-Year", "url": "https://en.tmtpost.com/post/7549549", "publisher": "TMTPost" }, { "title": "Chinese home appliance giant Midea unveils 6-arm robot for factory work", "url": "https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3335721/chinese-home-appliance-giant-midea-unveils-six-arm-robot-factory-work", "publisher": "South China Morning Post" }, { "title": "Midea unveils Miro U, the world's first six-arm wheel-leg humanoid robot", "url": "https://www.gizmochina.com/2025/12/07/midea-miro-u-six-arm-wheel-leg-humanoid-robot-unveiled/", "publisher": "Gizmochina" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Midea Group is a Foshan appliance maker founded in 1968 by He Xiangjian, listed in Shenzhen and Hong Kong. It became a robotics owner by taking control of Germany's KUKA in 2017 and buying out the remaining shareholders in 2022, and it reports a research staff of more than 23,000 with 2024 R&D spending of CNY 16.2 billion, about 4 percent of revenue. The company says its humanoid technology stack is developed in-house.\n\nThe first machine, an industrial humanoid called Meiluo, was announced as a prototype in early 2025 and put to work from May 2025 at Midea's Jingzhou washing machine plant on data collection, equipment maintenance, materials handling and inspection. A bipedal retail series, Meila, was in final testing in late 2025 for a 2026 launch in Midea stores to guide customers, demonstrate products and make coffee.\n\nOn 5 December 2025 Midea unveiled MIRO U, described as a third-generation humanoid: a wheeled base with a humanoid torso and six actuated arms, meant to do three tasks at once. Midea planned to install it at its Wuxi washing machine factory by the end of December 2025 and claimed a 30 percent gain in line changeover efficiency. Unit numbers have not been published, and Midea itself said full industrialisation of humanoids would take at least three to five more years." }, { "slug": "nasa", "name": "NASA (Johnson Space Center)", "aliases": [ "NASA JSC" ], "country": "US", "city": "Houston, Texas", "founded": "1958", "founders": [], "type": "government", "website": "https://www.nasa.gov", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "nasa-robonaut-2", "nasa-valkyrie" ], "summary": "NASA's Johnson Space Center developed Robonaut 2 with General Motors, the first humanoid in space, and the Valkyrie humanoid for the DARPA Robotics Challenge. Its engineers seeded Apptronik and Persona AI.", "sources": [ { "title": "Robonaut", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robonaut", "date": null, "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "Valkyrie (robot)", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valkyrie_(robot)", "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "NASA Humanoid Robot to Be Tested in Australia", "url": "https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/johnson/nasa-humanoid-robot-to-be-tested-in-australia/", "publisher": "NASA" }, { "title": "Industry Insights: Persona.AI's CEO on Building Rugged Humanoids", "url": "https://www.automate.org/robotics/industry-insights/from-moonshots-to-ship-docks", "publisher": "Association for Advancing Automation" }, { "title": "Apptronik Developing General-Purpose Humanoid Robot", "url": "https://spectrum.ieee.org/humanoid-robot-apptronik-apollo", "publisher": "IEEE Spectrum" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "NASA's humanoid work sits in the dexterous robotics team at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, now led by Shaun Azimi. It began in the late 1990s with Robonaut 1, a DARPA-partnered upper-body robot that never flew. In 2007 General Motors signed a Space Act Agreement to co-develop a successor, and Robonaut 2 was unveiled in February 2010.\n\nR2 launched to the International Space Station on STS-133 on 24 February 2011, the first US-built robot on the station. Legs arrived in April 2014, but the robot developed electrical faults and came home in May 2018; it was never relaunched and is now a museum piece. Valkyrie (R5), a 1.87 m, 129 kg biped with 44 degrees of freedom, was built between October 2012 and July 2013 for the DARPA Robotics Challenge, where it scored no points at the December 2013 trials after a network fault. In 2015 NASA lent units to MIT and Northeastern with USD 500,000 each, and in July 2023 sent one to Woodside Energy in Perth under a reimbursable agreement to study remote caretaking of offshore facilities.\n\nNASA has no production humanoid; its lasting output is people and actuator know-how: Valkyrie team member Nick Paine co-founded Apptronik, and former Robonaut lead Nic Radford founded Persona AI." }, { "slug": "naver-labs", "name": "Naver Labs", "aliases": [ "NAVER LABS" ], "country": "KR", "city": "Seongnam", "founded": "2017", "founders": [], "type": "big-tech", "website": "https://www.naverlabs.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "naver-ambidex" ], "summary": "Naver Labs is the robotics and AI research subsidiary of Korean internet company Naver, known for the AMBIDEX dual-arm robot and the robot-friendly 1784 headquarters.", "sources": [ { "title": "Naver Labs", "url": "https://www.naverlabs.com", "date": null, "publisher": "Naver Labs" }, { "title": "NAVER LABS", "url": "https://www.naverlabs.com/en/", "publisher": "Naver Labs" }, { "title": "NAVER LABS - AMBIDEX", "url": "https://www.naverlabs.com/en/ambidex", "publisher": "Naver Labs" }, { "title": "Naver's 1784 building showcases human-robot interaction", "url": "https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/tech/2024/03/129_354467.html", "publisher": "The Korea Times" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Naver Labs is the research subsidiary of Naver, South Korea's dominant search and internet company, spun out as a separate unit in 2017 and based in Seongnam, south of Seoul. It describes itself as Naver's future technology institute, with robotics, physical AI, spatial intelligence, digital twins and AR as its subjects, and it does not sell robots as products; its work feeds Naver's own buildings and services and a growing list of licensing projects.\n\nIts humanoid-adjacent hardware is AMBIDEX, a two-armed robot with cable-driven joints built with Korea Tech and first shown in 2017. It has since gone through a fan-handling challenge at IROS 2018, a 5G teleoperation demonstration in 2019, haptic teaching in 2020 and hardware and software upgrades in 2021, and remains a research platform for safe human-contact manipulation rather than a full humanoid with legs.\n\nThe company's real deployment is 1784, Naver's second headquarters completed in July 2022, where around 110 wheeled Rookie robots deliver parcels and coffee under a cloud brain called ARC, using a robot-only elevator. In July 2026 Naver Labs said the ARC system and 1784 approach were being applied to the Tokyo Midtown Yaesu building in Japan, and in September 2026 it announced FLOW, a no-code platform for building robot services. No standalone revenue or headcount is published for the subsidiary." }, { "slug": "neura-robotics", "name": "Neura Robotics", "aliases": [ "NEURA" ], "country": "DE", "city": "Metzingen, Germany", "founded": "2019", "founders": [ "David Reger" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://neura-robotics.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [ "Lingotto", "Vsquared Ventures", "HV Capital", "BlueCrest Capital", "C4 Ventures" ], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "neura-4ne-1" ], "summary": "Neura Robotics is Germany's main humanoid startup, founded in 2019 by David Reger in Metzingen. It builds cognitive industrial robots and the 4NE-1 humanoid, raised a EUR 120 million Series B in January 2025 led by Lingotto, and was reported to be raising around EUR 1 billion in 2025 and 2026.", "sources": [ { "title": "Neura Robotics", "url": "https://neura-robotics.com/", "date": null, "publisher": "Neura Robotics" }, { "title": "NEURA Robotics Announces Record Series C of up to $1.4B", "url": "https://neura-robotics.com/record-series-c/", "publisher": "Neura Robotics" }, { "title": "Robotics startup backed by Nvidia, Amazon and others raises $1.4B", "url": "https://www.manufacturingdive.com/news/neura-robotics-startup-backed-by-nvidia-amazon-bosch-qualcomm-raises-1b-series-c/822900/", "publisher": "Manufacturing Dive" }, { "title": "NEURA Robotics Secures EUR 120 Million in Series B Funding", "url": "https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250115046478/en/NEURA-Robotics-Secures-%E2%82%AC120-Million-in-Series-B-Funding-to-Propel-Cognitive-and-Humanoid-Robotics-Vision", "publisher": "Business Wire" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Neura Robotics was founded in 2019 by David Reger in Metzingen, a small town south of Stuttgart, and sells what it calls cognitive robots: collaborative arms, mobile platforms and the 4NE-1 humanoid. The company describes 4NE-1 as about 1.75 m tall, roughly 95 kg and with 42 degrees of freedom. It has not published how many 4NE-1 units have been built or delivered, nor named a site where the humanoid does production work. Its industrial partnerships (Bosch, Schaeffler, Dassault Systemes, AWS) are framed as integration and pilot programmes.\n\nMoney has arrived faster than deployments. A EUR 120 million Series B led by Lingotto closed in January 2025. On 10 June 2026 Neura announced a Series C of up to USD 1.4 billion, with Tether, Nvidia, Amazon, Qualcomm, Bosch, Schaeffler, the European Investment Bank, imec.xpand, Lingotto Horizon and InterAlpen Partners among the backers. The phrase up to matters: neither the company nor the press coverage has said how much is committed equity versus conditional tranches, and no valuation was disclosed.\n\nNeura says its order book and deployment pipeline exceed USD 1 billion and that it aims for serial production of millions of robots by 2030, with a network of Neura Gyms training environments. Revenue, headcount and shipped-unit figures have not been published." }, { "slug": "new-technology-coalition", "name": "New Technology Coalition", "aliases": [ "AIDOL developer" ], "country": "RU", "city": "Moscow", "founded": null, "founders": [], "type": "startup", "website": null, "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "aidol" ], "summary": "The New Technology Coalition is the Russian group that unveiled the AIDOL humanoid in Moscow in November 2025.", "sources": [ { "title": "Reuters coverage", "url": "https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/", "date": "2025-11-11", "publisher": "Reuters" }, { "title": "Russia 'human' robot falls on stage during debut", "url": "https://www.newsweek.com/russia-human-robot-falls-stage-during-debut-11031104", "publisher": "Newsweek" }, { "title": "Russia's AIdol Humanoid Robot Takes a Tumble During Moscow Debut", "url": "https://www.humanoidsdaily.com/news/russia-s-aidol-humanoid-robot-takes-a-tumble-during-moscow-debut", "publisher": "Humanoids Daily" }, { "title": "Aidol: the robot that fell, who developed it and with whose money", "url": "https://vc.ru/story/2336596-aidol", "publisher": "vc.ru" }, { "title": "Aidol announces USD 250,000 contract to supply robots to Japan, partner undisclosed", "url": "https://vc.ru/tech/2871054-aidol-zakljuchila-kontrakt-na-postavku-robotov-v-yaponiyu", "publisher": "vc.ru" }, { "title": "Russia's first AI-powered humanoid robot AIDOL collapses during its onstage debut", "url": "https://www.euronews.com/2025/11/13/russias-first-ai-powered-humanoid-robot-aidol-collapses-during-its-onstage-debut", "publisher": "Euronews" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "The New Technology Coalition is a Moscow-based association of Russian robotics firms formed to build a domestic humanoid, headed by Vladimir Vitukhin. Members include Aidol, the entity that owns the robot platform, registered months before the November 2025 launch with Vitukhin as sole owner; Promobot, the Perm service-robot maker of Alexei Yuzhakov, which supplied skin and eyes; and Corporation of Robots VDNKh under Artur Zarkhi. Four state universities contributed work. The coalition says the prototype took no outside private money and has talked of raising USD 30 to 50 million.\n\nThe robot, AIDOL, was presented on 10 and 11 November 2025 at a coalition forum in Moscow. Led on stage by two staff to the theme from Rocky, it took a few short steps, fell face first, shed parts and was covered with a black cloth. Vitukhin blamed lighting and calibration. The claimed specs are 19 facial servos under silicone skin giving at least 12 basic emotions, seven microphones, a 48 volt battery for up to six hours and 77 percent Russian-made components, with a target of 93 percent.\n\nIn April 2026 Aidol announced a USD 250,000 contract to supply robots as receptionists to an unnamed Japanese IT and gaming company, with delivery promised for mid 2026. No delivery had been reported by September 2026." }, { "slug": "noetix", "name": "Noetix Robotics", "aliases": [ "Songyan Dynamics", "Songyan Power" ], "country": "CN", "city": "Beijing", "founded": "2023-09", "founders": [ "Jiang Zheyuan" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://www.noetixrobotics.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "noetix-bumi", "noetix-hobbs", "noetix-n2" ], "summary": "Noetix is a Beijing startup founded by Jiang Zheyuan that sells low-cost humanoids, including the N2 that placed second in the 2025 half marathon and the sub-CNY 10,000 Bumi.", "sources": [ { "title": "Noetix Robotics official site", "url": "https://www.noetixrobotics.com", "date": null, "publisher": "Noetix Robotics" }, { "title": "Noetix Robotics Raises Nearly 1 Billion Yuan After Spring Festival Gala Skit", "url": "https://www.caixinglobal.com/2026-03-02/noetix-robotics-raises-nearly-1-billion-yuan-after-spring-festival-gala-skit-102418646.html", "publisher": "Caixin Global" }, { "title": "After new funding, Noetix Robotics explains how it built a humanoid robot cheaper than an iPhone", "url": "https://technode.com/2025/10/27/after-new-funding-noetix-robotics-explains-how-it-built-a-humanoid-robot-cheaper-than-an-iphone/", "publisher": "TechNode" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Noetix Robotics (Songyan Dynamics Beijing Technology) was founded in September 2023 by Jiang Zheyuan, who was 27 when he left a Tsinghua doctoral programme to start it. The company's bet is the opposite of the industrial humanoid: small, cheap bipeds for schools, hobbyists and entertainment.\n\nThe N2, priced at CNY 39,900, became known when it finished second in the Beijing humanoid half marathon in April 2025 in 3 hours 37 minutes; deliveries began that month and the company said orders passed 2,000. In October 2025 it launched Bumi, a 94 cm, 12 kg robot at CNY 9,998, presented as the first high-performance humanoid under CNY 10,000; TechNode reported more than 100 sold in the first hour and 500 in two days on JD.com. Noetix said it was aiming at 1,000 units a month by late 2025 from plants in Beijing and Changzhou.\n\nMoney has followed the attention. A Pre-B round of nearly CNY 300 million led by Vertex Ventures closed in October 2025, and on 2 March 2026 Caixin reported a Series B of nearly CNY 1 billion (USD 146 million) led by Chendao Capital with CAS Investment and Unity Ventures, the ninth round in under three years, shortly after five Noetix robots appeared in a CCTV Spring Festival Gala skit. Revenue, margins and headcount are not disclosed." }, { "slug": "nvidia", "name": "Nvidia", "aliases": [ "NVIDIA" ], "country": "US", "city": "Santa Clara, California", "founded": "1993", "founders": [ "Jensen Huang", "Chris Malachowsky", "Curtis Priem" ], "type": "big-tech", "website": "https://www.nvidia.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": "NASDAQ: NVDA", "robots": [], "summary": "Nvidia supplies the compute and foundation models used by most Western humanoid makers: the Isaac GR00T family of humanoid foundation models (N1 in March 2025, N1.5 and N1.6 later in 2025), the Jetson Thor onboard computer (generally available August 2025 at USD 3,499 for the developer kit) and Isaac Sim and Cosmos for simulation and synthetic data. It is also an investor in Figure AI and other humanoid startups.", "sources": [ { "title": "Isaac GR00T", "url": "https://developer.nvidia.com/isaac/gr00t", "date": null, "publisher": "Nvidia" }, { "title": "NVIDIA Announces NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot for Academic Research", "url": "https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-open-humanoid-robot-reference-design", "publisher": "Nvidia" }, { "title": "NVIDIA Blackwell-Powered Jetson Thor Now Available, Accelerating the Age of General Robotics", "url": "https://investor.nvidia.com/news/press-release-details/2025/NVIDIA-Blackwell-Powered-Jetson-Thor-Now-Available-Accelerating-the-Age-of-General-Robotics/default.aspx", "publisher": "Nvidia" }, { "title": "GR00T N1.6", "url": "https://research.nvidia.com/labs/gear/gr00t-n1_6/", "publisher": "Nvidia Research" }, { "title": "GitHub - NVIDIA/Isaac-GR00T: NVIDIA Isaac GR00T N1.7", "url": "https://github.com/Nvidia/Isaac-GR00T", "publisher": "GitHub" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Nvidia is the Santa Clara chip company founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem and listed on Nasdaq. It does not build humanoids, but it has positioned itself as the toolmaker for everyone who does: the onboard computer, the simulation software, the synthetic-data models and an open family of robot control models called Isaac GR00T.\n\nThe pieces have arrived steadily. GR00T N1 was released in March 2025 as an open vision-language-action model, followed by N1.5 and N1.6, which folds in the Cosmos Reason vision-language model; the GitHub repository is now at N1.7. Jetson Thor, the Blackwell-based robot computer, went on general sale on 25 August 2025 with a developer kit from 3,499 US dollars and 2,070 FP4 teraflops in a 130 watt envelope, and Nvidia named Agility, Amazon Robotics, Boston Dynamics, Figure and Meta among early adopters.\n\nOn 31 May 2026 it went a step closer to hardware with the Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot, a Unitree H2 Plus body with Sharpa Wave tactile hands and a Thor T5000 module, to be sold by Unitree from late 2026 to research labs such as ETH Zurich and Stanford. Nvidia also invests in humanoid startups, including Figure AI, through its venture arm." }, { "slug": "openai", "name": "OpenAI", "aliases": [], "country": "US", "city": "San Francisco, California", "founded": "2015", "founders": [], "type": "big-tech", "website": "https://openai.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [], "summary": "OpenAI re-established a robotics hardware team in 2024, hired former Meta hardware lead Caitlin Kalinowski, filed trademarks covering humanoid robots in 2025 and has been reported to be developing its own humanoid. It invested in Figure AI (collaboration ended February 2025), 1X and Physical Intelligence.", "sources": [ { "title": "OpenAI", "url": "https://openai.com/", "date": null, "publisher": "OpenAI" }, { "title": "Sam Altman Confirms OpenAI Will Definitely Do a Humanoid", "url": "https://www.humanoidsdaily.com/news/sam-altman-confirms-openai-will-definitely-do-a-humanoid", "publisher": "Humanoids Daily" }, { "title": "Caitlin Kalinowski", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caitlin_Kalinowski", "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "OpenAI hardware chief resigns after AI models deployed on Pentagon's classified networks", "url": "https://interestingengineering.com/ai-robotics/openai-hardware-chief-resigns", "publisher": "Interesting Engineering" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "OpenAI, the San Francisco AI lab founded in 2015 and best known for ChatGPT, has no humanoid robot on the market and has never shown one. It is in this database because of its investments, its hiring and its stated intent.\n\nThe company came back to robots first as an investor, backing Figure AI and 1X Technologies, then as a builder. Caitlin Kalinowski, formerly head of hardware at Oculus and a MacBook design lead at Apple, joined in November 2024 to lead robotics and consumer hardware. Figure ended its OpenAI collaboration after its CEO said OpenAI was not committed enough to physical testing, and Figure now trains its own models. Kalinowski resigned in March 2026, saying OpenAI's Pentagon agreement left too little deliberation over surveillance and lethal autonomy.\n\nIn May 2026 OpenAI set up an internal robotics division under research VP Aditya Ramesh, hiring mechanical engineers for actuator design, sensors and prototyping, with a stated near-term focus on data-centre and infrastructure automation and a longer-term aim of household robots. A second robotics facility in Richmond, California was announced in December 2025. On the Sources podcast in early September 2026 Sam Altman said the company would definitely do a humanoid as well as other form factors. No prototype, timeline or partner for the hardware has been disclosed." }, { "slug": "oregon-state-university", "name": "Oregon State University", "aliases": [ "OSU Dynamic Robotics Laboratory" ], "country": "US", "city": "Corvallis, Oregon", "founded": "1868", "founders": [], "type": "university", "website": "https://oregonstate.edu", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "atrias" ], "summary": "Oregon State's Dynamic Robotics Laboratory under Jonathan Hurst built the ATRIAS biped, whose spring mass design led to the founding of Agility Robotics and the Cassie and Digit robots.", "sources": [ { "title": "Agility Robotics", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agility_Robotics", "date": null, "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "ATRIAS", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATRIAS", "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "Bipedal robot developed at Oregon State learns to run", "url": "https://aihub.org/2021/08/11/bipedal-robot-developed-at-oregon-state-learns-to-run/", "publisher": "AIhub" }, { "title": "Bipedal robot developed at Oregon State makes history by learning to run, completing 5K", "url": "https://news.oregonstate.edu/news/bipedal-robot-developed-oregon-state-makes-history-learning-run-completing-5k", "publisher": "Oregon State University" }, { "title": "OSU spinout Agility Robotics, maker of legged workplace robots, secures $20 million in new investment", "url": "https://news.oregonstate.edu/news/osu-spinout-agility-robotics-maker-legged-workplace-robots-secures-20-million-new-investment", "publisher": "Oregon State University" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Oregon State University, a public university in Corvallis founded in 1868, matters to humanoids through one lab. Jonathan Hurst arrived in 2008 as its first robotics professor and built the Dynamic Robotics Laboratory around one idea: legs should behave like springs and masses, as birds' legs do, not as stiff position-controlled joints.\n\nThe lab's first full biped was ATRIAS, whose name stands for Assume The Robot Is A Sphere. Modelled on ground birds and meant to be the fastest biped in the world, it is described by the university as the first robot to reproduce the dynamics of human walking. It walked outdoors at about 3 mph with handlers in April 2015 and appeared at the DARPA Robotics Challenge finals that June. Its successor Cassie, a pair of legs with no upper body, was developed under a 16-month, USD 1 million DARPA grant. In 2021 Cassie ran 5 km outdoors in just over 53 minutes on a reinforcement-learned controller, with two falls, and in 2022 set a Guinness record for the 100 m by a bipedal robot.\n\nHurst, Damion Shelton and Mikhail Jones founded Agility Robotics as a spin-off to sell Cassie and later build Digit. The lab continues on learned locomotion with Cassie hardware; commercial work moved to the company. OSU itself sells no robots." }, { "slug": "oversonic-robotics", "name": "Oversonic Robotics", "aliases": [], "country": "IT", "city": "Besana in Brianza, Italy", "founded": "2020", "founders": [ "Fabio Puglia", "Paolo Denti" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://www.oversonicrobotics.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": 65, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "oversonic-robee" ], "summary": "Oversonic Robotics is an Italian company that makes the RoBee wheeled cognitive humanoid for industrial and healthcare use, sold in small numbers since 2021.", "sources": [ { "title": "Oversonic Robotics", "url": "https://www.oversonicrobotics.com/", "date": null, "publisher": "Oversonic Robotics" }, { "title": "Oversonic Robotics, Italian humanoid robots focus on healthcare and manufacturing", "url": "https://en.ilsole24ore.com/art/oversonic-robotics-italian-humanoid-robots-target-healthcare-and-manufacturing-AIyh9WKC", "publisher": "Il Sole 24 Ore" }, { "title": "Oversonic Robotics signs humanoid robots supply agreement with STMicroelectronics", "url": "https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/oversonic-robotics-signs-humanoid-robots-supply-agreement-with-stmicroelectronics-302647593.html", "publisher": "PR Newswire / Oversonic Robotics" }, { "title": "STMicroelectronics acquires stake in humanoid robot developer Oversonic Robotics", "url": "https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2026/07/13/stmicroelectronics-acquires-stake-in-humanoid-robot-developer-oversonic-robotics/103263/", "publisher": "Robotics and Automation News" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Oversonic Robotics was founded in 2020 in Besana Brianza, north of Milan, by Fabio Puglia, an astrophysicist turned entrepreneur, and Paolo Denti, former CEO of the giftware company Thun. It now operates from Carate Brianza with sites in Milan and Rovereto and a US office in Ohio. Its December 2025 press release put the headcount at 65, about thirty of them engineers.\n\nRoBee is a wheeled cognitive humanoid launched in 2021 in three versions, R for industry, M for healthcare and F for logistics. Its selling point is certification: CE machinery, CE medical class 1 and a string of ISO standards; the company says RoBee is the only humanoid certified for both industrial and medical use. It has worked in several Italian factories, with hospital pilots alongside.\n\nThe numbers are small but, unusually for this sector, published. Il Sole 24 Ore reported estimated 2025 revenue of EUR 4.5 to 5 million against a negative EBITDA of EUR 5.5 to 6 million, 95 percent of it Italian, with orders from Germany, France and the US. On 22 December 2025 STMicroelectronics signed a supply agreement for RoBee in several plants, starting at its packaging and test fab in Malta, and on 23 June 2026 ST, Fondazione ENEA Tech Biomedical and SpotInvest took stakes in the company. Unit counts are not disclosed." }, { "slug": "pal-robotics", "name": "PAL Robotics", "aliases": [], "country": "ES", "city": "Barcelona, Spain", "founded": "2004", "founders": [ "Francesco Ferro" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://pal-robotics.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": 100, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "pal-kangaroo", "pal-reem", "pal-reem-a", "pal-reem-b", "pal-reem-c", "pal-talos" ], "summary": "PAL Robotics of Barcelona has built humanoids since 2004, from the chess-playing REEM-A to the commercial REEM-C and TALOS research bipeds and the Kangaroo jumping platform. It also sells the TIAGo mobile manipulators and is Europe's longest-running humanoid manufacturer.", "sources": [ { "title": "PAL Robotics", "url": "https://pal-robotics.com/", "date": null, "publisher": "PAL Robotics" }, { "title": "PAL Robotics", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAL_Robotics", "date": null, "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "About us", "url": "https://pal-robotics.com/about-us/", "publisher": "PAL Robotics" }, { "title": "Francesco Ferro | CEO and co-founder | PAL Robotics", "url": "https://www.plantautomation-technology.com/interviews/francesco-ferro-pal-robotics", "publisher": "Plant Automation Technology" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "PAL Robotics was set up in Barcelona in 2004 by Francesco Ferro, a Politecnico di Torino telecoms engineer who remains CEO, as co-founder. The company describes itself as part of the PAL Technology Group of Abu Dhabi, and its first job was a contract for a client in the United Arab Emirates to build a robot that could physically play chess. It remains privately held, with offices in Toulouse and Bari added later, and its about page puts the team at roughly 100 people serving customers in more than 30 countries.\n\nThat chess contract produced REEM-A in 2005, which the company calls Europe's first fully autonomous humanoid biped; by 2006 it walked, played chess with the Hydra engine and recognised faces. REEM-B followed in 2008, the wheeled REEM service robot in 2010, the full-size REEM-C biped in 2013 and the torque-controlled TALOS research humanoid in 2017, later joined by the Kangaroo jumping biped. Its volume products are not humanoids but the TIAGo mobile manipulator, TIAGo Pro and the ARI social robot.\n\nPAL sells research platforms to universities and EU projects in small numbers; it has never published total robots delivered, revenue or funding, and no venture rounds are on record. It is the longest-running humanoid builder in Europe, but a small one." }, { "slug": "persona-ai", "name": "Persona AI", "aliases": [], "country": "US", "city": "Houston, Texas", "founded": "2024", "founders": [ "Nic Radford", "Jerry Pratt", "Jide Akinyode" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://www.personainc.ai", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "persona-ai-humanoid" ], "summary": "Persona AI builds ruggedised humanoids for shipbuilding and heavy industry, founded in 2024 by Nic Radford (NASA Valkyrie, Nauticus Robotics) and Jerry Pratt (IHMC). It announced a partnership with HD Hyundai shipbuilding units in 2025.", "sources": [ { "title": "Persona AI", "url": "https://www.personainc.ai/", "date": null, "publisher": "Persona AI" }, { "title": "Persona AI raises $27M to develop humanoid robots for shipyards", "url": "https://www.therobotreport.com/persona-ai-raises-27m-develops-purpose-built-humanoid-robots-shipyards/", "publisher": "The Robot Report" }, { "title": "Persona AI expands at the Ion, inks deal to deploy humanoid robots", "url": "https://houston.innovationmap.com/humanoid-robots-persona-ai-2671925407.html", "publisher": "InnovationMap" }, { "title": "Houston's Persona AI helping to build robots to work in shipyards", "url": "https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/trending/article/persona-ai-humanoid-robots-shipyards-20319212.php", "publisher": "Houston Chronicle" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Persona AI is a Houston startup founded in 2024 by three people with long robotics records: CEO Nic Radford, who spent 15 years at NASA's Dexterous Robotics Lab and led the Valkyrie humanoid before founding Nauticus Robotics; CTO Jerry Pratt, formerly of IHMC and chief technology officer at Figure AI; and COO Jide Akinyode, previously Nauticus's vice president of engineering. The company works from the Ion innovation district in Houston.\n\nIts pitch is a rugged humanoid for shipyards and heavy manufacturing rather than warehouses, sold under a robotics-as-a-service model. The anchor deal is a memorandum of understanding signed in spring 2025 with HD Korea Shipbuilding & Offshore Engineering, HD Hyundai Robotics and the Korean integrator Vazil Company to develop humanoids for welding in shipyards. The stated schedule is prototypes by the end of 2026, then field testing and commercial deployment from 2027. No delivery or unit count has been published.\n\nFunding is early-stage. An oversubscribed pre-seed of USD 27 million was announced on 17 May 2025, co-led by Unity Growth and Tides Ventures with Mirae Asset Group and a long list of smaller funds; a Houston Chronicle report later put total pre-seed money at USD 42 million. Headcount and revenue have not been published." }, { "slug": "physical-intelligence", "name": "Physical Intelligence", "aliases": [ "PI", "π" ], "country": "US", "city": "San Francisco, California", "founded": "2024", "founders": [ "Karol Hausman", "Sergey Levine", "Chelsea Finn", "Brian Ichter", "Lachy Groom" ], "type": "ecosystem", "website": "https://www.pi.website", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": 5600000000, "valuation_date": "2025-11", "key_investors": [ "CapitalG", "Thrive Capital", "Lux Capital", "Bezos Expeditions", "OpenAI", "Khosla Ventures", "Sequoia" ], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [], "summary": "Physical Intelligence develops general-purpose robot foundation models (pi0 in October 2024, pi0.5 in April 2025, pi-star-0.6 in November 2025) that are trained across many robot types. It raised USD 400 million at USD 2.4 billion in November 2024 and USD 600 million at USD 5.6 billion in November 2025.", "sources": [ { "title": "Physical Intelligence", "url": "https://www.physicalintelligence.company/", "date": null, "publisher": "Physical Intelligence" }, { "title": "Physical Intelligence", "url": "https://www.pi.website/", "publisher": "Physical Intelligence" }, { "title": "Physical Intelligence Valued at $11 Billion as Robotics AI Investment Surges", "url": "https://www.thelec.net/news/articleView.html?idxno=6214", "publisher": "The Elec" }, { "title": "Ex-DeepMind Staffers' Robotics Startup in Talks for $11 Billion Valuation", "url": "https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-27/ex-deepmind-staffers-robotics-startup-in-talks-for-11-billion-valuation", "publisher": "Bloomberg" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Physical Intelligence, styled as the Greek letter pi, was founded in San Francisco in early 2024 by Karol Hausman, Sergey Levine, Chelsea Finn, Brian Ichter and Lachy Groom. Hausman and Ichter came from Google's robotics research, Levine from UC Berkeley and Finn from Stanford. The company builds no robots; it trains one control model on data from many arms, mobile manipulators and humanoids, on the premise that one brain will drive any body.\n\nThe model line is public. Pi0 appeared on 31 October 2024 as a generalist policy folding laundry and bussing tables on several robot types; it was open-sourced in February 2025. Pi0.5 in April 2025 was tested in homes the model had not seen. Pi-star-0.6 in November 2025 added reinforcement learning from real-world corrections, and pi0.7 followed on 16 April 2026 as a steerable model. All demonstrations are the company's own.\n\nAfter a USD 70 million seed, the company raised USD 400 million at USD 2.4 billion in November 2024 and USD 600 million led by CapitalG at USD 5.6 billion in November 2025, with Thrive, Lux, Khosla, Sequoia and OpenAI among backers. In March 2026 Bloomberg reported talks on a further USD 1 billion at about USD 11 billion. As of that reporting the company had not released a commercial product or named a paying customer." }, { "slug": "pndbotics", "name": "PNDbotics", "aliases": [ "Pandong Robotics" ], "country": "CN", "city": "Beijing", "founded": "2023", "founders": [], "type": "startup", "website": "https://www.pndbotics.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "pndbotics-adam" ], "summary": "PNDbotics is a Beijing startup selling the Adam humanoid platform to researchers, with a focus on natural gait and quasi-direct-drive actuators.", "sources": [ { "title": "PNDbotics official site", "url": "https://www.pndbotics.com", "date": null, "publisher": "PNDbotics" }, { "title": "Humanoid robot Adam debuts at music festival in China", "url": "https://newatlas.com/ai-humanoids/pndbotics-adam-humanoid-robot/", "publisher": "New Atlas" }, { "title": "China's humanoid robot achieves human-like motion with 31 joints", "url": "https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/chinas-humanoid-robot-nails-human-like-motion", "publisher": "Interesting Engineering" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "PNDbotics (Pandong Robotics) is a Beijing startup founded in 2023 that sells full-size research humanoids rather than chasing factory contracts. Its distinguishing feature is a set of in-house quasi-direct-drive actuators with force control, which give its Adam robots a noticeably natural walking gait; the first Adam Lite, 1.6 m and about 60 kg with 25 such actuators, appeared in 2023.\n\nThe current flagship is Adam SP: 1.67 m, 62 kg, up to 44 degrees of freedom, 340 to 360 Nm peak joint torque, five-fingered hands and a payload of roughly 5 kg, listed online at about USD 100,000 as a prototype. In July 2025 the company had an Adam play a keytar on stage at the VOYAGEX music festival in Changchun, a pre-programmed and supervised routine. The first configuration to ship in volume is Adam-U, a legless, height-adjustable upper-body platform (31 degrees of freedom, 61 kg) built with motion-capture firm Noitom and hand maker Inspire for data collection and manipulation training, priced from USD 45,000 with pre-orders from September 2025.\n\nPNDbotics has published no customer list, unit count, revenue or funding, and its founders are not named in the sources consulted. It is a small hardware supplier to the research and data-collection market, with an open SDK, and should be judged on that basis." }, { "slug": "pollen-robotics", "name": "Pollen Robotics", "aliases": [], "country": "FR", "city": "Bordeaux, France", "founded": "2016", "founders": [ "Matthieu Lapeyre", "Pierre Rouanet" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://www.pollen-robotics.com", "status": "acquired", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "pollen-reachy-2" ], "summary": "Pollen Robotics of Bordeaux makes the open-source Reachy humanoid platforms and was acquired by Hugging Face in April 2025, after which the two launched the Reachy Mini desktop robot.", "sources": [ { "title": "Pollen Robotics", "url": "https://www.pollen-robotics.com/", "date": null, "publisher": "Pollen Robotics" }, { "title": "Hugging Face bridges gap between AI and physical world with Pollen Robotics acquisition", "url": "https://www.therobotreport.com/hugging-face-bridges-gap-between-ai-physical-world-pollen-robotics-acquisition/", "publisher": "The Robot Report" }, { "title": "Hugging Face to sell open-source robots thanks to Pollen Robotics acquisition", "url": "https://huggingface.co/blog/hugging-face-pollen-robotics-acquisition", "publisher": "Hugging Face" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Pollen Robotics was founded in Bordeaux in 2016 by Matthieu Lapeyre and Pierre Rouanet, two roboticists from the French research institute Inria. Its Reachy platform, a humanoid torso with two arms, a camera head and later a wheeled base and VR teleoperation, was sold to research and teaching labs; the current Reachy 2 lists at 70,000 US dollars and users named by the company include Cornell and Carnegie Mellon. Pollen came second in the ANA Avatar XPRIZE in 2022 and said at the time of its sale that it had shipped hundreds of units to more than 20 countries.\n\nOn 14 April 2025 Hugging Face, the AI model platform, bought the company for an undisclosed sum, folding it into its LeRobot open-source robotics effort led by Remi Cadene. The stated plan was to publish Reachy's designs, 3D files and software and to sell cheap, open hardware alongside them.\n\nThe first result was Reachy Mini, a desktop expressive robot from 299 US dollars programmable in Python, JavaScript and Scratch, which the company site now says has passed 10,000 units shipped. A 399 US dollar 25 cm biped called Microduck was on pre-order as of September 2026. Employee numbers and revenue have not been disclosed, and the humanoid line remains a research product." }, { "slug": "pudu", "name": "Pudu Robotics", "aliases": [ "Pudu" ], "country": "CN", "city": "Shenzhen, Guangdong", "founded": "2016", "founders": [ "Zhang Tao" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://www.pudurobotics.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "pudu-d7", "pudu-d9" ], "summary": "Pudu Robotics is a large maker of restaurant delivery and cleaning robots that added the wheeled D7 and bipedal D9 humanoids in 2025.", "sources": [ { "title": "Pudu Robotics official site", "url": "https://www.pudurobotics.com", "date": null, "publisher": "Pudu Robotics" }, { "title": "Pudu Robotics Raises Nearly USD 150 Million, Exceeds USD 1.5 Billion Valuation", "url": "https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/pudu-robotics-raises-nearly-usd-150-million-exceeds-usd-1-5-billion-valuation-302751124.html", "publisher": "PR Newswire" }, { "title": "Pudu Robotics launches PUDU D9 humanoid robot", "url": "https://www.therobotreport.com/pudu-d9-humanoid-robot-launched/", "publisher": "The Robot Report" }, { "title": "PUDU Robotics: From HKUST Roots to Global Commercial Robot Leader", "url": "https://pandaily.com/pudu-robotics-commercial-robot-unicorn-jun2026", "publisher": "Pandaily" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Pudu Robotics was founded in Shenzhen in 2016 by Zhang Tao (Felix Zhang), and made its name with wheeled delivery robots for restaurants such as BellaBot, later adding commercial cleaning and industrial delivery machines. It is one of the few robot companies in this database with real volume: over 80,000 units shipped by December 2024 and, by the company's April 2026 count, over 120,000 units in more than 80 countries, which Frost & Sullivan put at a 23 percent global share in 2023. Pudu said revenue doubled in 2025, with cleaning robots over 70 percent of the total.\n\nThe humanoids are a recent extension. The PUDU D7, a wheeled semi-humanoid with two arms, was announced in 2024 with commercialisation planned for 2025. The PUDU D9, a full-size biped at 170 cm and 65 kg with 42 degrees of freedom, a 20 kg arm payload and 2 m/s walking speed, followed on 19 December 2024 with a promise of pre-sales through its website. Pudu has not published shipment numbers or customer sites for either humanoid.\n\nOn 23 April 2026 Pudu announced a round of nearly USD 150 million at a valuation above USD 1.5 billion, taking cumulative funding past USD 300 million; investors were not named. Reports describe the raise as preparation for a listing in China or Hong Kong." }, { "slug": "rainbow-robotics", "name": "Rainbow Robotics", "aliases": [ "Rainbow" ], "country": "KR", "city": "Daejeon", "founded": "2011", "founders": [ "Oh Jun-Ho" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://www.rainbow-robotics.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [ "Samsung Electronics" ], "public_ticker": "KOSDAQ: 277810", "robots": [ "rainbow-hubo2", "rainbow-rb-y1" ], "summary": "Rainbow Robotics is the KAIST HUBO spin-out that sells collaborative robots, quadrupeds and the RB-Y1 bimanual platform. Samsung Electronics became its largest shareholder in 2023 and made it a subsidiary in December 2024.", "sources": [ { "title": "Rainbow Robotics", "url": "https://www.rainbow-robotics.com", "date": null, "publisher": "Rainbow Robotics" }, { "title": "Rainbow Robotics", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_Robotics", "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "Samsung increases stake in Rainbow Robotics, establishes Future Robotics Office", "url": "https://www.therobotreport.com/samsung-increases-stake-in-rainbow-robotics-establishes-future-robotics-office/", "publisher": "The Robot Report" }, { "title": "Humanoid enters first commercial warehouse trial in South Korea", "url": "https://interestingengineering.com/ai-robotics/samsung-backed-robot-enters-coupang-warehouse", "publisher": "Interesting Engineering" }, { "title": "Rainbow Robotics unveils omnidirectional wheels, development kit for its dual-arm robot", "url": "https://www.therobotreport.com/rainbow-robotics-unveils-omnidirectional-wheels-development-kit-dual-arm-robot/", "publisher": "The Robot Report" }, { "title": "Samsung Launches Humanoid Robot Division With Robot-Brain AI Already Tested in Factories", "url": "https://www.techtimes.com/articles/321464/20260724/samsung-launches-humanoid-robot-division-robot-brain-ai-already-tested-factories.htm", "publisher": "Tech Times" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Rainbow Robotics was founded on 10 February 2011 in Daejeon by Oh Jun-ho, head of KAIST's Humanoid Robot Research Center, and his students, to commercialise the HUBO humanoids built at KAIST. The DRC-HUBO variant, with actuator cooling and a mode that kneels onto wheels, won the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge finals. The company trades on KOSDAQ and opened a US office in Schaumburg, Illinois, in 2023.\n\nHumanoids have never been its revenue base. It sells RB series cobot arms, mobile robots, a quadruped and medical lasers, and since March 2024 the RB-Y1, a 1.4 m, 131 kg wheeled torso with two 7-axis arms carrying 3 kg each. It is sold as a research platform to users the company lists as including MIT, UC Berkeley and Georgia Tech. In June 2026 industry reports said Coupang was trialling it for sorting goods in a fulfilment centre, unconfirmed by either party.\n\nSamsung Electronics bought 14.7 percent in 2023 for KRW 86.8 billion and in December 2024 exercised a call option worth KRW 267 billion to reach 35 percent, making Rainbow a subsidiary after regulatory approval in March 2025. Oh Jun-ho moved to head Samsung's Future Robotics Office, and in July 2026 Samsung launched a separate humanoid division, RX, under CEO TM Roh. Rainbow's own bipedal programme has been quiet since HUBO." }, { "slug": "reflex-robotics", "name": "Reflex Robotics", "aliases": [], "country": "US", "city": "New York, New York", "founded": "2022", "founders": [], "type": "startup", "website": "https://reflexrobotics.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "reflex-robotics-reflex" ], "summary": "Reflex Robotics is a New York startup building a low-cost wheeled humanoid that is teleoperated by default and learns autonomy from operator data.", "sources": [ { "title": "Reflex Robotics", "url": "https://reflexrobotics.com/", "date": null, "publisher": "Reflex Robotics" }, { "title": "Reflex Robotics to Build Latin America's First Humanoid Robot Factory in Mexico", "url": "https://www.humanoidsdaily.com/news/reflex-robotics-to-build-latin-america-s-first-humanoid-robot-factory-in-mexico", "publisher": "Humanoids Daily" }, { "title": "Wheeled mobile manipulator uses teleoperation to multi-task", "url": "https://www.therobotreport.com/rbr50-company-2025/wheeled-mobile-manipulator-uses-teleoperation-to-multi-task/", "publisher": "The Robot Report" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Reflex Robotics is a New York startup, founded in 2022 out of MIT, whose team came from Boston Dynamics, Tesla, Oculus, ASML, Anduril and Waymo. It raised a USD 7 million seed round led by Khosla Ventures, with the co-founders of Dropbox and Cruise among the backers; its site also lists Liquid 2 Ventures, Collab Fund, 8090 Industries and Tishman Speyer. The company does not name its founders on the pages consulted.\n\nThe robot is deliberately unglamorous: a torso and two arms on a wheeled base, with a vertical lift instead of legs, a payload of about 50 lb and a claimed battery life of more than 16 hours. It is teleoperated by default, with remote operators driving it from thousands of miles away, and the company says it learns autonomy from that operator data. Reflex argues the hardware costs roughly USD 10,000 to build, an order of magnitude below legged humanoids, and pitches a one-year payback in warehouses. It took part in GXO Logistics' multi-vendor humanoid trials in 2025.\n\nIn February 2026 Humanoids Daily reported plans for a factory in Nuevo Leon, Mexico, promoted as Latin America's first humanoid plant with more than 2,000 jobs, plus an R&D lease in San Francisco. Unit counts, revenue and headcount are not public, and the Mexico plan has no stated timeline or investment figure." }, { "slug": "robosen", "name": "Robosen Robotics", "aliases": [ "Robosen" ], "country": "CN", "city": "Shenzhen", "founded": "2008", "founders": [], "type": "supplier", "website": "https://www.robosen.com/", "status": "active", "employees_est": 150, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "robosen-k1-pro" ], "summary": "Consumer robotics maker best known for licensed transforming Transformers robots and the K1 series of programmable walking humanoids.", "sources": [ { "title": "Robosen K1 series", "url": "https://us.robosen.com/collections/k1-series", "date": null, "publisher": "Robosen" }, { "title": "Robosen: Making Life More Fun Since 2008", "url": "https://us.robosen.com/blogs/news/robosen-making-life-more-fun-since-2008", "publisher": "Robosen" }, { "title": "$700 Optimus Prime Robot Will Walk, Race And Transform On Its Own", "url": "https://www.carscoops.com/2021/04/700-optimus-prime-robot-will-walk-race-and-transform-on-its-own/", "publisher": "Carscoops" }, { "title": "Robosen", "url": "https://www.robosen.com/", "publisher": "Robosen" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Robosen Robotics (Shenzhen) was established in 2008 by a group of robot hobbyists the company has never named individually. It is a consumer electronics maker, not a humanoid-platform company: its own history lists a small humanoid in 2009, a 1.6 metre domestic robot in 2013 and, in 2019, the Interstellar Agent T9, its first robot that changed shape by itself. Carscoops reported in 2021 that it employed about 150 people across R&D, production, marketing and service; the 2021 headcount is the only one on record. A US office in City of Industry, California handles Western sales.\n\nThe product that made it known was the Hasbro-licensed Optimus Prime of April 2021, a 19 inch robot with metal alloy parts that walks, converts into a truck on its own and speaks with new lines by Peter Cullen, sold at 699 US dollars through Hasbro Pulse. Disney's Buzz Lightyear followed in 2022, Grimlock and a Bumblebee in 2023, Megatron in 2024 and a G1 Bumblebee in 2025.\n\nThe K1 series, launched in 2021, is its unlicensed programmable humanoid line, sold to hobbyists and schools rather than industry. Unit sales, revenue and funding are not published." }, { "slug": "robotera", "name": "Robotera", "aliases": [ "Xingdong Jiyuan", "RobotEra" ], "country": "CN", "city": "Beijing", "founded": "2023", "founders": [ "Chen Jianyu" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://www.robotera.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "robotera-l7", "robotera-q5", "robotera-star1" ], "summary": "Robotera is a Tsinghua University spin-out building full-size humanoids with in-house actuators, known for fast running demos with Star1 and L7.", "sources": [ { "title": "Robotera official site", "url": "https://www.robotera.com", "date": null, "publisher": "Robotera" }, { "title": "Stardust Era Raises 2.5 Billion Yuan in Two Months as State-owned Capital Groups Enter the Market", "url": "https://eu.36kr.com/en/p/3883465079517189", "publisher": "36Kr" }, { "title": "China Robotics Startup Robotera Raised $200 Million New Funding", "url": "https://www.caproasia.com/2026/04/29/china-robotics-startup-robotera-raised-200-million-new-funding-raised-145-million-cny-1-billion-at-1-45-billion-cny-10-billion-valuation-in-2026-march-founded-in-2023-by-chen-jianyu-with-shar/", "publisher": "Caproasia" }, { "title": "Robotera Is Said to Weigh a Hong Kong IPO to Raise Up to $1 Billion", "url": "https://startupfortune.com/robotera-is-said-to-weigh-a-hong-kong-ipo-to-raise-up-to-1-billion/", "publisher": "Startup Fortune" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Robotera (Beijing Xingdong Jiyuan Technology) was set up in August 2023 by Chen Jianyu, born in 1992, and incubated at Tsinghua University's Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences; Tsinghua holds shares directly. It builds its own actuators and says it develops the full hardware and software stack in-house.\n\nThe products are the STAR1 humanoid, filmed running in the Gobi desert and on the Great Wall, the full-size L7 biped that succeeded it, the Q5 wheeled service humanoid, the M7 upper-body unit and the XHand direct-drive five-finger hand, which is sold separately. Deployment claims centre on parcel logistics: by July 2026 the company said its robots were working in more than 10 sorting centres across five provinces for SF Express and China Post, with thousand-unit batch deliveries promised for the second quarter of 2026. Unit totals have not been independently confirmed.\n\nFunding in 2026 was rapid. A CNY 1 billion strategic round in March pushed the valuation past CNY 10 billion (about USD 1.45 billion); SF Group led a USD 200 million round in April or May; and on 6 July 2026 Chengtong Fund led a further CNY 1 billion. Investors include Geely Capital, BAIC Capital, Alibaba, CDH and Beijing municipal funds. Reports say it is weighing a Hong Kong IPO of up to USD 1 billion. Revenue and headcount are unpublished." }, { "slug": "robotis", "name": "Robotis", "aliases": [ "ROBOTIS Co., Ltd." ], "country": "KR", "city": "Seoul", "founded": "1999", "founders": [ "Byoung-Soo Kim" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://en.robotis.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": "KOSDAQ: 108490", "robots": [ "darwin-op", "robotis-op3", "thormang3" ], "summary": "Robotis is a Korean maker of Dynamixel servo actuators and open platform robots. It productised the DARwIn-OP academic humanoid, followed by OP2 and OP3, and built the full size THORMANG research humanoid.", "sources": [ { "title": "ROBOTIS e-Manual", "url": "https://emanual.robotis.com/", "date": null, "publisher": "Robotis" }, { "title": "K-robot firm Robotis flexes its muscles, from actuators to humanoid robots", "url": "https://mbiz.heraldcorp.com/article/10842773", "publisher": "The Herald Business" }, { "title": "ROBOTIS (KOSDAQ:108490) Company Profile", "url": "https://stockanalysis.com/quote/kosdaq/108490/company/", "publisher": "StockAnalysis" }, { "title": "Robotis Bioloid", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotis", "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "DARwIn-OP", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARwIn-OP", "publisher": "Wikipedia" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Robotis was founded in Seoul in 1999 by Kim Byoung-soo, who still runs it and holds about 27 percent, and listed on KOSDAQ in October 2018. LG Electronics holds a stake reported at 6.6 to 7.5 percent. The core business is Dynamixel, smart servo actuators launched in 2003 and found in many hobby, education and research robots, plus cycloid gears and delivery robots. In 2025 it reported record sales of KRW 38.9 billion, about USD 27.5 million, 97 percent from actuators, and a first operating profit in four years of KRW 3.3 billion.\n\nIts humanoids have mostly been small open platforms that showcase the actuators. Robotis built DARwIn-OP, the 20-joint open humanoid developed with Virginia Tech, Purdue and Penn under a USD 1.2 million NSF grant, then its own OP2 and OP3, staples of the RoboCup kid-size league. Bioloid kits took the same servos to hobbyists; THORMANG was a full-size research humanoid.\n\nIn April 2026 the company unveiled AI Sapiens, a 135 cm humanoid on new Dynamixel-Q actuators, and had it dance at a government forum in August 2026. Sales are promised for 2027; no price or customer has been named. The clearer bet is upstream: actuator output was 220,000 units in 2025 with a 2026 target above 500,000, and an Uzbekistan factory backed by an LG memorandum is planned." }, { "slug": "samsung", "name": "Samsung Electronics", "aliases": [ "Samsung" ], "country": "KR", "city": "Suwon", "founded": "1969-01", "founders": [ "Lee Byung-chul" ], "type": "big-tech", "website": "https://www.samsung.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": 259149, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": "KRX: 005930", "robots": [], "summary": "Samsung Electronics took control of Rainbow Robotics in December 2024 and created a Future Robotics Office to develop humanoids. As of 2026 it has not revealed a humanoid of its own.", "sources": [ { "title": "Samsung Newsroom", "url": "https://news.samsung.com/global/", "date": null, "publisher": "Samsung" }, { "title": "Samsung Electronics", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Electronics", "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "Samsung increases stake in Rainbow Robotics, establishes Future Robotics Office", "url": "https://www.therobotreport.com/samsung-increases-stake-in-rainbow-robotics-establishes-future-robotics-office/", "publisher": "The Robot Report" }, { "title": "Samsung Moves Robotics Talent to Front Line as Roh Personally Reviews Humanoid Tech", "url": "https://en.sedaily.com/finance/2026/08/11/samsung-races-to-commercialize-its-own-humanoid-robot", "publisher": "Seoul Economic Daily" }, { "title": "AI can talk the talk, but Samsung bets humanoid robots need OLED", "url": "https://www.sammobile.com/news/ai-can-talk-the-talk-but-samsung-bets-humanoid-robots-need-oled/", "publisher": "SamMobile" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Samsung Electronics, founded on 13 January 1969 and headquartered in Suwon, is Korea's largest company, with 2025 revenue of KRW 333.6 trillion (about USD 292 billion) and 259,149 employees. It has shown consumer robots for years, including the Bot Handy manipulator in 2022 and the rolling Ballie, but Ballie never shipped and was absent from CES 2026.\n\nThe humanoid strategy started with money rather than a machine. Samsung bought 14.7 percent of KAIST spin-off Rainbow Robotics for KRW 86.8 billion in 2023, then on 31 December 2024 exercised a call option worth KRW 267 billion (USD 182 million) to reach 35 percent and become the largest shareholder. At the same time it created a Future Robotics Office reporting to the CEO, led by Rainbow co-founder and HUBO creator Oh Jun-ho, who said at RoboWorld 2025 that Samsung was working on hands, actuators and sensors with Nvidia on the AI side.\n\nIn 2026 a Future Robotics Initiative Group recruited engineers in March, a Robotics eXperience (RX) division was set up in July, and on 10 August 2026 the Seoul Economic Daily reported an internal demonstration at the Umyeon R&D campus of an in-house humanoid prototype that handled a camera, reviewed by DX chief Roh Tae-moon. The stated plan is factory use inside Samsung affiliates first, consumers later. No robot has been shown publicly and no date has been given." }, { "slug": "sanctuary-ai", "name": "Sanctuary AI", "aliases": [ "Sanctuary Cognitive Systems" ], "country": "CA", "city": "Vancouver, British Columbia", "founded": "2018", "founders": [ "Geordie Rose", "Suzanne Gildert", "Olivia Norton", "Ajay Agrawal" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://www.sanctuary.ai", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [ "Magna International", "Accenture", "Bell", "Verizon Ventures", "Export Development Canada" ], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "sanctuary-phoenix" ], "summary": "Sanctuary AI of Vancouver develops the Phoenix general-purpose humanoid and its Carbon control software, with a focus on hydraulic dexterous hands and teleoperation-based training. Magna is a partner and investor. The company changed leadership in 2025.", "sources": [ { "title": "Sanctuary AI", "url": "https://www.sanctuary.ai/", "date": null, "publisher": "Sanctuary AI" }, { "title": "Sanctuary AI", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctuary_AI", "date": null, "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "Robotics startup Sanctuary AI appoints former MDA exec as CEO", "url": "https://betakit.com/robotics-startup-sanctuary-ai-appoints-former-mda-exec-as-ceo/", "publisher": "BetaKit" }, { "title": "Sanctuary AI obtains Canadian funding for general-purpose humanoid development", "url": "https://www.therobotreport.com/sanctuary-ai-obtains-canadian-funding-general-purpose-humanoid-development/", "publisher": "The Robot Report" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Sanctuary AI was founded in Vancouver in 2018 by Geordie Rose, Suzanne Gildert, Olivia Norton and Ajay Agrawal. Its pitch was a control system called Carbon, teleoperation to gather training data, and hydraulic hands. Investors have included Magna International, Accenture, Bell, Verizon Ventures, Export Development Canada and BDC, plus a 30 million Canadian dollar contribution from the federal Strategic Innovation Fund in November 2022; total funding was put at 140 million dollars by mid-2024.\n\nThe Phoenix humanoid reached its seventh generation in April 2024, when Magna also signed a partnership; the site now shows an eighth. Real-world use has been limited to pilots, the best documented being a one-week trial at a Mark's clothing store in British Columbia in which the robot performed 110 retail tasks, and wire-assembly work with unnamed automotive suppliers at which the company claims a 99.5 percent success rate.\n\nRose left in November 2024 amid reports he was pushed out, about 30 staff were laid off, and James Wells served as interim CEO. Zeon of Japan invested an undisclosed sum in May 2026, and on 26 June 2026 board chair Daniel Friedmann, formerly of MDA, became CEO. The company now describes its product as hardware-agnostic physical AI for existing robots, not the Phoenix humanoid itself." }, { "slug": "schaft", "name": "SCHAFT", "aliases": [ "Schaft Inc" ], "country": "JP", "city": "Tokyo", "founded": "2012", "founders": [ "Yuto Nakanishi", "Junichi Urata", "Narito Suzuki", "Koichi Nishiwaki" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schaft_(company)", "status": "defunct", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [ "Google" ], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "schaft-s-one" ], "summary": "SCHAFT was a University of Tokyo spin-out acquired by Google in 2013 that won the DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials. Alphabet shut it down in November 2018 after a sale to SoftBank fell through.", "sources": [ { "title": "SCHAFT, Wikipedia", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schaft_(company)", "date": null, "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "Alphabet closes Schaft", "url": "https://www.theregister.com/2018/11/16/alphabet_closes_schaft/", "publisher": "The Register" }, { "title": "Alphabet's secretive SCHAFT Inc shows off new bipedal robot in Tokyo", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2016/04/08/alphabets-secretive-schaft-inc-shows-off-new-bipedal-robot-in-tokyo", "publisher": "TechCrunch" }, { "title": "S-One", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-One", "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "SoftBank buys robotics startups Boston Dynamics and Schaft from Alphabet", "url": "https://siliconangle.com/2017/06/09/softbank-buys-robotics-startups-boston-dynamics-schaft-google/", "publisher": "SiliconANGLE" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "SCHAFT Inc. was a Tokyo startup spun out of the University of Tokyo's JSK robotics laboratory in 2012 by Yuto Nakanishi, Junichi Urata, Narito Suzuki and Koichi Nishiwaki. Its robot S-One, an electrically driven biped at a time when serious humanoids were hydraulic, stood 130 cm and weighed 95 kg.\n\nGoogle bought the company in December 2013, one of the seven robotics firms Andy Rubin collected that year. The same month S-One won the DARPA Robotics Challenge Trials with 27 of 32 points, seven ahead of IHMC, losing points only on the vehicle egress task. The company then went silent inside Alphabet's X division. The only later public appearance was at the New Economic Summit in Tokyo on 8 April 2016, where Nakanishi showed an unnamed biped with rail-like sliding legs walking on a forest floor, a rocky beach, snow and stairs while carrying a barbell; X said it was not a product announcement.\n\nAlphabet agreed in June 2017 to sell SCHAFT to SoftBank together with Boston Dynamics, but the SCHAFT part of the deal collapsed, reportedly because staff refused to transfer. Alphabet shut the company down in November 2018 after finding no other buyer. SCHAFT never sold a robot." }, { "slug": "skild-ai", "name": "Skild AI", "aliases": [], "country": "US", "city": "Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania", "founded": "2023", "founders": [ "Deepak Pathak", "Abhinav Gupta" ], "type": "ecosystem", "website": "https://www.skild.ai", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [ "SoftBank", "Nvidia", "Lightspeed", "Coatue", "Bezos Expeditions", "Sequoia" ], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [], "summary": "Skild AI, founded in 2023 by Carnegie Mellon professors Deepak Pathak and Abhinav Gupta, trains a general robot brain (Skild Brain) meant to run on many robot bodies including humanoids. It raised a USD 300 million Series A in July 2024 at USD 1.5 billion and larger rounds in 2025 and 2026 led by SoftBank and Nvidia.", "sources": [ { "title": "Skild AI", "url": "https://www.skild.ai/", "date": null, "publisher": "Skild AI" }, { "title": "Skild AI raises $1.4B to build 'omni-bodied' robot brain", "url": "https://www.therobotreport.com/skild-ai-raises-1-4b-building-omni-bodied-robot-skild-brain/", "publisher": "The Robot Report" }, { "title": "SoftBank and Nvidia reportedly in talks to fund Skild AI at $14B, nearly tripling its value", "url": "https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/08/softbank-and-nvidia-reportedly-in-talks-to-fund-skildai-at-14b-nearly-tripling-its-value/", "publisher": "TechCrunch" }, { "title": "Announcing Series C", "url": "https://www.skild.ai/blogs/series-c", "publisher": "Skild AI" }, { "title": "Robotics Startup Skild Valued Above $14 Billion After SoftBank-Led Funding Round", "url": "https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-14/robotics-startup-skild-valued-above-14-billion-after-softbank-led-funding-round", "publisher": "Bloomberg" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Skild AI was founded in Pittsburgh in 2023 by Deepak Pathak, its CEO, and Abhinav Gupta, its president, both Carnegie Mellon professors known for self-supervised and adaptive robot learning. It builds no robots. Its product is the Skild Brain, a single control model it calls omni-bodied, meant to run humanoids, arms, quadrupeds and wheeled platforms without retraining for each body. It was shown in July 2025 picking up dishes and climbing stairs; LG CNS and Hewlett Packard Enterprise are named partners.\n\nThree large rounds came inside eighteen months. A USD 300 million Series A in July 2024 valued the company at USD 1.5 billion. A USD 500 million Series B led by SoftBank in May 2025, with LG Technology Ventures, Samsung and Nvidia, took it to USD 4.7 billion. On 15 January 2026 a USD 1.4 billion Series C led by SoftBank, with NVentures, Bezos Expeditions, Sequoia, Coatue and strategic money from Samsung, LG, Schneider Electric and Salesforce, valued it above USD 14 billion. Total funding passed USD 2 billion.\n\nThe company says the model is deployed in security, inspection, delivery, warehousing, manufacturing, data centres and construction, and The Robot Report cited roughly USD 30 million of revenue in 2025. Customers and robot counts are undisclosed, so the gap between valuation and verifiable revenue is large." }, { "slug": "softbank-robotics", "name": "SoftBank Robotics", "aliases": [ "SoftBank Robotics Group" ], "country": "JP", "city": "Tokyo, Japan", "founded": "2012", "founders": [], "type": "conglomerate", "website": "https://www.softbankrobotics.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [ "SoftBank Group" ], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "softbank-pepper" ], "summary": "SoftBank Robotics is the SoftBank Group unit that launched Pepper in 2014 and later the Whiz cleaning robot and Servi delivery robot. It sold its European humanoid arm (Aldebaran) to United Robotics Group in 2022 and paused Pepper production in 2020.", "sources": [ { "title": "SoftBank Robotics", "url": "https://www.softbankrobotics.com/", "date": null, "publisher": "SoftBank Robotics" }, { "title": "Pepper (robot)", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper_(robot)", "date": null, "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "Aldebaran, maker of Pepper and Nao robots, put in receivership", "url": "https://www.therobotreport.com/aldebaran-pepper-nao-robots-receivership/", "publisher": "The Robot Report" }, { "title": "German United Robotics Group acquires SoftBank Robotics Europe in Paris", "url": "https://www.softbankrobotics.com/news/20220412a/", "publisher": "SoftBank Robotics Group" }, { "title": "SoftBank Robotics and Keenon Robotics announce strategic global partnership", "url": "https://www.softbankrobotics.com/news/20210921a/", "publisher": "SoftBank Robotics Group" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "SoftBank Robotics Group is the Tokyo robotics unit of SoftBank Group. It was built on Aldebaran Robotics, the Paris company founded in 2005 by Bruno Maisonnier that made the small NAO humanoid; SoftBank bought it in 2012 for about USD 100 million and renamed it SoftBank Robotics Europe in 2016. Masayoshi Son unveiled Pepper, a 1.2 m wheeled semi-humanoid with a chest tablet, in Tokyo on 5 June 2014; the first 1,000 units sold out in a minute in June 2015.\n\nPepper is the largest-volume humanoid ever shipped, with about 27,000 built, plus some 20,000 NAO. It was also a commercial failure: few customers renewed the USD 550 a month service contracts, and production was paused in June 2021 for weak demand. The Japanese parent moved on to reselling other makers' machines: the Whiz cleaner, the Servi delivery robot and, from September 2021, Keenon's Keenbot.\n\nOn 9 April 2022 SoftBank sold the European humanoid business to Germany's United Robotics Group, keeping a minority stake in URG; the unit went back to the Aldebaran name. URG stopped funding it in 2024, it filed for bankruptcy in February 2025 and was placed in receivership in June 2025 after about USD 29 million of operating losses. SoftBank Robotics today is a service-robot distributor with no humanoid of its own." }, { "slug": "sony", "name": "Sony", "aliases": [ "Sony Group" ], "country": "JP", "city": "Tokyo", "founded": "1946", "founders": [ "Masaru Ibuka", "Akio Morita" ], "type": "big-tech", "website": "https://www.sony.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": "TYO: 6758, NYSE: SONY", "robots": [ "sony-qrio" ], "summary": "Sony developed the QRIO entertainment humanoid alongside AIBO in the early 2000s and cancelled both in 2006.", "sources": [ { "title": "Sony Group", "url": "https://www.sony.com", "date": null, "publisher": "Sony" }, { "title": "QRIO", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QRIO", "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "Sony's Humanoid Robot \"QRIO\" Entertains Campus Community", "url": "https://www.cmu.edu/cmnews/extra/050128_qrio.html", "publisher": "Carnegie Mellon University" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Sony is the Tokyo electronics and entertainment group founded in 1946 by Masaru Ibuka and Akio Morita and listed in Tokyo and New York. Its humanoid record is short and entirely historical: the Sony Dream Robot programme that followed the AIBO robot dog and never turned into a product.\n\nThe SDR prototypes led to the SDR-4X, which in September 2003 was renamed QRIO, a play on curiosity. It stood about 60 cm tall, weighed 7.3 kg, recognised faces and voices, remembered people, walked, kicked a ball, stood up after being pushed over and ran at 23 cm per second, which earned it a Guinness World Records entry in the 2005 edition as the first bipedal robot capable of running; battery life was about an hour. Sony used it as what its US president called a corporate ambassador, sending two units to Carnegie Mellon in January 2005 and four to dance in a Beck music video, but it was never sold and the number built was never published.\n\nOn 26 January 2006 Sony announced it would stop QRIO development, the same day it dropped AIBO, as part of a group restructuring. Sony has announced no humanoid since." }, { "slug": "stanford-university", "name": "Stanford University", "aliases": [ "Stanford" ], "country": "US", "city": "Stanford, California", "founded": "1885", "founders": [], "type": "university", "website": "https://www.stanford.edu", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "humanplus", "toddlerbot" ], "summary": "Stanford research groups released the open source ToddlerBot platform in 2025 and the HumanPlus shadowing system on a Unitree H1 in 2024, both focused on machine learning for humanoids.", "sources": [ { "title": "ToddlerBot", "url": "https://toddlerbot.github.io/", "date": null, "publisher": "Stanford University" }, { "title": "HumanPlus", "url": "https://humanoid-ai.github.io/", "date": null, "publisher": "Stanford University" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Stanford University, founded in 1885 in Stanford, California, is not a robot maker; it appears here because two of its labs produced open humanoid research systems that other groups have built on. Neither project sells hardware or reports deployments; both were published at the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL).\n\nHumanPlus (2024) came from Chelsea Finn's group with Zipeng Fu, Qingqing Zhao, Qi Wu and Gordon Wetzstein. It is a software pipeline rather than a new robot: a customised 33 degree-of-freedom, 180 cm humanoid built on Unitree hardware with Inspire hands, first controlled by shadowing a person seen through a single RGB camera, then trained by behaviour cloning on the resulting demonstrations. The low-level policy was pretrained on 40 hours of existing human motion data. The team reported 60 to 100 percent success on tasks such as putting on a shoe, unloading a rack, folding a sweatshirt and typing, from up to 40 demonstrations each. It was a CoRL 2024 best paper finalist.\n\nToddlerBot (2025) is a small open-source humanoid from Haochen Shi and Weizhuo Wang, advised by Shuran Song and C. Karen Liu. It has 30 active degrees of freedom, walks at 0.25 m/s, lifts about 40 percent of its own weight and does cartwheels and pull-ups. Assembly manuals, a bill of materials and a version 2.0 are public so other labs can build one." }, { "slug": "tesla", "name": "Tesla", "aliases": [ "Tesla, Inc." ], "country": "US", "city": "Austin, Texas", "founded": "2003", "founders": [ "Martin Eberhard", "Marc Tarpenning", "Elon Musk (early investor and CEO)" ], "type": "automaker", "website": "https://www.tesla.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": "NASDAQ: TSLA", "robots": [ "tesla-optimus-bumblebee", "tesla-optimus-gen-1", "tesla-optimus-gen-2", "tesla-optimus-v3" ], "summary": "Tesla began its Optimus humanoid program in 2021 and has shown three generations, with a production-intent V3 planned for a Fremont line in 2026. Musk has called Optimus potentially Tesla's most valuable product and set a long-term target of millions of units per year. Tesla funds the program internally.", "sources": [ { "title": "Tesla AI and Robotics", "url": "https://www.tesla.com/AI", "date": null, "publisher": "Tesla" }, { "title": "Optimus (robot)", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimus_(robot)", "date": null, "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "Tesla pushes Optimus V3 reveal later this year, again", "url": "https://electrek.co/2026/04/22/tesla-optimus-production-fremont-model-sx-line/", "publisher": "Electrek" }, { "title": "Tesla Optimus project fires up as Musk sees production line progress", "url": "https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-optimus-project-fires-up-musk-sees-production-line-progress/", "publisher": "Teslarati" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Tesla, the Austin-based car maker listed on Nasdaq, announced Optimus on 19 August 2021 at AI Day with a dancer in a robot suit standing in for hardware. A walking prototype, Bumblebee, appeared in September 2022; Gen 2, slimmer with better hands, in December 2023. At the We, Robot event in October 2024 the robots served drinks and chatted, largely by teleoperation. Musk has put a future price near USD 30,000. Tesla funds the programme itself.\n\nIn January 2025 Musk predicted roughly 10,000 units would be built that year; Tesla missed that entirely, and in January 2026 Musk conceded no Optimus was yet doing useful work in its factories. Programme head Milan Kovac left in June 2025 and Ashok Elluswamy of Autopilot took over. A v2.3 robot handed out popcorn at showroom events in London and Berlin in December 2025.\n\nOn the first-quarter 2026 call Musk said the Fremont line vacated by Model S and X in May would start building the production-intent V3 in late July or August 2026, with output initially quite slow and no 2026 volume target, citing about 10,000 unique parts. The V3 reveal slipped from early 2026 to mid-year. A second plant at Giga Texas is meant to start in summer 2027. As of September 2026 no Optimus has been sold to an outside customer." }, { "slug": "the-bot-company", "name": "The Bot Company", "aliases": [], "country": "US", "city": "San Francisco, California", "founded": "2024", "founders": [ "Kyle Vogt", "Paril Jain", "Luke Holoubek" ], "type": "startup", "website": null, "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": 4000000000, "valuation_date": "2025", "key_investors": [ "Greenoaks", "Nvidia", "Spark Capital", "Quiet Capital" ], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [], "summary": "The Bot Company is a stealth home-robot startup founded in 2024 by Cruise co-founder Kyle Vogt. It raised USD 150 million at a USD 2 billion valuation in March 2025, and Bloomberg reported in October 2025 that it was set to raise USD 250 million at more than USD 4 billion, without publicly showing a robot.", "sources": [ { "title": "The Bot Company", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyle_Vogt", "date": null, "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "The Bot Company, led by Kyle Vogt, brings in another $150M", "url": "https://www.therobotreport.com/the-bot-company-led-by-kyle-vogt-brings-in-another-150m/", "publisher": "The Robot Report" }, { "title": "The Bot Company valuation, funding & news", "url": "https://sacra.com/c/the-bot-company/", "publisher": "Sacra" }, { "title": "Cruise Founder Kyle Vogt's Robotics Startup Eyes $4 Billion Valuation", "url": "https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-28/cruise-founder-kyle-vogt-s-robotics-startup-eyes-4-billion-valuation", "publisher": "Bloomberg" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "The Bot Company was started in San Francisco in 2024 by Kyle Vogt, who co-founded the self-driving firm Cruise in 2013, sold it to General Motors for USD 1 billion in 2016 and resigned as its CEO in November 2023 after California pulled Cruise's driverless permits. His co-founders are Paril Jain, formerly an AI lead at Tesla, and Luke Holoubek, an ex-Cruise engineer.\n\nThe pace of fundraising is what makes it notable. A first USD 150 million round from Spark Capital and Nat Friedman among others valued it at USD 550 million; on 24 March 2025 a second USD 150 million round led by Greenoaks set a USD 2 billion post-money valuation, with Quiet Capital and the Collison brothers among participants. On 28 October 2025 Bloomberg reported it was set to raise USD 250 million at more than USD 4 billion, led by Eclipse.\n\nThat sits on nothing shown in public. As of the latest reporting no prototype had been revealed, there were no shipments and no revenue. The robot, by press accounts, is not a humanoid: a wheeled or tracked base with arms and grippers, meant to pick up toys and tidy rather than do dishes, because low-stakes tasks tolerate a 90 to 99 percent success rate. It is in this database as a well-funded counter-bet on the humanoid form." }, { "slug": "tmsuk", "name": "Tmsuk", "aliases": [ "tmsuk Co" ], "country": "JP", "city": "Kyoto", "founded": "2000", "founders": [ "Yoichi Takamoto" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://www.tmsuk.co.jp", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "tmsuk-kiyomori" ], "summary": "Tmsuk is a Japanese service and rescue robot company that built the samurai humanoid Kiyomori with Waseda University in 2005.", "sources": [ { "title": "Tmsuk", "url": "https://www.tmsuk.co.jp", "date": null, "publisher": "Tmsuk" }, { "title": "TMSUK", "url": "https://www.tmsuk.co.jp/en/", "publisher": "tmsuk" }, { "title": "Japan Eyes Plan to Mass Produce Humanoid Robots By 2027", "url": "https://www.eweek.com/news/japan-mass-produce-humanoid-robots-2027/", "publisher": "eWeek" }, { "title": "Visit to TMSUK CO., Ltd.", "url": "https://stdc-kansai.org/visit-to-tmsuk-co-ltd", "publisher": "Science & Technology Diplomatic Circle Kansai" }, { "title": "T-52 Enryu", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-52_Enryu", "publisher": "Wikipedia" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Tmsuk was founded in 2000 by Yoichi Takamoto, who is still chairman and representative director, and grew up in Kitakyushu before moving its head office to a converted machiya townhouse in Kyoto's Nishijin district. It is a small private firm that sells what it calls workroids, service robots for medicine, disaster response and mobility: the RODEM personal mobility chair, the Pedia_Roid child-patient simulator for medical training, a sewer inspection robot and ceiling-construction robots, with bases in Fukuoka, Miyazaki and Taipei.\n\nIts humanoid work has been episodic. With Atsuo Takanishi's laboratory at Waseda University it built the WL-16 walking chair that carries a person, and in 2005 the samurai-armoured Kiyomori, a 39-joint biped made for a Niigata science museum exhibition. Its best-known machine is not a humanoid at all but the T-52 Enryu rescue robot of 2004, developed with Kyoto University and the Kitakyushu fire department.\n\nIn July 2025 tmsuk co-founded the Kyoto Humanoid Association with Waseda, Murata Manufacturing, Renesas and Sumitomo Heavy Industries, aiming at a prototype by March 2026 and mass production from 2027 of two machines, a roughly 250 cm disaster robot able to lift over 50 kg and a human-sized research model. No funding, headcount or unit figures have been published." }, { "slug": "toyota", "name": "Toyota (incl. Toyota Research Institute)", "aliases": [ "Toyota Motor Corporation", "TRI" ], "country": "JP", "city": "Toyota City, Aichi", "founded": "1937", "founders": [ "Kiichiro Toyoda" ], "type": "automaker", "website": "https://global.toyota", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": "TYO: 7203, NYSE: TM", "robots": [ "toyota-cue", "toyota-punyo", "toyota-t-hr3" ], "summary": "Toyota has built humanoids since its 2005 Expo partner robots, including the teleoperated T-HR3 and the basketball-shooting CUE. Its US research arm TRI studies soft whole-body manipulation with Punyo.", "sources": [ { "title": "Toyota global newsroom", "url": "https://global.toyota/en/newsroom/", "date": null, "publisher": "Toyota" }, { "title": "Why is Toyota Developing Humanoid Robots?", "url": "https://global.toyota/en/newsroom/corporate/30609642.html", "publisher": "Toyota Motor Corporation" }, { "title": "Toyota Partner Robot", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Partner_Robot", "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "Toyota's Bubble-ized Humanoid Grasps With Its Whole Body", "url": "https://spectrum.ieee.org/humanoid-robot-tri-punyo", "publisher": "IEEE Spectrum" }, { "title": "AI-powered robot by Boston Dynamics and Toyota Research Institute takes a key step towards general-purpose humanoids", "url": "https://newsroom.toyota.eu/ai-powered-robot-by-boston-dynamics-and-toyota-research-institute-takes-a-key-step-towards-general-purpose-humanoids/", "publisher": "Toyota Europe" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Toyota Motor Corporation, founded in 1937 by Kiichiro Toyoda and listed in Tokyo and New York, has run humanoid projects for two decades without turning any into a product. Its Partner Robots played drums and trumpets at the 2005 Aichi Expo, and a running version reached 7 km/h on flat ground in 2009. The third generation, T-HR3, appeared in 2017 as a teleoperated humanoid that mirrors an operator wearing a master control system and returns force feedback; an improved version with a Master Hand for finger-level control and lighter limbs was shown at iREX in Tokyo in December 2019. Toyota's stated motives are care work and remote operation by caregivers. The CUE basketball-shooting robot is a separate demonstration line.\n\nToyota Research Institute (TRI) in Los Altos, California, works on manipulation rather than walking. Its Punyo project, described publicly in April 2024, scales up soft bubble grippers into a humanoid upper body whose arms and chest are covered in air bladders with tactile sensing, so it can hug grocery bags and heavy objects against its torso. On 20 August 2025 TRI and Boston Dynamics showed a Large Behavior Model driving Atlas through tasks that mix manipulation and locomotion, with new skills added without hand-programming.\n\nNo Toyota humanoid has been deployed commercially, and the Boston Dynamics work is a research partnership with a company owned by rival Hyundai." }, { "slug": "ubtech", "name": "UBTech Robotics", "aliases": [ "UBTECH", "Youbixuan" ], "country": "CN", "city": "Shenzhen, Guangdong", "founded": "2012", "founders": [ "Zhou Jian" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://www.ubtrobot.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": "HKEX: 9880", "robots": [ "tien-kung-xingzhe", "ubtech-alpha", "ubtech-walker", "ubtech-walker-c", "ubtech-walker-s", "ubtech-walker-s1", "ubtech-walker-s2", "ubtech-walker-x" ], "summary": "UBTech is a Shenzhen robotics company listed in Hong Kong in December 2023, known for consumer Alpha robots and the Walker humanoid line. Its Walker S industrial humanoids are in Chinese car and electronics plants and the company reported a Walker S order book above CNY 800 million in 2025.", "sources": [ { "title": "UBTech official site", "url": "https://www.ubtrobot.com", "date": null, "publisher": "UBTech" }, { "title": "UBTECH Humanoid Robot Walker S2 Begins Mass Production and Delivery, with Orders Exceeding 800 Million Yuan", "url": "https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ubtech-humanoid-robot-walker-s2-begins-mass-production-and-delivery-with-orders-exceeding-800-million-yuan-302616924.html", "publisher": "PR Newswire" }, { "title": "UBTECH Humanoid Revenue Surges in 2025 Results", "url": "https://humanoid.guide/ubtech-humanoid-revenue-surges-in-2025-results/", "publisher": "Humanoid.guide" }, { "title": "UBTECH 2025 Report Card: Revenue from Full-Size Humanoid Robots Grows Over 22-Fold", "url": "https://autonews.gasgoo.com/articles/icv/ubtech-2025-report-card-revenue-from-full-size-humanoid-robots-grows-over-22-fold-2039900685372407808", "publisher": "Gasgoo" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "UBTech Robotics was founded in Shenzhen in 2012 by Zhou Jian, known in English as James Zhou, who remains chairman and CEO. It grew on the small Alpha consumer humanoids and education robots and listed in Hong Kong in December 2023. Its full-size Walker line began as a service humanoid and turned industrial with Walker S, trialled on Chinese car assembly lines from 2024.\n\nThe third-generation Walker S2 entered what the company calls mass production on 17 November 2025, with a first batch of several hundred units for car, electronics and battery plants. UBTech named BYD, Dongfeng Liuzhou, Geely, FAW-Volkswagen, Audi FAW, BAIC, Foxconn and SF Express as customers and said Walker orders since early 2025 exceeded CNY 800 million, including CNY 159 million for a data collection centre in Zigong. Capacity targets are 5,000 units in 2026 and 10,000 in 2027.\n\nThe 2025 accounts, published in April 2026, are the hardest data on any humanoid maker. Revenue rose 53.3 percent to CNY 2.01 billion; full-size humanoid revenue went from CNY 35.6 million to CNY 821 million, 41 percent of the total, on 1,079 units delivered. Gross margin reached 37.7 percent and the net loss narrowed 32 percent to CNY 790 million. Part of the order book is data-collection work rather than production lines, and the company is still loss-making." }, { "slug": "unitree", "name": "Unitree Robotics", "aliases": [ "Unitree", "Hangzhou Yushu Technology" ], "country": "CN", "city": "Hangzhou, Zhejiang", "founded": "2016", "founders": [ "Wang Xingxing" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://www.unitree.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [ "Tencent", "Alibaba", "Ant Group", "China Mobile", "Geely", "Meituan", "Sequoia China" ], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "unitree-g1", "unitree-h1", "unitree-h1-2", "unitree-h2", "unitree-r1" ], "summary": "Unitree is the highest-volume maker of legged robots, starting with quadrupeds in 2016 and moving into humanoids with H1 in 2023. Its G1 and R1 set price floors for the industry. The company filed for a Shanghai STAR Market IPO in 2025.", "sources": [ { "title": "Unitree official site", "url": "https://www.unitree.com", "date": null, "publisher": "Unitree" }, { "title": "Unitree Robotics stock soars 460% in Shanghai IPO debut", "url": "https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/unitree-robotics-stock-soars-460-111514463.html", "publisher": "Yahoo Finance" }, { "title": "Unitree, famous for its dancing robots, surges by 460% on its trading debut", "url": "https://fortune.com/2026/08/19/unitree-china-dancing-robots-ipo-trading-surge-valuation/", "publisher": "Fortune" }, { "title": "China's backflipping robot maker Unitree pops 542% in Shanghai debut", "url": "https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/19/china-backflipping-robot-maker-unitree-jumps-shanghai-ipo.html", "publisher": "CNBC" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Unitree Robotics (Hangzhou Yushu Technology) was founded in Hangzhou in 2016 by Wang Xingxing. Its business for years was quadrupeds, and that volume gave it the actuators, supply chain and pricing that later made its humanoids cheap. The H1 biped came in 2023, followed by the smaller G1, the R1 and the H2, each priced well below Western competitors.\n\nThe prospectus filed for its Shanghai listing is the only audited look at a Chinese humanoid maker. Revenue rose from CNY 392.77 million in 2024 to CNY 1.70 billion in 2025, with net profit of CNY 278.21 million in 2025 and more than 5,000 humanoid units shipped that year. Overseas sales were about 44 percent of main-business revenue, including 18 percent from the United States, a market closed to it after the FCC added foreign-made humanoid and quadruped robots to its Covered List in July 2026. Pre-IPO investors included Tencent, Alibaba, Ant Group, DeepSeek and state-backed funds.\n\nUnitree listed on the STAR Market on 19 August 2026 at CNY 150.8 a share, raising about CNY 6.1 billion (USD 905 million). The stock closed its first day at CNY 845, up more than 460 percent, for a market value that press reports put at USD 50 billion to 66 billion, against USD 9 billion at the IPO price." }, { "slug": "university-of-bonn", "name": "University of Bonn", "aliases": [ "NimbRo", "Autonomous Intelligent Systems Group" ], "country": "DE", "city": "Bonn", "founded": "1818", "founders": [], "type": "university", "website": "https://www.ais.uni-bonn.de", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "nimbro-op2x" ], "summary": "The Autonomous Intelligent Systems group at the University of Bonn led by Sven Behnke runs team NimbRo, which builds open source humanoids, has won many RoboCup Humanoid League titles and won the ANA Avatar XPRIZE in 2022.", "sources": [ { "title": "NimbRo", "url": "https://www.nimbro.net/", "date": null, "publisher": "University of Bonn" }, { "title": "Our team NimbRo won the ANA Avatar XPRIZE Finals", "url": "https://www.ais.uni-bonn.de/nimbro/AVATAR/", "publisher": "University of Bonn" }, { "title": "Sven Behnke, Autonomous Intelligent Systems", "url": "https://www.ais.uni-bonn.de/behnke/", "publisher": "University of Bonn" }, { "title": "NimbRo announced as winner of the $10M ANA Avatar XPRIZE", "url": "https://www.xprize.org/news/ana-avatar-xprize-winners", "publisher": "XPRIZE Foundation" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "The University of Bonn, founded in 1818, hosts one of the longest-running academic humanoid groups in Europe. Sven Behnke has held the chair for Autonomous Intelligent Systems at Computer Science Institute VI since 2008 and runs team NimbRo. The group's focus is cognitive robotics, computer vision and machine learning; it builds robots to compete, not to sell.\n\nIts humanoids are the NimbRo-OP family, open-platform TeenSize and AdultSize soccer robots with the NimbRo-OP2X as the current model. NimbRo soccer robots have won many RoboCup Humanoid League titles, including every AdultSize competition in 2018 and 2019. The group also built Momaro, a wheeled-legged manipulator for the DARPA Robotics Challenge.\n\nIts widest recognition came on 5 November 2022 in Long Beach, when NimbRo won the ANA Avatar XPRIZE finals and the USD 5 million grand prize. Its teleoperated avatar let an operator judge finish all ten tasks in 5 minutes 50 seconds for a perfect 15 out of 15 score. Behnke is also a principal investigator at the Lamarr Institute and coordinates Bonn's part of the Robotics Institute Germany programme running from 2024 to 2028. Nothing from the lab has been commercialised as a humanoid product; its output is papers, open designs and trained researchers." }, { "slug": "uc-berkeley", "name": "University of California, Berkeley", "aliases": [ "UC Berkeley", "Berkeley Hybrid Robotics Lab" ], "country": "US", "city": "Berkeley, California", "founded": "1868", "founders": [], "type": "university", "website": "https://www.berkeley.edu", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "berkeley-humanoid", "berkeley-humanoid-lite" ], "summary": "UC Berkeley's Hybrid Robotics Lab led by Koushil Sreenath built the Berkeley Humanoid in 2024 and released the open source Berkeley Humanoid Lite in 2025 to make humanoid research affordable.", "sources": [ { "title": "Berkeley Humanoid", "url": "https://berkeley-humanoid.com/", "date": null, "publisher": "UC Berkeley" }, { "title": "Berkeley Humanoid: A Research Platform for Learning-based Control", "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.21781", "publisher": "arXiv" }, { "title": "Demonstrating Berkeley Humanoid Lite: An Open-source, Accessible, and Customizable 3D-printed Humanoid Robot", "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.17249", "publisher": "arXiv" }, { "title": "Berkeley debuts $5,000 open-source humanoid built with desktop 3D printers", "url": "https://www.rdworldonline.com/berkeley-debuts-5000-open-source-humanoid-built-with-desktop-3d-printers/", "publisher": "R&D World" }, { "title": "HybridRobotics/Berkeley-Humanoid-Lite", "url": "https://github.com/HybridRobotics/Berkeley-Humanoid-Lite", "publisher": "GitHub" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "The University of California, Berkeley, founded in 1868, hosts the Hybrid Robotics Lab under Koushil Sreenath, the source of the two humanoids in this record. Both are cheap research platforms for reinforcement-learning control, not products.\n\nBerkeley Humanoid, described in a paper submitted on 31 July 2024 by Qiayuan Liao, Bike Zhang, Xuanyu Huang, Xiaoyu Huang, Zhongyu Li and Sreenath, is a lightweight mid-scale biped built to keep the gap between simulation and hardware small. The paper shows it walking hundreds of metres outdoors, on steep unpaved trails and hopping on one and two legs. No unit count, price or licence is given on the project site.\n\nBerkeley Humanoid Lite, published in April 2025 (arXiv 2504.17249) by Yufeng Chi, Liao, Junfeng Long, Xiaoyu Huang, Sophia Shao, Borivoje Nikolic, Li and Sreenath, goes further on cost: a 0.8 m, 16 kg robot with 22 cycloidal gearboxes printed on a desktop FDM printer, off-the-shelf motors and a bill of materials of about USD 4,300 in the US or USD 3,200 in China. Hardware, firmware and training code are open source on GitHub. It can walk, write with a marker and solve a Rubik's Cube, with roughly 30 minutes of battery. Its value is as a template others can build, not a deployed machine." }, { "slug": "ucla", "name": "University of California, Los Angeles", "aliases": [ "UCLA", "RoMeLa" ], "country": "US", "city": "Los Angeles, California", "founded": "1919", "founders": [], "type": "university", "website": "https://www.ucla.edu", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "bruce" ], "summary": "UCLA's Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory under Dennis Hong builds research humanoids including BRUCE and the full size ARTEMIS, which competed in RoboCup.", "sources": [ { "title": "RoMeLa", "url": "https://www.romela.org/", "date": null, "publisher": "UCLA RoMeLa" }, { "title": "ARTEMIS, UCLA's most advanced humanoid robot, gets ready for action", "url": "https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/artemis-ucla-humanoid-robot-ready-for-action", "publisher": "UCLA Newsroom" }, { "title": "UCLA Professor Dennis Hong: A Timeline of Robotics Innovation", "url": "https://newsroom.ucla.edu/magazine/dennis-hong-robots-timeline-legacy-engineering", "publisher": "UCLA Newsroom" }, { "title": "UCLA engineers become 6-time RoboCup soccer world champions", "url": "https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/ucla-engineers-become-6-time-robocup-soccer-world-champs", "publisher": "UCLA Newsroom" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "UCLA appears here for one laboratory: RoMeLa, the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory run by Dennis Hong in the Samueli School of Engineering. Hong started the lab at Virginia Tech and moved it to UCLA in 2014. It is an academic group funded by grants and sponsors such as the Office of Naval Research, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Robotis, not a company.\n\nIts humanoid line runs from the small DARwIn robots through CHARLI, whose CHARLI-2 made Time's best inventions list and won the Louis Vuitton best humanoid award at RoboCup 2011, to THOR-RD, which entered the DARPA Robotics Challenge finals and won RoboCup in 2015. BRUCE, an open-platform biped with proprioceptive actuators built with the spin-off Westwood Robotics, arrived in 2022. ARTEMIS, unveiled on 10 March 2023, is a 142 cm, 38 kg biped with custom force-controlled electric actuators that the lab says walks at 2.1 m/s; its build was partly crowdfunded with 118,000 US dollars from 232 donors. It placed third at RoboCup 2023 and won every match at RoboCup 2024 in Eindhoven, the lab's sixth title.\n\nIn 2025 the lab built COSMO, a robot used to promote a Netflix film. None of these machines is for sale." }, { "slug": "usc", "name": "University of Southern California", "aliases": [ "USC", "Dynamic Robotics and Control Laboratory" ], "country": "US", "city": "Los Angeles, California", "founded": "1880", "founders": [], "type": "university", "website": "https://www.usc.edu", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "hector" ], "summary": "USC's Dynamic Robotics and Control Laboratory led by Quan Nguyen develops the open source HECTOR humanoid for research on model predictive control and learning based locomotion.", "sources": [ { "title": "HECTOR simulation", "url": "https://github.com/DRCL-USC/Hector_Simulation", "date": null, "publisher": "USC DRCL" }, { "title": "Dynamic Loco-manipulation on HECTOR: Humanoid for Enhanced ConTrol and Open-source Research", "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.11868", "publisher": "arXiv" }, { "title": "Dynamic Robotics and Control Laboratory", "url": "https://sites.usc.edu/quann/", "publisher": "USC" }, { "title": "USC Researchers Unveil Breakthroughs in Robotics at ICRA 2024", "url": "https://viterbischool.usc.edu/news/2024/05/usc-researchers-unveil-robotics-breakthroughs-at-icra-2024/", "publisher": "USC Viterbi" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "The University of Southern California, a private university in Los Angeles founded in 1880, appears here for one lab: the Dynamic Robotics and Control Laboratory in the Viterbi School of Engineering, led by Quan Nguyen. Its humanoid HECTOR (Humanoid for Enhanced ConTrol and Open-source Research) is a small testbed for model predictive control and learning-based locomotion.\n\nHECTOR is modular, splitting into arms, trunk and legs so it can run as a plain biped or as a full humanoid. Each leg has five degrees of freedom including an actuated ankle, and HECTOR V2, presented in a paper submitted on 19 December 2023 by Junheng Li, Junchao Ma, Omar Kolt, Manas Shah and Nguyen, adds four-degree-of-freedom arms. The V2 is 85 cm tall and 16 kg with a peak knee torque of 67 Nm. The paper shows it walking over uneven ground at 0.6 m/s while carrying up to 2.5 kg and recovering from pushes.\n\nThe open-source part is the software: simulation and control code in ROS and MATLAB on GitHub. Hardware designs are not published, and the machine has never been sold or deployed. A spin-off, LASER Robotics, has marketed HECTOR V2 as a research platform, but no pricing or unit numbers are public. USC's contribution is control methods, not hardware." }, { "slug": "ut-austin", "name": "University of Texas at Austin", "aliases": [ "UT Austin", "Human Centered Robotics Lab" ], "country": "US", "city": "Austin, Texas", "founded": "1883", "founders": [], "type": "university", "website": "https://www.utexas.edu", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "draco-3" ], "summary": "UT Austin's Human Centered Robotics Lab led by Luis Sentis develops the Draco series of bipedal humanoids with Apptronik, which was spun out of the lab in 2016.", "sources": [ { "title": "Human Centered Robotics Lab", "url": "https://sites.utexas.edu/hcrl/", "date": null, "publisher": "UT Austin" }, { "title": "Luis Sentis", "url": "https://ae.utexas.edu/person/luis-sentis/", "publisher": "UT Austin Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "The University of Texas at Austin is listed for its Human Centered Robotics Laboratory, founded and led by Luis Sentis, a Stanford electrical engineering PhD who holds the Frank and Kay Reese endowed professorship in aerospace engineering. The lab works on whole-body control, planning and human factors for humanoids, mobile manipulators and exoskeletons, and had graduated 17 PhDs by March 2026.\n\nIts humanoid record has two strands. Sentis was UT Austin's lead in the DARPA Robotics Challenge partnership with NASA Johnson Space Center, helping design and test the Valkyrie humanoid, for which he received a NASA Elite Team award; lab research later let Valkyrie run in a real-world setting. The second strand is the Draco series of teen-sized bipeds. Draco 3 was custom-built for the lab by Apptronik, the Austin humanoid company that grew out of the lab in 2016 with former student Nick Paine as CTO and Sentis as a founding member and innovation adviser; Apptronik announced a large funding round at the New York Stock Exchange in February 2026.\n\nRecent work includes a tendon-driven ARISTO hand with haptic wearables developed with Sony. The lab sells nothing; its robots are research tools, and its main commercial output is the company it spawned." }, { "slug": "vinmotion", "name": "VinMotion", "aliases": [ "Vingroup VinMotion" ], "country": "VN", "city": "Hanoi", "founded": "2025-01", "founders": [ "Vingroup" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://vingroup.net", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [ "Vingroup" ], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "vinmotion-humanoid" ], "summary": "VinMotion is the humanoid robotics company of Vietnam's Vingroup conglomerate, founded in January 2025.", "sources": [ { "title": "Vingroup newsroom", "url": "https://vingroup.net/en/news", "date": null, "publisher": "Vingroup" }, { "title": "Vietnam's VinMotion Unveils Gen 2 Humanoid Robot", "url": "https://mikekalil.com/blog/vietnam-vinmotion-motion2-humanoid-robot/", "publisher": "Mike Kalil" }, { "title": "Vingroup invests $12.75m in US-based humanoid robot research company", "url": "https://vir.com.vn/vingroup-invests-1275m-in-us-based-humanoid-robot-research-company-153860.html", "publisher": "Vietnam Investment Review" }, { "title": "VinMotion", "url": "https://vinmotion.net/", "publisher": "VinMotion" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "VinMotion (VinMotion General Purpose Humanoid Robots Application, Development and Research JSC) was set up in Hanoi in January 2025 as part of Vingroup, the conglomerate controlled by Pham Nhat Vuong that also owns the car maker VinFast. Vingroup holds 51 percent, Vuong 39 percent and his two sons the remainder. Reports put initial funding at about USD 39 million. The robotics work is led by Quan Nguyen, a Carnegie Mellon PhD and assistant professor at the University of Southern California.\n\nThe first robot, Motion 1, appeared in June 2025 after what the company describes as three months of research and is presented as the first Vietnamese-made humanoid, aimed at light factory tasks such as transport and inspection. Motion 2 was shown in a video at the end of December 2025 with a more natural gait, faster walking, a 40 kg load carried on its back, self-righting after falls, autonomous charging and battery swapping. VinMotion says the robots are being tested in logistics and at VinFast plants; no unit numbers have been published.\n\nOn 2 June 2026 Vingroup approved a USD 12.75 million investment to create Vinmotion USA, Inc. as a research centre to recruit talent. VinMotion is a well-funded prototype programme, not yet a supplier." }, { "slug": "virginia-tech", "name": "Virginia Tech", "aliases": [ "RoMeLa (Virginia Tech era)" ], "country": "US", "city": "Blacksburg, Virginia", "founded": "1872", "founders": [], "type": "university", "website": "https://www.vt.edu", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [], "summary": "Dennis Hong's RoMeLa lab, then at Virginia Tech, developed the DARwIn series of humanoids and led the NSF funded DARwIn-OP open platform with Purdue, Penn and Robotis before moving to UCLA in 2014.", "sources": [ { "title": "DARwIn-OP", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARwIn-OP", "date": null, "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "UCLA Professor Dennis Hong: A Timeline of Robotics Innovation", "url": "https://newsroom.ucla.edu/magazine/dennis-hong-robots-timeline-legacy-engineering", "publisher": "UCLA" }, { "title": "Our first look inside SAFFiR, the Navy's firefighting robot", "url": "https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/our-first-look-inside-saffir-the-navys-firefighting-robot", "publisher": "IEEE Spectrum" }, { "title": "Humanoid Nature", "url": "https://newsroom.ucla.edu/magazine/dennis-hong-robotics-and-mechanisms-laboratory", "publisher": "UCLA" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Virginia Tech, the public university in Blacksburg founded in 1872, housed the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory, RoMeLa, while Dennis Hong made it the best known academic humanoid shop in the United States. Hong founded the lab there and built its first humanoid soccer player, DARwIn, in 2004. CHARLI, started in 2008 by Hong and graduate students on USD 20,000 of seed money, is described by UCLA as America's first full-size walking two-legged humanoid; CHARLI-2 made Time's best inventions list in 2011 and won the Louis Vuitton best humanoid award at RoboCup that year.\n\nThe lab's most lasting output was DARwIn-OP, a 20-joint miniature humanoid using Robotis Dynamixel MX-28 servos, developed from 2010 with Purdue, Penn and Robotis under a USD 1.2 million NSF grant as a fully open platform. It won the RoboCup kid-size league in 2011, 2012 and 2013 and was built and sold by Robotis, which went on to its own OP2 and OP3.\n\nA US Navy contract produced SAFFiR, a heavier CHARLI derivative with linear actuators meant to fight fires aboard ships, shown in 2012, and the THOR line for the DARPA Robotics Challenge. Hong moved RoMeLa to UCLA in 2014 with team and projects; THOR-RD competed at the 2015 DRC finals under UCLA. Virginia Tech no longer runs a humanoid programme of note." }, { "slug": "wandercraft", "name": "Wandercraft", "aliases": [], "country": "FR", "city": "Paris, France", "founded": "2012", "founders": [ "Matthieu Masselin", "Nicolas Simon", "Alexandre Boulanger", "Jean-Louis Constanza" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://www.wandercraft.eu", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [ "Renault Group", "Bpifrance", "Quadrant Management", "Teampact Ventures" ], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "wandercraft-calvin-40" ], "summary": "Wandercraft makes self-balancing medical exoskeletons (Atalante, Eve) and in 2025 used that technology to build the Calvin-40 industrial humanoid in 40 days. It raised a USD 75 million Series D in June 2025 with Renault as strategic investor.", "sources": [ { "title": "Wandercraft", "url": "https://www.wandercraft.eu/", "date": null, "publisher": "Wandercraft" }, { "title": "Wandercraft announces Series D Round, bringing $75M in total funding secured for global acceleration of AI-powered robotics", "url": "https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2025/06/11/3097632/0/en/wandercraft-announces-series-d-round-bringing-75m-in-total-funding-secured-for-global-acceleration-of-ai-powered-robotics.html", "publisher": "GlobeNewswire / Wandercraft" }, { "title": "Wandercraft raises $75M to scale exoskeletons, humanoids", "url": "https://www.therobotreport.com/wandercraft-raises-75m-to-scale-exoskeletons-humanoids/", "publisher": "The Robot Report" }, { "title": "Renault-Backed Wandercraft Seeks EUR 100 Million in New Funding", "url": "https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-09-02/renault-backed-wandercraft-seeks-100-million-in-new-funding", "publisher": "Bloomberg" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Wandercraft is a Paris company founded in 2012 whose real business is medical exoskeletons: self-balancing walking frames that let paraplegic patients stand and walk without crutches. Its Atalante X rehabilitation system holds two FDA clearances and, per the company's June 2025 release, is used in more than 100 rehabilitation centres, where about 2,500 people have taken a combined 14 million steps. A personal exoskeleton, Eve, was in clinical trials at two US centres with a market launch targeted for 2026. Matthieu Masselin is CEO and a co-founder.\n\nThe humanoid is a by-product of that work. Calvin-40 was assembled in 40 days in 2025 by reusing the exoskeleton's actuators and balance control, with Nvidia Isaac software, and is aimed at heavy physical tasks in car plants. Renault Group is its first customer and took a minority stake in Wandercraft, with a strategic partnership to help scale production.\n\nOn 11 June 2025 Wandercraft announced a USD 75 million Series D from Renault, Bpifrance's PSIM fund, Teampact Ventures and Quadrant Management. On 2 September 2026 Bloomberg reported the company was seeking a further EUR 100 million, with Renault preparing to deploy hundreds of Calvin robots. That plan has not been confirmed with delivered numbers, and Wandercraft's humanoid remains far less proven than its exoskeletons." }, { "slug": "waseda", "name": "Waseda University", "aliases": [ "Waseda Humanoid Robotics Institute", "Takanishi Laboratory" ], "country": "JP", "city": "Tokyo", "founded": "1882", "founders": [], "type": "university", "website": "https://www.waseda.jp", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "wabian-2r", "wabot-1", "wabot-2" ], "summary": "Waseda University's Kato and Takanishi laboratories built the first full-scale humanoid, WABOT-1, in 1973 and have continued humanoid research through the WABIAN series.", "sources": [ { "title": "Waseda Humanoid Robotics Institute", "url": "http://www.humanoid.waseda.ac.jp/", "date": null, "publisher": "Waseda University" }, { "title": "A Quick Visit to the Humanoid Robotics Institute", "url": "https://www.waseda.jp/inst/cro/news-en/2025/06/03/19639/", "publisher": "Waseda University" }, { "title": "WABOT -WAseda roBOT-", "url": "http://www.humanoid.waseda.ac.jp/booklet/kato_2.html", "publisher": "Waseda University Humanoid Robotics Institute" }, { "title": "Japan Eyes Plan to Mass Produce Humanoid Robots By 2027", "url": "https://www.eweek.com/news/japan-mass-produce-humanoid-robots-2027/", "publisher": "eWeek" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Waseda University in Tokyo, founded in 1882, is where the modern humanoid started. In 1970 four laboratories in its School of Science and Engineering formed a bio-engineering group under Ichiro Kato, and between 1970 and 1973 they built WABOT-1, which the university describes as the first full-scale anthropomorphic robot in the world: it walked on legs, gripped and carried objects with tactile-sensing hands, measured distances with its cameras and held simple conversations in Japanese, with the estimated mental ability of a one-and-a-half-year-old child. WABOT-2, built from 1980 to 1984 and shown at the Tsukuba science expo in 1985, read sheet music and played an electronic organ while accompanying a singer.\n\nAtsuo Takanishi succeeded Kato and directs the work today. The Humanoid Robotics Institute was set up in April 2000 and became a project research institute in 2020. Its robots include the WABIAN bipeds, the WT talking robots that copy the human vocal tract and the KOBIAN emotion-expressing humanoid.\n\nNothing is sold. Current work has drifted toward sports training, surgical and neonatal training simulators with Kyoto Kagaku and tmsuk, and farm robots. In July 2025 Waseda co-founded the Kyoto Humanoid Association with tmsuk, Murata, Renesas and Sumitomo Heavy Industries, which aims to mass-produce humanoids in Japan from 2027." }, { "slug": "weave-robotics", "name": "Weave Robotics", "aliases": [ "Weave" ], "country": "US", "city": "San Francisco", "founded": "2024", "founders": [ "Kaan Dogrusoz", "Evan Wineland" ], "type": "startup", "website": "https://www.weaverobotics.com/", "status": "active", "employees_est": 26, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "weave-isaac-1" ], "summary": "American startup building Isaac, a wheeled home robot that tidies and folds laundry, sold direct to consumers at $7,999 or $449 a month.", "sources": [ { "title": "Weave Robotics launches Isaac 1, a $7,999 home robot", "url": "https://thenextweb.com/news/weave-robotics-isaac-1-home-robot", "date": "2026-07-09", "publisher": "The Next Web" }, { "title": "Weave Robotics", "url": "https://ycombinator.com/companies/weave-robotics", "publisher": "Y Combinator" }, { "title": "Weave Robotics news & analysis", "url": "https://sacra.com/c/weave-robotics/", "publisher": "Sacra" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Weave Robotics is a San Francisco startup founded in 2024 by Kaan Dogrusoz, formerly a manager in machine-learning robotics research at Apple, and Evan Wineland, formerly a lead AI product manager on Siri and Apple Intelligence. The company went through Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch and raised a USD 500,000 pre-seed in October 2024 led by YC. Its YC profile lists a team of 26. No later funding round has been disclosed.\n\nThe product is Isaac, a home robot marketed for tidying and laundry: it picks up dirty clothes, folds clean ones, makes beds and tidies toys, but does not run a washing machine. Isaac is not a biped. It rides on a wheeled base, extends to about 5 feet 9 inches when working, uses two orange claw grippers rather than hands, runs about eight hours per charge and is driven through a phone app, with a remote human operator able to take over for hard tasks. Weave calls this Remote Op; how much of a session is autonomous has not been quantified.\n\nIsaac was first promised for fall 2025. In July 2026 the company opened orders at USD 7,999 up front or USD 449 a month, with shipping to California from September 2026 and the rest of the United States in 2027. Order numbers have not been released." }, { "slug": "westinghouse", "name": "Westinghouse Electric Corporation", "aliases": [ "Westinghouse" ], "country": "US", "city": "Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania", "founded": "1886", "founders": [ "George Westinghouse" ], "type": "conglomerate", "website": null, "status": "defunct", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "elektro" ], "summary": "Westinghouse was a major American electrical manufacturer. Its Mansfield, Ohio plant built a series of demonstration robots in the 1930s, culminating in Elektro, shown at the 1939 New York World's Fair.", "sources": [ { "title": "Elektro", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektro", "date": null, "publisher": "Wikipedia" }, { "title": "Westinghouse Electric Corporation", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westinghouse_Electric_Corporation", "publisher": "Wikipedia" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Westinghouse Electric was founded in Pittsburgh in 1886 by George Westinghouse and grew into a giant of American heavy industry, making generators, steam turbines, appliances, broadcasting stations and later nuclear reactors. Its robots were never products but publicity for its electrical controls, built at the appliance works in Mansfield, Ohio, through the 1930s.\n\nThe last and best of them was Elektro, built in 1937 and 1938 by a team including J. M. Barnett, Jack Weeks Sr. and Harold Gorsuch. Seven feet tall and 265 pounds, with aluminium skin over a steel frame, it moved its head and arms, walked on voice command, spoke about 700 words from a 78 rpm record player, blew up balloons and smoked cigarettes, with photoelectric eyes. It starred at the 1939 New York World's Fair and was joined in 1940 by Sparko, a robot dog that barked, sat and begged. Elektro toured North America in 1950, appeared in the 1960 film Sex Kittens Go to College, and was later recovered and restored; replicas stand in museums including The Henry Ford.\n\nThe company itself is gone: it bought CBS for USD 5.4 billion in 1995, became CBS Corporation in 1997, sold its power business to Siemens and its nuclear arm to BNFL, and survives as a licensed brand and a separate nuclear company." }, { "slug": "x-humanoid", "name": "X-Humanoid (Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center)", "aliases": [ "Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center", "Beijing Embodied AI Robotics Innovation Center" ], "country": "CN", "city": "Beijing", "founded": "2023-11", "founders": [], "type": "research-institute", "website": "https://www.x-humanoid.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [ "UBTech", "Xiaomi Robotics", "Beijing E-Town" ], "public_ticker": null, "robots": [ "tiangong", "tiangong-2", "tiangong-ultra" ], "summary": "X-Humanoid is the Beijing municipal humanoid innovation center backed by UBTech, Xiaomi and Beijing E-Town. Its Tiangong platform is open source and won the first humanoid half marathon in 2025.", "sources": [ { "title": "X-Humanoid official site", "url": "https://www.x-humanoid.com", "date": null, "publisher": "X-Humanoid" }, { "title": "China's home-grown general-purpose humanoid jogs out at 6 km/h", "url": "https://newatlas.com/robotics/china-tiangong-general-purpose-humanoid/", "publisher": "New Atlas" }, { "title": "X-Humanoid, Maker of Tiangong, Plans for IPO", "url": "https://mikekalil.com/blog/the-rise-of-x-humanoid/", "publisher": "Mike Kalil" }, { "title": "Open X-Humanoid", "url": "https://github.com/Open-X-Humanoid", "publisher": "GitHub" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "X-Humanoid, formally the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, was set up in November 2023 in Beijing E-Town (the Yizhuang development zone) as China's first provincial-level humanoid centre, a joint venture rather than a private startup. UBTech, Xiaomi's robotics arm and the state-owned Beijing Jingcheng Machinery Electric put in about USD 42 million, and the E-Town government vehicle Beijing Yizhuang Robot Technology added USD 7 million, for registered capital of roughly USD 49 million. Xiong Youjun, also UBTech's CTO, runs it.\n\nIts platform is Tiangong, unveiled in April 2024 as a 163 cm, 43 kg all-electric humanoid that jogged at 6 km/h and climbed stairs without cameras. Tiangong 1.2 MAX (173 cm, 60 kg) followed in August 2024, then the athletic Tiangong Ultra, which won the first humanoid half marathon in Beijing in April 2025 and took a large share of the medals at the World Humanoid Robot Games in August 2025. A compact Tiangong Omni, the Hui Si Kai Wu software platform, the RoboMind dataset and an XR-1 vision-language-action model are released as open source for other makers.\n\nThe centre says more than 120 third-generation robots are in use generating training data, and Xiong told the 2026 World Robot Conference it intends to pursue an IPO. Its output is mostly demonstrations, datasets and reference designs; paying industrial deployments and revenue have not been published." }, { "slug": "xiaomi", "name": "Xiaomi", "aliases": [ "Xiaomi Robotics Lab" ], "country": "CN", "city": "Beijing", "founded": "2010", "founders": [ "Lei Jun" ], "type": "big-tech", "website": "https://www.mi.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": "HKEX: 1810", "robots": [ "xiaomi-cyberone" ], "summary": "Xiaomi showed the CyberOne humanoid in 2022, ahead of the current wave, and is a shareholder of Beijing's X-Humanoid center. It has not released a humanoid product.", "sources": [ { "title": "Xiaomi official site", "url": "https://www.mi.com", "date": null, "publisher": "Xiaomi" }, { "title": "Xiaomi demos new CyberOne bipedal robot", "url": "https://www.therobotreport.com/xiaomi-demonstrates-new-bipedal-robot-cyberone/", "publisher": "The Robot Report" }, { "title": "Xiaomi's New Humanoid Robot Installs Nuts, Sorts Panels in EV Factory Trial", "url": "https://www.eweek.com/news/xiaomi-humanoid-robot-ev-factory-testing/", "publisher": "eWeek" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Xiaomi is the Beijing consumer electronics and electric car group founded in 2010 by Lei Jun and listed in Hong Kong. Its humanoid work sits in a robotics lab and has never produced a product for sale. CyberOne, unveiled by Lei on 11 August 2022 a year after the CyberDog quadruped, was a 177 cm, 52 kg biped with 21 degrees of freedom and a curved display for a face; Lei said building one cost 600,000 to 700,000 yuan, and the robot was a stage demonstration rather than a product.\n\nThe programme went quiet until 2026. In March 2026 Lei said Xiaomi could use humanoids in its factories at scale within five years. At the World Robot Conference on 21 August 2026 the company reported trials in its electric vehicle plant: installing self-tapping nuts at a 76-second cycle with 90.2 percent success in a first three-hour run, rising to 98 percent by July, and sorting console panels and folding material boxes at about 90 percent.\n\nExecutive Lu Weibing said humanoids remain some distance from mass commercialisation. There is no external revenue, unit count or headcount for the effort." }, { "slug": "xpeng", "name": "Xpeng", "aliases": [ "XPeng Motors", "Xiaopeng" ], "country": "CN", "city": "Guangzhou, Guangdong", "founded": "2014", "founders": [ "He Xiaopeng", "Xia Heng", "He Tao" ], "type": "automaker", "website": "https://www.xpeng.com", "status": "active", "employees_est": null, "total_funding_usd": null, "valuation_usd": null, "valuation_date": null, "key_investors": [], "public_ticker": "NYSE: XPEV, HKEX: 9868", "robots": [ "xpeng-iron", "xpeng-px5" ], "summary": "Xpeng is an electric car maker that has invested in humanoids since 2020 through its robotics unit. Its Iron humanoid uses the company's own Turing AI chips and is planned for mass production at the end of 2026.", "sources": [ { "title": "Xpeng official site", "url": "https://www.xpeng.com", "date": null, "publisher": "Xpeng" }, { "title": "Xpeng unveils next-gen Iron humanoid robot at 2025 AI Day", "url": "https://cnevpost.com/2025/11/05/xpeng-unveils-next-gen-iron-humanoid-robot/", "publisher": "CnEVPost" }, { "title": "XPeng robotics raises $900M at $6.3B valuation for IRON robot push", "url": "https://electrek.co/2026/08/24/xpeng-robotics-900m-iron-humanoid-robot-valuation/", "publisher": "Electrek" }, { "title": "XPENG Shares Achievements in Physical AI Emergence: Unveils XPENG VLA 2.0, Robotaxi, Next-Gen IRON, and Flying Car", "url": "https://www.xpeng.com/news/019a56f54fe99a2a0a8d8a0282e402b7", "publisher": "Xpeng" } ], "last_verified": "2026-09-06", "profile": "Xpeng is a Guangzhou electric car maker founded in 2014 by He Xiaopeng, Xia Heng and He Tao, listed in New York (XPEV) and Hong Kong (9868). It treats robots, flying cars and driver assistance as one physical-AI programme built around its in-house Turing chip. The robotics unit dates from 2020 and the first-generation IRON humanoid appeared at AI Day in November 2024.\n\nThe next-generation IRON, shown at AI Day on 5 November 2025, is 178 cm and 70 kg with hands of 22 degrees of freedom, an all-solid-state battery and three Turing chips giving 2,250 TOPS, running Xpeng's second-generation VLA model. Xpeng said it would prioritise commercial service jobs such as guided tours, with an inspection deployment at steelmaker Baosteel, and would start mass production by the end of 2026, aiming at more than 1,000 units a month and a long-range figure of one million by 2030. None of that volume exists yet; public deployments so far are demonstrations and pilots.\n\nIn June 2026 He Xiaopeng took direct charge of robotics, and on 24 August 2026 Xpeng Robotics was spun into a subsidiary with a round of more than USD 900 million at a USD 6.3 billion post-money valuation, led by IDG Capital with Tencent and Alibaba; Xpeng keeps roughly 82 percent." } ] }