Humanoid Robotics: Funding and Corporate Moves

• NEURA Robotics closed a $1.4 billion Series C at a $7 billion valuation, positioning the German company to build out its Neuraverse and NEURA Gym infrastructure and cementing DACH leadership in physical AI
• Humanoid, a European startup, raised a $152 million Series A, becoming the region's first humanoid robotics unicorn
• Agility Robotics strengthened its executive team with a new CFO ahead of a planned public listing, then went public via SPAC as the first publicly listed humanoid robotics company
• Zalando joined Sereact's Series B as a strategic investor, growing the round to $116 million
• A German robotics startup raised $55 million in seed funding to accelerate deployment across Europe
• Robotics funding reached $18.8 billion across six months, with thirteen humanoid startups alone accounting for $6.5 billion of capital raised over the trailing twelve months
• European humanoid valuations look inflated when benchmarked against Chinese shipper AgiBot, where comparable capability commands a fraction of the price

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Physical AI: Models and Learning

• NVIDIA is positioning robotics as the next computing platform, shipping Isaac GR00T 1.7 and Isaac Teleop on Hugging Face's LeRobot to own more of the stack from silicon to software
• Google's Gemini Robotics 2 runs a single model checkpoint across different robot bodies and now delivers whole body humanoid control, dexterity and multi robot collaboration
• Anthropic's Claude Opus 5 outperformed Google's Gemini Robotics ER2 on real robot tasks in a head to head evaluation
• VLASH predicts future execution states ahead of time, cutting VLA reaction latency by up to 11.8x
• One test found that directional text hints improved robot navigation more than depth maps did, pointing to language grounding as an underused signal
• Training data annotation, not raw model capability, is now the limiting step in specializing new robotics applications
• Sim to real transfer remains the field's core bottleneck: locomotion demos trained purely in simulation prove narrow capability rather than readiness for messy real environments

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Industrial and Warehouse Deployment

• Amazon is investing €300 million to convert its Pforzheim site into an advanced robotics fulfillment center
• Figure's humanoid pilot with BMW has already built 30,000 cars, well ahead of where Tesla's Optimus stands on comparable material factory work
• Xiaomi's humanoid robots are now handling parts and transporting materials inside one of the company's automobile factories
• Figure 03 humanoids are sorting packages and navigating autonomously inside a live warehouse environment
• DANOBAT's dBot robots, running on Siemens SINUMERIK technology, are delivering high precision robotized machining on production lines
• KUKA and Siemens Bank are now offering deferred payment financing for robotics investments, lowering the upfront barrier to industrial deployment
• The FDA granted de novo authorization to Johnson & Johnson's Ottava surgical robot, though surgeon habit rather than technical specification is what currently protects Intuitive Surgical's market position

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Policy, Safety and Governance

• The FCC banned the import and sale of foreign made humanoids, quadrupeds and autonomous mobile robots from certain manufacturers
• Cybersecurity, data sovereignty and governance are becoming baseline requirements for trusted robotics deployment rather than optional add ons
• Chinese made humanoids raise data exposure, remote takeover and safety standard risks that buyers are only beginning to price in
• microagi signed the Open Weights letter, arguing that manufacturing plants should own their robot intelligence outright rather than license it
• Germany's economics minister visited NEURA Robotics, spotlighting the country's stake in the physical AI opportunity
• Leaders at the MACHINA Summit stressed ROI, safety and staged commercialization over speed for humanoid rollouts

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Research, Hardware and Open Source

• A free 46 hour ROS 2 Jazzy course now takes learners from nodes, topics and services through to building a full simulated mobile robot
• The CRISP open source ROS 2 package is easing VLA experimentation on real robotic manipulators
• Ant Group's Robbyant open sourced depth, vision and VLA robot models under its Robbyant project
• OctoSense, a multi sensor robotics dataset, is now browsable and queryable through FiftyOne
• RSS 2026 is advancing research in dexterous manipulation, physical reasoning and embodied AI
• Tacta Systems argues three finger tactile hands are sufficient for manufacturing dexterity, without the added cost of a full five finger hand
• The humanoid hardware debate over legs versus wheels for locomotion continues, with Unitree's new wheeled legged AS2-W bringing quadruped capability into a much lower price bracket

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Thanks to Joern Menninger, Titus Gulbis, Aaron Prather, Saurav D., Michael Beer, Kingsley Advani, Ralf Gulde, Artjem Weissbeck, Nikola Lazarov, Vlad Oleksiienko, Marcel Münch, Zeo Nam, Qi Wang, Lukas M. Ziegler, Tim Iskhak, Aris Zhu, Shamas Khan, Kal Mos, Andrew Maas, Jerry Huang, Christian Breiner, Unni Mecheeri, Ken Kuang, Sergey Kochnev, Stefanie Frank, Reiner Meier, Sean Whooley, Dave Saunders, Evan Beard, Fan Tan Smith, Robert Little, Bercan Kilic, David Reger, Tim Schuster, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Lars N. Josler, Enzo Ghisoni, Leonard Rodman, Jimmy Guerrero, Tomasz Bednarz, Michelle Sun, Peter Wirth and Gennadiy Vaksman, and everyone else who contributed insights to this edition. Find the full list of posts and voices on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/best-linkedin-cw-30-31-robotics-thomas-allgeyer-fz0dc/?lipi=urn%3Ali%3Apage%3Ad_flagship3_detail_base%3B90c8Q6n0TiG%2B4KJKZFPN1w%3D%3D