USA
News on American humanoid robot companies, including Tesla Optimus, Figure, Agility Robotics, Apptronik and Boston Dynamics, plus US funding and policy.
Humanoid Daily
Figure's baby AGI, Meta's China gamble, China 5Xs physical AI investment, and Agility goes to Wall Street
Nov 3, 2026Physical Ai
Everything we learned about Figure from its public all-hands meeting
Nov 3, 2026Usa
Foundry Robotics raised $100 million to build autonomous factories, along with robots
Nov 2, 2026More USA
Meta 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, 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, 2026Washington targets robot imports, Agility goes public, $20 billion valuation, and home insurance for humanoids
Today in Humanoid (almost) Daily ... Washington declares robot imports a national security threat, Agility Robotics heads to Nasdaq next week. AGIBOT wants to change how we measure robot work, Hyundai Mobis bets big on robot joints, Bleu Robotics gets €5 million to teach robots faster, there's more than 1,100 jobs training robots, humanoid robots can now get home insurance, and the number of the day: $20 billion, zero revenue.
Physical 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, 2026Humanoid robots for last-mile delivery? Reward AI's OM-1 shows some cool tricks
Reward AI’s OM-1, a robot model trained only on human glove data with no teleoperation, now runs humanoids on last-mile delivery. In the new video they unload packages from a Cybertruck and carry them up and down stairs, all autonomous and in real time. The demo is impressive, but Reward still hasn’t published success rates, a paper or benchmarks.
Oct 28, 2026GXO is expanding Digit to 2 more warehouses, but they're still chasing ROI
Agility Robotics and GXO are expanding their humanoid partnership from 1 to 3 U.S. sites. That doesn't mean GXO is hitting ROI targets yet on its humanoid robot testing.
Oct 26, 2026Killer hacked robots, Optimus in production, NVIDIA's platform wins, micro-factories staffed by robots, and more!
Today in Humanoid Daily ... Tesla starts building Optimus (but how many), NVIDIA wants to own the robot platform, 1 word turns a robot violent, Unitree's CEO warns investors, tiny micro-factories powered by humanoids, a humanoid with personality, and the number of the day is 348!
IDC: American humanoid robot makers face a 2028 squeeze under FCC robot ban
IDC projects US humanoid revenue 58% below baseline by 2030, because fast product cycles leave few certified models to keep shipping. US builders won’t reach scale until late 2028, which leaves an opening for component suppliers.
Oct 22, 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, 2026Farmtech, meet humanoid robots, sort of: AGCO is bringing Digit to farm equipment manufacturing
AGCO, a $10 billion agricultural equipment maker behind Fendt and Massey Ferguson, will pilot Agility Robotics' Digit at its Hesston, Kansas facility in 2027 ... the first major deployment of humanoid robots in agricultural machinery manufacturing.
Oct 20, 2026The $400 humanoid, Digit the forklift, Germany's robot gyms, and 6 chip companies focusing on humanoid robots
Today in Humanoid Daily ... a new $400 humanoid powered by a smartphone, Digit 5 is the forklift of humanoids, Germany's robot billionaire is building robot gyms, China unveils a 13-foot humanoid robot that lifts half a ton, and the number of the day is 6 ... 6 chip companies focusing on robots.
UCLA researchers built a $400 humanoid using a $50 smartphone
A team at UCLA's RoMeLa lab has built a fully functional bipedal humanoid robot for $400 by centering its design around a cheap Android smartphone. The open-source PhoneBot is 8 to 9 times cheaper than any comparable platform and can walk, follow people, and recover from falls.
Oct 19, 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.
Another robot company on public markets: Faraday Future sells itself to itself, sort of
Faraday Future is “selling” its robotics business for $200 million to FFR, a Nasdaq company it already controls and will own about 66% of afterward. The deal creates a separately traded robot company. And it has some very ambitious projections: 130,000 robots and $1.98 billion in revenue by 2030.
Oct 14, 2026Humanoid is a state of mind: Matter Venture Partners’ Haomiao Huang on robots worth building
Matter Venture Partners’ Haomiao Huang, fresh off closing a $450 million hard tech fund, says “humanoid is a state of mind.” To him that means a general-purpose robot with dexterity, mobility and onboard compute that fits human spaces, on legs or not. He sees factory robots at scale first, then 80%-good-enough helpers at home. Spiders might come later ...
Oct 13, 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, 2026Singapore held its first humanoid fight night. California just shut down the American version.
ARC's Singapore event put professional martial artists in motion-capture suits piloting full-sized humanoids in live combat. The same week, California issued a cease-and-desist to REK for running similar events without a license. Where is this sport/entertainment/spectacle going?
Oct 9, 2026Hello Amazon! AWS just entered the physical AI infrastructure race
Amazon Web Services launched an open-source Physical AI Toolchain today, and it's a direct play for the software layer sitting beneath every humanoid robot being built. That's a super-interesting play for a company that might own more robots than any other on the planet.
Former Tesla Optimus chief Ashish Kumar launches new industrial robot startup
Ashish Kumar, who led Tesla's Optimus humanoid program, is raising roughly $100 million to build Intelligent Machines: a San Francisco startup targeting the skilled manufacturing and aerospace tasks that current humanoids can't handle.
Oct 7, 2026Mecka AI is making $100M a year sending humans to collect robot training data
Mecka AI crowdsources human movement data using body sensors and iPhones, has hit $100M annual run rate, and just closed a Sequoia-led round approaching a $500M valuation, providing the clearest sign yet that robot training data is its own industry.
Oct 7, 2026Boston Dynamics picks Amazon's Alexa head Rohit Prasad as its new CEO
Rohit Prasad, who built Alexa into a product in hundreds of millions of homes and led Amazon's Nova foundation models, takes over at Boston Dynamics on October 7. He's the company's third CEO in 34 years and a clear signal that Hyundai is betting on AI commercialization, not hardware engineering, to win the physical AI race.
Oct 7, 2026Boston Dynamics' Atlas has 4 fingers. Tesla's Optimus has 5. Here's why ...
Boston Dynamics deliberately cut the pinky from Atlas's commercial hand after physical experiments and simulations showed 4 fingers matched the dexterity of 5 for factory tasks. Tesla chose 5 for Optimus to work with human-built tools. The difference isn't a hardware limitation ... it's two different theories of what humanoid robots are for.
Oct 7, 2026Dyna Robotics' new Taku humanoid is built for a job, not a set of tasks
Dyna Robotics wants to sell businesses a robot employee, not a robot task. Taku is the hardware making that pitch real: a wheeled semi-humanoid that chains 79 subtasks across an hour of laundry work with no human standing by.
Oct 5, 2026Top 10 countries globally for industrial robots: who's growing, who's falling behind
China installed 354,000 industrial robots in 2025, 59% of the global total and nearly 3X the next four countries combined. The US passed Japan for second place but still imports most of its robots. Japan and Europe are sliding, while India is rising fast, according to the IFR's World Robotics 2026 report.
Oct 5, 2026General Robotics CEO: we're wasting billions on physical AI chasing the wrong layer
General Robotics says its GRID platform can onboard a new robot in two hours instead of a month. CEO Ashish Kapoor, who led Microsoft's robotics research group, explains how AI agents and a single robotics monorepo make that possible, why mixed robot fleets are inevitable, and why he thinks billions invested in robot foundation models may be chasing the wrong layer.
Oct 3, 2026Clone shows off an amazing robot hand it's already retiring. The new hand might be totally different.
Clone Robotics posted a stunning teleoperation video of its Torso 3 hand, then called it a "legacy" design. The company says it has rebuilt its entire system from scratch for simulatability and controllability, culminating in Torso 4, a human-level torso for enterprise bimanual tasks, launching in November.
Oct 3, 2026Tesla Is building 1,000 Optimus robots a week, but the hands are a major problem
Tesla's Optimus production ramp is reportedly very real: hundreds of units per week, trending to 1,000. But a hand assembly bottleneck involving 100+ screws, unreliable touch sensors, and supplier inconsistency is keeping most units out of customer (internal or external) hands.
Oct 2, 2026Boston Dynamics' new Atlas hands bet on fewer parts, not more fingers
Boston Dynamics just unveiled new hands for Atlas with 13 degrees of freedom, four fingers and no pinky. While rivals like 1X, Tesla and Genesis AI chase 20-plus degrees of freedom, Boston Dynamics is betting on simplicity, strength, ruggedness and hands that can be accurately simulated for reinforcement learning.
Oct 2, 2026New IDC data: humanoid robot shipments up 432% year over year, jobs for robots, and much more ...
Today in Humanoid Daily ... Singapore puts humanoids on the police beat, Korea wants 200,000 robots by 2030, the U.S. Army and Ukraine push robots toward military use, robots are moving into hospitals and homes, and today's number of the day is 25,000. As in ... shipped robots, up 432% year over year.