Travis Kalanick is back, and Uber is helping to fund him. The founder Uber forced out in 2017 has raised $1.7 billion for Atoms, an industrial-AI and robotics company he has built in near-total stealth for years. Andreessen Horowitz led the round. Its …
The hard part of medical robotics is not the robot. It is the practice. A surgical system needs thousands of attempts to learn a delicate task, and you cannot run those on real patients. Nvidia thinks the answer is to let the robot rehearse inside a si…
NEURA Robotics is opening ‘gyms’ where robots train under real-world conditions, starting with two German universities. Its bet is that the thing holding humanoids back is not intelligence, but a shortage of real experience. The German robotics firm NE…
Hironobu Tamba spent years inside SoftBank building large language models, the kind of software that answers questions and drafts emails. He has now walked away from that work to bet on machines that move. Tamba is president and chief executive of Noet…
San Francisco-based Gritt has exited stealth with just over $32 million in combined pre-seed and Series A funding to deploy AI-powered robotic systems on large-scale construction sites, starting with solar farms. The $26 million Series A was led by Obv…
London-based robotics startup Humanoid has raised $152 million in a Series A round led by Prime Movers Lab, the venture firm behind Figure AI’s $39 billion valuation, pushing Humanoid’s own valuation above $1 billion. Bosch, Schaeffler, Aglaé Ventures,…
Blackstone is buying into Futronic, a South Korean maker of the high-precision actuators that let machines move, in a wager that the least visible hardware in a robot is where the next returns will sit. The firm did not disclose the size of the investm…
Like many engineers, Sarah Downs says she knew she wanted to pursue a STEM career from a young age. As a teenager, she discovered robotics through her Tulsa, Okla., middle school’s First Lego League team, and she fell in love with the field, she says….
Picture a lightweight headset. You think about picking up a cup, and a robot arm reaches out and does it. No button, no voice command, no movement. BrainCo drew crowds with that demo at the World AI Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, the South China Mornin…
Bercan Kilic got his dream job in 2023, designing aerodynamics for Red Bull Racing while it was winning everything. He found the engineering magnificent and the point of it thin. His Munich startup, microagi, has now raised $55m, which it says is the l…