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

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2 hours ago
AnalysisUS

Skild AI and Figure top the largest humanoid and embodied-AI funding rounds of 2025-2026, as money moves from robot bodies to robot brains

Skild AI's $1.4 billion Series C, led by SoftBank, and Figure AI's $1 billion Series C, led by Parkway Venture Capital, are the two largest humanoid and embodied-AI rounds in ROBOTNESS's verified records since January 2025, and together make up 41% of the $5.86 billion disclosed across 22 rounds. Humanoid makers took 70% of disclosed money in 2025, but developers of robot foundation models have taken 71% in 2026 so far, and NVIDIA joined seven rounds without leading one.

3 sourcesSkild AIFigure AIApptronikRobot Foundation ModelsWorld Models
4 hours ago
IndustryUS

What is a vision-language-action (VLA) model, and who is building them?

A vision-language-action (VLA) model is one neural network that reads camera images and a plain-language instruction and outputs a robot's next motor commands, built by training a vision-language model on robot demonstrations. Google DeepMind, Physical Intelligence, NVIDIA, Figure AI, Skild AI and AgiBot lead, and the commercial race now turns on the cost of action data rather than model design.

11 sourcesGoogle DeepMindPhysical IntelligenceNVIDIAVLARobot Foundation Models
21 hours ago
ResearchUS

Anthropic finds robots can do 74% of US physical tasks but are cost-competitive on just 0.3% of work

Anthropic economists scored about 19,000 O*NET job tasks and concluded that robots can technically perform 74% of physical tasks in the US, yet beat human labour on cost for only 0.3% of tasks. At the historical 3% annual decline in robot prices, the study estimates it would take 40 years for that share to reach 10%.

2 sourcesAnthropicFigure AISkild AIDexterous ManipulationRobot Foundation Models
22 hours ago
ProductUS

Runway turns its video models into robot control with Praxis-1, an open-weight world action model

Runway announced Praxis-1 on 30 September 2026, an open-weight world action model that converts its large-scale video pretraining into control for real robots. Early tests run with Noble Machines, Standard Bots and Ultra on bimanual, six-axis arm and mobile-base hardware, and public weights are promised in the coming months.

2 sourcesRunwayPhysical IntelligenceNVIDIAWorld ModelsRobot Foundation Models
22 hours ago
FundingUS

Columbia spinout Tangent Robotics raises $4.5 million to give factory robots a sense of touch

Tangent Robotics, a New York company spun out of Columbia Engineering, said on 30 September 2026 it raised a $4.5 million pre-seed round co-led by Fly Ventures and Toyota Ventures. It is building robot hands with light-based touch sensors and learning methods for fine assembly tasks such as connector mating and gear meshing.

1 sourceTangent RoboticsWonik RoboticsSanctuary AITactile SensingDexterous Manipulation
yesterday
FundingUS

Gradient leads US$7.6 million round for Feather, which sells a US$29,990 two-armed robot and lets buyers pick the brain

Feather Robotics, a US startup selling an open-hardware wheeled robot with two arms for US$29,990, raised US$7.6 million in a round led by Gradient, the lead investor said on 30 September 2026. Gradient said Feather has already passed US$1 million in revenue, with robots at work in manufacturing and food service.

3 sourcesFeather Robotics1X TechnologiesInbolt
2 days ago
FundingUS

General Intuition raises $220 million at a $6.2 billion valuation, betting gameplay clips can teach robots to act

General Intuition, which trains AI models on action-labelled gameplay clips from the Medal platform, said on 29 September 2026 that it had raised $220 million at a $6.2 billion valuation from investors including Khosla Ventures and General Catalyst. The figure is 2.7 times the $2.3 billion it disclosed with its Series A 96 days earlier, and the company has opened a waitlist for partners in robotics, simulation and games.

4 sourcesGeneral IntuitionSkild AIPhysical IntelligenceWorld ModelsImitation Learning
3 days ago
PartnershipUSSingle source

Gecko Robotics adopts NVIDIA's agent safety stack to fence in the AI that drives its inspection robots

Gecko Robotics is integrating NVIDIA's Open Agent Safety Platform into its infrastructure inspection robots, The Robot Report reported on Sept. 28. The platform pairs open-source OpenShell software, which enforces policy limits on NVIDIA Vera CPUs while agents run, with Sentry, a reference design on BlueField-4 data processing units that watches agents and quarantines those breaking policy within milliseconds. In Gecko's systems, AI agents start and stop data collection, plan robot paths and raise or lower payloads but do not handle data uploads. The robots inspect fuel tanks, nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers for Fortune 100 energy companies, the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy.

1 sourceNVIDIA
6 days ago
ProductUS

Video Friday: Life’s Better With a Little Robot Goose

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months.

1 source
6 days ago
BusinessUSSingle source

Agility Robotics studies wheeled designs beyond its Digit humanoid, CEO says

Agility Robotics is looking at other robot designs, including wheeled ones, to serve different operating environments and customer needs, CEO Jonathan Hurst confirmed. Hurst said the effort has only just started, with no launch timeline and no decision on whether it would mean a wheeled Digit or an entirely new machine. The company holds more than $300 million in multi-year Digit v5 orders from a single unnamed customer and is going public through a SPAC deal valued at $2.5 billion that is expected to raise more than $620 million in gross proceeds. Agility posted 2025 revenue of $1.8 million and an operating loss of $140 million.

1 sourceAgility Robotics
7 days ago
BusinessUSSingle source

IFR counts 5 million industrial robots in service as China takes 59% of 2025 installations

The global stock of operational industrial robots reached 5 million units in 2025, up 9% on the year, according to statistics the International Federation of Robotics released on Sept. 24. Annual installations rose 11% to more than 600,000 units, of which China accounted for 354,000, or 59%, with Chinese manufacturers supplying 195,000 of those robots. The United States ranked second with 38,500 installations, while Japan fell 19% to 36,219 units and dropped to third, ahead of South Korea at 30,000 and Germany at under 25,000. The IFR forecasts installations of 655,000 units in 2026 and 806,000 units in 2029.

1 source
10 days ago
BusinessUS

Boston Dynamics opens Atlas training center at Hyundai's Georgia plant as Hyundai targets 25,000 humanoids

Boston Dynamics opened the Robotics Metaplant Application Center at Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America, where Atlas is training on parts sequencing ahead of assembly work by 2030. The company said Hyundai plans to deploy 25,000 Atlas units and build a US facility able to make 30,000 robots a year, while Hyundai targets Atlas on its Georgia line from 2028.

4 sourcesBoston DynamicsHyundai Motor GroupFigure AIDexterous ManipulationElectric Actuators
13 days ago
ResearchUS

Video Friday: Two Birotors Make a Quadrotor

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months.

1 source
17 days ago
FundingUS

Shipyard humanoid maker Persona AI reports $65.4 million sold toward a $142 million private offering

Houston-based Persona AI disclosed in an SEC Form D filed on September 14, 2026 that it has sold $65,363,626 of a planned $141,964,814 private offering to 46 investors, with the first sale on August 28. The company, which builds humanoid robots for shipyard welding and other skilled trades and has a deployment agreement with HD Hyundai, raised $27 million in a pre-seed round in May 2025.

7 sourcesPersona AIApptronikAgility RoboticsDexterous ManipulationTeleoperation
21 days ago
BusinessUS

Skild AI says it passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue as its S1 model learns tasks from one video

Skild AI said on September 10 that it crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue ten months after its first commercial deployment, with more than 60 paying customers. The figure follows the August 18 launch of S1, a robot foundation model that the company says can pick up a new task from a single video demonstration without retraining.

4 sourcesSkild AINVIDIAFigure AIRobot Foundation ModelsImitation Learning