Robotics

Mecka AI has reportedly raised $60 million from Sequoia to expand robot training data and deployment, highlighting a growing bottleneck in robotics.

Reka AI’s Rho-1 combines text, images, video, and robot control in one 19B research model, signaling a push toward unified AI systems.

Anthropic is reportedly advancing a hardware standard for AI agents to control machines, a move that could reshape robotics, automation and enterprise deployment.

General Intuition is reportedly seeking a $6 billion valuation with new robotics-focused funding, testing investor appetite for physical AI and generalized agent models.

DeepSeek and Unitree are reported to be collaborating on robotics AI models, a move that could link model development with robot hardware.

Mistral AI introduced Robostral Navigate, an 8B robotics model for single-camera navigation, signaling a push toward cheaper robot perception stacks.

Paradigm has raised a $1.2 billion fourth fund, signaling that one of crypto’s best-known VC firms now sees AI and robotics as core bets.

General Intuition has raised $320 million to scale AI trained on millions of hours of gameplay, betting action data can help AI develop real-world reasoning.

AI robotics labs are outsourcing the tedious physical work of collecting robot training data to companies like XDOF, highlighting the hidden labor behind AI development.

Amazon introduced a next-generation Proteus warehouse robot with language capabilities for worker-assigned tasks.

Nvidia selected China's Unitree for its first publicly available humanoid robotics system for researchers.

Roomba inventor Joe Jones is back with an AI-powered companion robot designed to behave more like a pet than a household helper.

Ouster unveiled Rev8 color lidar sensors that combine imagery and depth data for robotaxis, drones and robotics perception.

Meta bought Assured Robot Intelligence as it builds AI models and teams for humanoid robotics inside Meta Superintelligence Labs.

Samsung's Project Luna is a round-screen AI robot with a swiveling head, offering a glimpse of the company's vision for consumer AI robotics.

Dozens of Chinese-made humanoid robots outpaced human runners in a Beijing half-marathon, demonstrating major leaps in autonomous navigation and physical AI.

Robotics startup Physical Intelligence releases π0.7, a general-purpose robot model capable of figuring out tasks it was not explicitly trained to perform.

Driven by acute labor shortages, Japan is scaling physical AI deployments in factories and warehouses, aiming for 30% of the global physical AI market.

Google DeepMind and Agile Robots announced a strategic research partnership to integrate DeepMind's Gemini Robotics models into Agile Robots' industrial platforms, creating a scalable AI flywheel for next-generation autonomous manufacturing.

NVIDIA's Jensen Huang delivered a sweeping GTC 2026 keynote covering DLSS 5 AI gaming software, the NemoClaw AI agent security layer, the NVIDIA AI Agent Toolkit, 110 AI-powered robots, and a vision for the first space-based data center, Vera Rubin Space-1.