John Koetsier

I tell stories with data and build startups. I've raised angel and VC funds, led software companies and startups, and chronicled the rise of the mobile economy. Currently I write for Forbes, host several podcasts, and am starting up HumanoidMegaHub. I was TUNE's mobile economist and Singular's VP of Insights, built the research team at VentureBeat, and managed teams creating software for partners like Intel and Disney. In past lives I built websites, e-learning platforms, and mobile apps, and, a long time ago, was named to Folio's top 100 of the media industry's "most innovative entrepreneurs and market shaker-uppers.”

John Koetsier

157 articles

The FCC just cleared its first foreign factory robots, from ATi Robotics

Swiss startup Embodied AI launches AIR, a humanoid robot that learns from factory workers

Swiss aircraft manufacturer testing a humanoid robot inspector on its PC-24 assembly line

Agility is public: the short list of humanoid robot stocks, and who's next

Toyota Robotics: Toyota just established a dedicated robotics division

The China humanoid shakeout begins: 150 companies at risk

XPeng open-sourced GroundingPI , a robot perception model that beats GPT-6 Astra

The UK just launched the first humanoid robot insurance

Figure's baby AGI, Meta's China gamble, China 5Xs physical AI investment, and Agility goes to Wall Street

24-hour HumanoidMegaHub outage yesterday (!!)

Pivotting from cars to robots: Schaeffler cuts 3,460 jobs, bets €400 million on humanoids

AGIBOT's 24-hour convenience store test: what 6 humanoid robots can do

Everything we learned about Figure from its public all-hands meeting

Japan just mounted a humanoid robot on a railway vehicle and gave it a chainsaw

Foundry Robotics raised $100 million to build autonomous factories, along with robots

Meta built a humanoid robot with Fourier Trump declared that a security risk three days earlier ...

The company making all of Atlas's actuators just got a Wall Street upgrade

Figure AI just froze Figure 04's design and says it found a physical AI scaling law

Saturn Dynamics says its world model beats Nvidia's Cosmos by 73% ... and runs 38X faster

Tesla will open Optimus reservations in December. Here's the fine print.

Washington targets robot imports, Agility goes public, $20 billion valuation, and home insurance for humanoids

XPENG starts producing solid-state batteries for its IRON humanoid robot

Aeon's robot logistics hub cuts 39 workers. The company hired 11,000 more

Europe's first humanoid robot factory is in Serbia, and it's Chinese

Inside Neura Robotics' massive physical AI strategy: more than humanoids

Physical Intelligence wants a $20 billion valuation. Here's the bull and bear case.

Unitree's first post-IPO earnings: 70% revenue growth, R&D spend up 250%

The China strategy? South Korea using government agencies as robot customers

The engineer who taught 1X's NEO to walk just raised $30 million to give robots a sense of touch

Humanoid robots for last-mile delivery? Reward AI's OM-1 shows some cool tricks

Agile Robots and Audi piloting humanoids ... on a task done 1 million times a day

Samsung robots for surgery, UK's biggest seed round, Boston Dynamics employee revolt, and hello BlackBerry!

Machenta raises $40 million betting simulation can replace real-world robot training data

Mitsubishi Electric just connected a humanoid robot to a CNC machine with natural language

GXO is expanding Digit to 2 more warehouses, but they're still chasing ROI

What 86 Chinese executives really think about humanoid robots

NVIDIA's massive robotics strategy: how all the puzzle pieces fit together

ANYmal solved a Rubik's Cube with its feet. Hello ... pedipulation?

Striding AI plans to reinvest retail with robots, $100M of investment, and a massive 7-Eleven franchisee

Killer hacked robots, Optimus in production, NVIDIA's platform wins, micro-factories staffed by robots, and more!

IDC: American humanoid robot makers face a 2028 squeeze under FCC robot ban

1.2 million consecutive steps: Figure 03 walked 348 miles in 9 days

Researchers hacked a robot to attack humans with a knife. The trigger was just 2 letters

Unitree's wild stock ride triggers warning from CEO

NVIDIA's GTC Berlin announcements: NVIDIA wants to be a robot platform company

Schaeffler's China factory: humanoid robots building parts for humanoid robots

Farmtech, meet humanoid robots, sort of: AGCO is bringing Digit to farm equipment manufacturing

Dream Labs raised $90 million and bets that video prediction is the key to robot control

The $400 humanoid, Digit the forklift, Germany's robot gyms, and 6 chip companies focusing on humanoid robots

Here's the battery tech that gives Digit 5 a 10:1 work-to-charge ratio

UCLA researchers built a $400 humanoid using a $50 smartphone

Hyundai and Kia plan humanoid robots in all new factories by 2032

Why Germany's humanoid billionaire is building robot gyms

Korea approves 20 humanoid robots for working with humans in factories

Hong Kong bets HK$10 billion on becoming the world's humanoid robot testing ground

Google one-shots humanoid training, Tesla gives robots skin, Faraday launches $2,490 humanoids, and more!

Vibe coding robots: Standard Bots hands post-training to ordinary factory workers with iPads

Galbot's humanoid already runs 200 stores in China. It just opened 3 more in Hong Kong.

Linkerbot ships 10,000 robot hands, hits $3B valuation

Another robot company on public markets: Faraday Future sells itself to itself, sort of

One-shot robot training: Google's Gemini 4 Argon taught Apptronik's Apollo to play cornhole

Humanoid is a state of mind: Matter Venture Partners’ Haomiao Huang on robots worth building

General foundation model for physical AI? Nature Will bets on 1 million hours of video

A robot was used to sexually assault a teenager in Germany while live-streaming to TikTok

Unitree's founder tested GPT-6 on robots ... the results might have been too good to report

DeepSeek is leading a $400 million seed round for a stealth robot AI startup

BYD goes big in humanoid robots with 4,000 engineers, NVIDIA makes robots smarter, and much more

BYD's first humanoid robot design just surfaced

Renting a humanoid robot in China now costs $40 a day, down 80% in 1 year

WAM-bam-thank-you NVIDIA: Long-WAM gives robots vastly better skills

SafeWorld raises $12M to make humanoid robots safe ... before they meet real people

Singapore held its first humanoid fight night. California just shut down the American version.

Generalist physical AI: Odyssey-3 launches with a $1.45B bet on 1 AI foundation model for every robot

China's Lumos Robotics says it staged the world's first fully autonomous robot theater

Hello Amazon! AWS just entered the physical AI infrastructure race

New UBTECH, VW project: humanoid robots will help mass customize cars

China controls 94% of the permanent magnets in a humanoid robot

Mecka AI is making $100M a year sending humans to collect robot training data