Every funding round, launch and paper, as it's reported.
Qibitech, the Tokyo developer of HATS vendor-agnostic robot control software, said on 30 September 2026 it raised about ¥600 million in a Series B through a third-party share allotment to funds managed by JIC Venture Growth Investments and Sumitomo Corporation Venture Partners. The money goes to HATS development, sales and hiring.
Direct Drive Tech, which makes direct-drive motor modules for household and wheel-legged robots, raised HK$1,080.0 million when it listed in Hong Kong on 29 September 2026. Robot-vacuum sensor supplier Camsense followed on 30 September with HK$682.0 million after retail investors oversubscribed its public tranche 3,546.91 times. Both companies depend on five customers for more than 80% of sales, their filings show.
Destro AI, a Brooklyn startup founded in 2026, said on 29 September 2026 it raised an $8 million seed round co-led by Base10 Partners and Bonfire Ventures. Its software assigns tasks across mixed robot fleets and is already live with Yusen Logistics (Americas).
Flourish, a San Francisco and Paris startup founded in January 2026 by Antoine Marcel, has opened sales of Flourish One, a six-wheeled, two-armed home robot priced at $3,555, The Robot Report reported. Owners teach a chore by moving their smartphone through the task, using the phone's motion sensors, and a cloud model is fine-tuned for that home in under 30 minutes; the robot runs on a Raspberry Pi rather than an onboard GPU, which Marcel said would double the cost. Each arm lifts 1.5 kg, the arms run for 12 hours per charge, and the first 50 hand-built units are due to ship before Christmas 2026.
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.
Global humanoid robot shipments reached nearly 25,000 units in the first half of 2026, up 432.1% year on year, with market value above $740 million, IDC said on September 29. China took about 77.9% of shipments, Chinese vendors supplied more than 95%, and IDC raised its 2030 forecast by about 50% to more than 750,000 units.
Singapore-based Sharpa launched three products at IROS 2026 in Pittsburgh: the D01 robot with whole-body electronic skin, the W02 hand with 21 active degrees of freedom at under 750 grams, and the AE01 haptic glove for teleoperation and data capture. Together they give the company the hardware to collect, replay and learn from touch-rich manipulation data.
AMD will pay roughly $8.2 billion in shares for the world-model startup and expects to close by the end of 2026, pending regulators. It frames the deal around compute for robotics, simulation and physical AI.
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.
The Open Agent Safety Platform pairs open-source OpenShell software with a Sentry reference design. NVIDIA names three robotics companies using it to put safety limits on physical systems.
Fidelity and Amplify co-led the Series C, lifting SiMa.ai's total funding to $500M. The company plans a 1,000-TOPS chip for the first half of 2028 and names humanoid robots as a core market.
Asimov's fictional Three Laws of Robotics famously set safeguards, and tech observers today raise similar concerns about AI.
While robotaxis prove their driving ability, scaling the industry globally requires solving the unglamorous challenge of fast, local vehicle servicing.
Amazon plans to spend more than $100 million on a 585,000 sq ft manufacturing facility in Greenwood, Indiana, scheduled to start operating in 2028 with 300 skilled manufacturing and engineering jobs. The site will produce equipment for Amazon's fulfillment and robotics network across North America, combining fabrication, robotic welding, automated powder coating and assembly supported by AWS and AI-based production systems, the company said. Amazon already runs a large robot manufacturing operation in Massachusetts that has built more than one million robots now deployed in over 300 facilities worldwide.
Rather than training one model to do everything, General Robotics composes specialized capabilities—helping robots adapt across tasks and form factors.
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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.
Labor availability, costs, productivity, and efficiency are common concerns of farmers that technology can address, according to CNH.
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.