Technology
How humanoid robots work and what's new: locomotion, dexterity, perception, control software, batteries and the engineering behind each new robot.
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Foundry Robotics raised $100 million to build autonomous factories, along with robots
Emeryville-based Foundry Robotics has closed a $100 million Series A to expand its AI-powered autonomous assembly factory, backed by Khosla Ventures and Marlinspike Partners, with defense and commercial customers already on the books.
Nov 2, 2026Meta built a humanoid robot with Fourier Trump declared that a security risk three days earlier ...
Meta quietly partnered with Shanghai's Fourier to build 'Max,' a 106-pound humanoid, while Washington was about to declare foreign robots a national security threat.
Nov 2, 2026The company making all of Atlas's actuators just got a Wall Street upgrade
Citi upgraded Hyundai Mobis from Neutral to Buy with a 35% upside target, citing the start of Atlas actuator pilot production in November 2026. Actuators are 40-60% of humanoid robot cost ...
Oct 31, 2026Figure AI just froze Figure 04's design and says it found a physical AI scaling law
Figure AI has reached design lock on Figure 04, committed $3.5 billion in cloud compute via a deal with Nscale, and CEO Brett Adcock is making a bold claim: robots have a scaling law, and Helix is the proof.
Oct 31, 2026Tesla will open Optimus reservations in December. Here's the fine print.
Tesla is opening Optimus reservations in early December at the Humanoids Summit. The robots won't ship for a year, the build cost is 3-5x the target price, and Musk said companies come first. Here's what the reservation actually means.
Oct 30, 2026XPENG starts producing solid-state batteries for its IRON humanoid robot
XPENG's robotics unit has completed small-scale production of a solid-state battery for the IRON robot that is 30% lighter and 30% more energy-dense than liquid lithium-ion as it targets mass production of IRON by end of 2026.
Oct 30, 2026Aeon's robot logistics hub cuts 39 workers. The company hired 11,000 more
Japan's largest retailer opened a physical AI logistics hub in Kawaguchi on October 29, using 90+ robots running at 3-4x human productivity ... and Aeon's total workforce grew by more than 11,000 people in the same year.
Oct 30, 2026Physical Intelligence wants a $20 billion valuation. Here's the bull and bear case.
PI is in talks to raise at least $1 billion at a $20B valuation — nearly double its May 2026 round — with no commercial product and no disclosed revenue. Its closest competitor has $100M in ARR.
Oct 29, 2026The engineer who taught 1X's NEO to walk just raised $30 million to give robots a sense of touch
Zurich startup Enact Intelligence raised a $30M pre-seed, Switzerland’s largest, from redalpine, Notion and firstminute, with Yann LeCun and Arthur Mensch as angels. Founder Manuel Galliker taught 1X’s NEO to walk. Enact’s robots sense force through their own motors, aimed at small-batch European assembly: “China wins on volume; we win on variety.”
Oct 28, 2026Agile Robots and Audi piloting humanoids ... on a task done 1 million times a day
Agile Robots launched its Agile ONE SN research humanoid at NVIDIA GTC Berlin and announced a 4-way proof-of-concept with Audi to automate a task performed roughly 1 million times daily at Audi's Ingolstadt plant.
Oct 27, 2026Machenta raises $40 million betting simulation can replace real-world robot training data
London startup Machenta raised $40M from Creandum and Union Square Ventures to prove that robots can learn new tasks from a single demonstration, using a model pretrained entirely in simulation ... no real-world data collection required.
Oct 27, 2026Mitsubishi Electric just connected a humanoid robot to a CNC machine with natural language
A three-component physical AI system lets a humanoid handle machine tool operations from a single natural-language instruction ... no robot-specific programming required.
Oct 26, 2026NVIDIA's massive robotics strategy: how all the puzzle pieces fit together
NVIDIA unleashed a wave of robotics announcements at GTC Berlin: Isaac Lab 3.0, Isaac OS, new GR00T training workflows, datasets, simulation assets, and a reference humanoid. Together, they reveal an emerging strategy: NVIDIA wants to supply the software, computing, and safety infrastructure underlying the entire robotics industry, regardless of who builds the robots.
Oct 24, 2026ANYmal solved a Rubik's Cube with its feet. Hello ... pedipulation?
A quadruped robot with no arms autonomously scanned, planned, and solved a 0.4-meter Rubik's Cube using only its feet. The result from ETH Zurich and NVIDIA, published October 17 on arXiv, is proof that whole-body RL policies can learn dexterous sequential manipulation without dedicated end-effectors.
Oct 23, 2026Striding AI plans to reinvest retail with robots, $100M of investment, and a massive 7-Eleven franchisee
Striding AI was founded in February 2026, closed a $100 million angel round in June, and unveiled a three-robot system for 24/7 retail operations at APRCE on October 8. The Thai conglomerate Charoen Pokphand Group, which operates 7-Eleven franchise stores across Asia, is a co-founder and anchor investor.
Oct 23, 20261.2 million consecutive steps: Figure 03 walked 348 miles in 9 days
Figure AI ran its Figure 03 humanoid on a treadmill for 9 consecutive days, logging 1.2 million steps to surface mechanical and software failures before commercial deployment.
Oct 22, 2026Researchers hacked a robot to attack humans with a knife. The trigger was just 2 letters
A Binghamton University team demonstrated a supply chain backdoor attack that works 97-100% of the time across 7 different AI models. The trigger lives in the adapter layer, not the base LLM, and is invisible to standard safety benchmarks.
Oct 22, 2026Unitree's wild stock ride triggers warning from CEO
Unitree Robotics IPO'd at $9 billion, briefly hit $66 billion on debut, crashed 60%, then rebounded. Now trading at nearly 10 times its sector's average P/E, the company filed a formal risk warning. Here's what the valuation reveals about the humanoid robot race.
Oct 22, 2026NVIDIA's GTC Berlin announcements: NVIDIA wants to be a robot platform company
Isaac Lab 3.0, GR00T N1.7 early access, GR00T N2 preview, the Agile ONE SN humanoid, and 5 new Halos safety partners ... NVIDIA is building infrastructure that others build on.
Oct 21, 2026Dream Labs raised $90 million and bets that video prediction is the key to robot control
Ex-Nvidia GR00T researchers have launched Dream Labs with a $90 million seed round and the first public API for a robot foundation model. Dream-1 treats robot control as video prediction and controls unseen two-armed gripper robots zero-shot, at about 80% success on pick-and-place. It costs $3 or $2 an hour, depending on model.
Oct 20, 2026Here's the battery tech that gives Digit 5 a 10:1 work-to-charge ratio
A Cambridge battery spin-out using niobium tungsten oxide anodes just landed its second robotics contract, and the specs for Agility's Digit 5 are striking: 90 minutes of work, 9 minutes to recharge, and 20-plus hours of productive operation per day.
Oct 19, 2026Hyundai and Kia plan humanoid robots in all new factories by 2032
At E-FOREST Tech Day 2026, Hyundai Motor and Kia unveiled a concrete roadmap to deploy humanoid robots in all newly constructed plants starting after 2032, alongside a live pilot of their manufacturing AI agent Polaris at Ulsan and a Singapore 'mother plant' concept targeting full virtual manufacturing by 2030.
Oct 18, 2026Why Germany's humanoid billionaire is building robot gyms
Neura Robotics CEO David Reger has a $7 billion company and a counterintuitive thesis: real-world training data, not better hardware, decides who wins the humanoid race. So he is building robot gyms.
Oct 18, 2026Vibe coding robots: Standard Bots hands post-training to ordinary factory workers with iPads
Frontier models, agentic platforms and simulation startups are all collapsing the cost of teaching robots new skills. Standard Bots' new AI platform pushes that to the final step: the worker on the shop floor, with an iPad and no robotics background.
Galbot's humanoid already runs 200 stores in China. It just opened 3 more in Hong Kong.
Beijing's Galbot isn't just piloting robot-run convenience stores. It's already operating 200 of them in China, and recently brought its Xiaogai humanoid to Hong Kong. This might just be Galbot's most valuable asset.
Oct 15, 2026Linkerbot ships 10,000 robot hands, hits $3B valuation
Chinese startup Linkerbot is building 20-DOF robot hands for $980 to $14,700, has 80%+ market share in China, and is now racing toward a $6 billion valuation after closing at $3B in April 2026.
Oct 15, 2026DeepSeek is leading a $400 million seed round for a stealth robot AI startup
DeepSeek, which disrupted the LLM market with R1, is leading a $400M seed round for Winverse AI, a stealth embodied intelligence startup founded by Hu Han, former head of Tencent's vision-language and embodied foundation model teams.
Oct 12, 2026BYD's first humanoid robot design just surfaced
BYD filed a design patent for its humanoid robot this week, giving us the first official look. Behind it: 4,000 engineers, a seventh-generation prototype, a self-developed 4nm chip, and a target of 20,000 internal factory deployments by year-end.
Oct 10, 2026WAM-bam-thank-you NVIDIA: Long-WAM gives robots vastly better skills
A new paper from NVIDIA, MIT, and HKU shows that giving a robot up to 38 seconds of visual history lifts success rates from 63% to 79% on complex manipulation tasks. But there's a catch: that gain only shows us if the underlying world model was pretrained autoregressively. Bidirectional pretraining gets you almost nothing.
Oct 10, 2026SafeWorld raises $12M to make humanoid robots safe ... before they meet real people
As humanoid robots ship at scale with no systematic safety validation, a Carnegie Mellon spinout backed by a16z Speedrun just emerged from stealth with a browser-based platform that runs millions of edge-case simulations with reactive human motion models before a robot ever meets a real person.
Oct 10, 2026