Humanoids

• UBTECH made the first mass Walker S2 delivery, with orders above 800M yuan
• UBTECH’s Liuzhou factory targets 10,000+ humanoids a year
• Humanoid shipments rose 432% in H1 2026, led by AGIBOT and Unitree
• GXO piloted 45 humanoids and put none into production
• Figure retired its F.02 units after the BMW line
• Musk says no robot hand can yet drive a screw
• Tutor launched a new Cassie and the Sonny humanoid

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Physical AI Models and Tooling

• Microsoft Research’s open weight Rho halves finetuning data needs
• Gemini 4 Argon taught Apptronik’s Apollo to play cornhole
• Reward AI’s OM-1 generalises zero shot across robots
• AWS launched an open source Physical AI Toolchain on NVIDIA’s stack
• One in seven of 4,420 startups studied is building physical AI
• LLM robot control scores doubled every 6 weeks to 48%
• Real time control needs 83 Hz, against 0.2 to 0.4 Hz for AI inference

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Industrial Deployment and Operating Model

• Universal Robots’ Gen7 draws its value from UR+ partners
• A 99% per action success rate completes a 100 action job 36.6% of the time
• Walmart keeps automating despite rebuilt warehouses and canceled shelf robots
• The US has an automation adoption problem, not a robot shortage
• Physical AI shifts the question to which judgment stays with people
• Over 5 million industrial robots are installed globally
• Caterpillar’s physical AI push hinges on reliability in unpredictable sites

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Capital and Corporate Moves

• Qualcomm agreed to acquire PickNik Robotics, steward of MoveIt
• ICON raised a $200M Series D to bring Titan into production
• Inbolt raised €11M to cut robot deployment to minutes
• Agility Robotics named three directors ahead of its SPAC combination
• Former KUKA CEO Till Reuter joined goodBytz as Chairman
• Schaeffler holds the only binding robot order among corporate investors graded
• O-ID raised $1.2M pre seed for a modular limb humanoid

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Healthcare and Surgical Robotics

• Stryker is investing $400M in CMR Surgical for 10%
• NEURA HealthTech launched, returning 1,300+ care hours a year
• Surgical robotics raised $1.1B last year, about one Figure round
• The surgical robots market is projected to hit $27.14 billion by 2030
• One surgeon cites 144 FDA reported deaths to keep surgeons in control
• Multiply Labs applies robotic automation to cell therapy manufacturing

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Europe

• Europe raised $53M per physical AI company against $148M in the US
• European robotics funding rose 190% in H1 2026 to €1.8B
• RobCo doubled its valuation in nine months to above $1 billion
• Germany has at least six robot arm manufacturers and six unicorns
• Switzerland leads on startups per capita but lacks late stage capital
• SCHUNK, a family firm making robot hands for 20 years, counters China
• A Munich startup paying 20,000+ people to film tasks won Germany’s largest seed

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Thanks to Alec Alakbarov, Gabriel Millien, Leonard Rodman, Pascal BORNET, Erdem Ürün, Rafael Hostettler, Leo Su, Dr. Michael Meneghini, Sergey Kochnev, Niclas Schlopsna, Mischa Dohler, Aaron Prather, Guillermo Flor, Krish Patel, RJ Pittman, Gianmaria Sbetta, Danny Bernstein, Sascha Weiler, Tom Holland, Jan Zizka, Michelle Sun, Gershon Celniker, Unni Mecheeri, Robert Little, Nicolas Sauvage, Ralf Gulde, David Reger, Aaron Saunders, Grace Gong, Swami Sivasubramanian, Samarth Malhotra, Peter Kappes, Tom Salemi, Marc Theermann,  Josh Gruenstein, Christopher Savoia, Ozgur Tohumcu, Roko Karanusic, Tim Carden, Leaf Jiang, Gauri Tripathi, Jake Hall, Lukas M. Ziegler, Markus Wagner, John Koetsier, Jay C., Nataly Laktionova, Mayuri Lamba, Sri Elaprolu, Andreas Klinger and everyone else who contributed insights to this edition. Find the full list of posts and voices on LinkedIn: