🦾 HardTech Reads: The AI & Robotics Revolution vol.84

Welcome to the exploration of the world where founders embark on bold quests and solve non-obvious problems 🤘

Lots of news this week so buckle up! Agility and Unitree are both sprinting toward the public markets, Atlas stole the show at the FIFA World Cup ⚽, Paris gave Europe its own humanoid at MACHINA 🇫🇷, and fresh funding landed on three continents 💰. Grab a coffee, this one runs longer than usual. Let’s get into it.

🔥 Key Highlights This Week

• 📈 Unitree receives approval for its Shanghai IPO
• 🚀 Agility Robotics is heading to Wall Street as the first pure-play humanoid public company through a $2.5B SPAC merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI
• 💰 China’s humanoid funding boom continues:
  • AI² Robotics raises approximately $735M.
  • X Square Robot surpasses a $2.8B valuation.
  • Ant Group leads a ~$74M Pre-A round in Zeroth, the $2,499 home humanoid with 30,000+ units on backorder.
• 🖐️ 1X unveils NEO’s new tendon-driven hands with 25 degrees of freedom
• 🔌 Sanctuary AI achieves 99.5%+ task success completing wire-plugging in just 2.54 sec
• 🏭 Apptronik opens Robot Park, a 90,000 sq ft humanoid data factory
• 🚗 Figure 03 returns to BMW’s Spartanburg factory
• 🏠 Weave Robotics launches Isaac 1, a $7,999 home robot
• 🤖 Pudu Robotics plans for the world’s first fully robot-operated hotel in 2027
• 🧠 Mistral AI releases its first robotics model
• 🇫🇷 UMA emerges from stealth in Paris as LeRobot creator Rémi Cadène unveils the Northstar humanoid at MACHINA.
• ⚽ Boston Dynamics’ Atlas makes its World Cup debut in front of 80k people
• 🌊 Kraken Robotics acquires Covelya Group for CA$615M

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🚀 HARDTECH NEWS: Robotics & AI Innovations

🤖 𝐀𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐥𝐢𝐪𝐮𝐢𝐝𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐨𝐛𝐨𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐬 𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐭!

This time underwater 🌊 😉 Kraken Robotics just closed its acquisition of Covelya Group for CAD $615M (~USD $432M).𝗛𝘂𝗴𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗴𝗿𝗮𝘁𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗯𝗼𝘁𝗵 𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗺𝘀 👏 Greg Reid

𝗗𝗲𝗮𝗹 𝗱𝗲𝘁𝗮𝗶𝗹𝘀:

→ $480M cash + $135M in shares

→ 6 companies in one move: Sonardyne Inc. (underwater navigation and positioning, the biggest one), EIVA (maritime software), Voyis (underwater optical imaging), Wavefront Systems (sonar), Chelsea Technologies Ltd (marine sensors) and Forcys (defense integration)

→ ~$365M combined 2025 revenue

→ 24% EBITDA margin (yes, in robotics)

Take a closer look at the buyer which is not a defense prime, not a hyperscaler!

It’s a robotics company that raised $115M last year, lined up credit and went shopping!😉

Robotics companies are the consolidators now🦾

My favorite detail: Sonardyne Inc., the crown jewel here, was founded in 1971!

𝗛𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝘁𝗲𝗰𝗵 𝗲𝘅𝗶𝘁𝘀 𝘁𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗲. 𝗦𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗲𝘀 𝟱𝟬 𝘆𝗲𝗮𝗿𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱 𝘂𝗽 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗲𝗰𝗼𝘀𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺. 𝗕𝘂𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘆 𝗽𝗮𝘆 𝘀𝘂𝗰𝗰𝗲𝗲𝗱 💰

👉 Learn more and here.

➡️ Agility Robotics Heads to Wall Street in a $2.5B SPAC Deal

Agility Robotics announced a merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI at a $2.5B pre-money valuation, making it the first publicly traded company devoted entirely to humanoid robots. The deal is expected to deliver more than $620M in gross proceeds, including a $200M PIPE, with the combined company trading under the ticker AGLT. Agility reports over $300M in multi-year orders for Digit v5, deployments across nine customer facilities, and manufacturing capacity designed for up to 10,000 units a year.

I love this milestone because Agility is not selling sci-fi spectacle. It is selling warehouse labor automation, and that is exactly where humanoids may become commercially real first.

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➡️ 1X Gives NEO Hands That Get Close to Human

1X pulled the covers off NEO’s new hands: 25 degrees of freedom per hand, with 22 fully actuated joints across the fingers and palm plus three at the wrist, close to the 27 DoF of a human hand. Every joint is force-controlled and backdrivable, driven by motors in the forearm pulling proprietary tendons through the wrist. The hands can lift a 20-pound kettlebell, pick grapes off the stem, plug in a USB-C cable, and they’re IP68 waterproof, so NEO can wash them under running water. Hundreds have already come off the production line, with capacity for 10,000 hands this year.

Hands have been the bottleneck in humanoid robotics for years, so I love seeing this level of engineering actually ship at scale instead of staying in a demo video.

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➡️ Atlas Makes Its World Cup Debut — and Hands Over the Match Ball

Boston Dynamics’ Atlas walked onto the pitch at halftime of the Brazil vs. Norway Round of 16 match at MetLife Stadium, performed goal celebrations in the style of Haaland, Kane, Cunha and Son, then bowed and handed the match ball to the referee in front of 80,633 fans. Hyundai, FIFA’s official robotics partner, called it the first robotics-powered halftime activation for a live global audience. The behaviors weren’t hand-programmed: Atlas learned the celebration moves in roughly 24 hours of training, work that would take a human athlete months of practice. Haaland then scored in the second half and celebrated with a robot dance of his own.

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➡️ Unitree Clears the Last Hurdle Before Its Shanghai IPO

China’s securities regulator approved Unitree’s registration for a STAR Market listing, clearing the company to raise about 4.2 billion yuan (~$618M) at a valuation around $5.9B, with a debut possible as early as late July. Unitree got there in 104 days, a speed record for the STAR Market’s pre-review system. It’s one of the rare profitable names in humanoids, selling low-cost bipeds and quadrupeds in volume, which is exactly why every Chinese robotics supplier is watching how the pricing lands. The listing will be the first real public-market test of humanoid valuations in China, just as Agility heads for the NYSE through its SPAC.

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➡️Apropos Unitree, Japan is long on Humanoids

Shimizu is testing out the ability of this robot from China’s Unitree to patrol construction sites on foot.

TOKYO – Japanese general contractor Shimizu plans to introduce AI-powered humanoid robots at its construction sites by around fiscal 2030, aiming to have them handle such work as painting and plastering in a bid to alleviate the industry’s severe labor shortages.

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➡️ UBTech Opens Sales of Its U1 Home Humanoid in China

UBTech has opened sales of its U1 companion humanoid for Chinese homes. Starting at roughly $17,650, the lifelike robot is positioned for companionship rather than factory work—and, importantly, it can actually be ordered instead of remaining permanently in demo mode. The price is still far from mass-market, but the transition from prototype to purchasable consumer product is the signal worth watching.

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➡️ UMA Steps Out of Stealth in Paris With the Northstar Humanoid

UMA (Universal Mechanical Assistant), founded by Rémi Cadène, the ex-Tesla Optimus scientist who later built Hugging Face’s LeRobot library, presented its Northstar humanoid and Real-Time Learning architecture at the MACHINA Summit. The plan covers a dual-arm mobile robot for warehouses and assembly lines plus a more compact humanoid for hospitals, labs and homes, with Yann LeCun advising and about 50 potential customers already in talks. The team designed and assembled its first prototype in Paris in nine months, backed by a $40M seed round. Cadène’s pitch is a European humanoid built on European trust, targeting European factories first.

This is why I was watching Paris. The robot race isn’t a two-player US-China story anymore, and I’m curious how far a LeRobot-style open ecosystem approach can carry a hardware company. (Disclaimer – I invested in Uma Robotics).

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➡️ Tesollo Starts Its IPO Run on the Back of Humanoid Hands

South Korean robotic hand maker Tesollo kicked off preparations for an IPO next year and closed a Series B round with follow-on backing from POSCO Technology Investment, KB Investment and Enlight Ventures, plus strategic investors Daesung Hi-Tech and HL Mando. The Incheon company builds multi-jointed hands for humanoids, from parallel grippers up to the five-fingered DG-5F with 20 independently driven joints, and its new DG-5F-S weighs under 1 kg at about 60% of the cost of its predecessor. Tesollo has exported to 19 countries and its overseas sales just passed domestic sales. Between Tesollo and 1X’s tendon hands, the hand supply chain is quietly becoming its own industry.

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➡️ Mistral Ships Its First Robotics Model

Mistral released Robostral Navigate, an 8B-parameter model that lets robots move through complex environments using a single camera and plain language prompts, no lidar or multi-camera rigs required. Trained entirely in simulation, it hit a 76.6% success rate on unseen R2R-CE navigation benchmarks and runs hardware-agnostic across robot fleets. The launch follows Mistral’s acquisition of Austria’s Emmi AI in May and lands alongside its industrial deals with Airbus and BMW. Europe’s flagship AI lab is now officially in the physical AI business.

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➡️ Pudu Robotics Plans the World’s First Fully Robot-Run Hotel

Pudu Robotics is building a hotel on West Artificial Island along the Shenzhen-Zhongshan Link where robots handle every guest-facing function: reception, concierge, housekeeping, food prep and delivery. The 44-room property is designed as one integrated robotic ecosystem, with specialized robots collaborating through a shared intelligence platform rather than working as isolated gadgets. Public trials of a limited number of rooms start in late 2026, with the full opening planned for 2027. It’s the most ambitious end-to-end test yet of whether service robots can run an entire customer experience without humans backstage.

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➡️ Tesla Converts Its Old Model S Line Into an Optimus Factory

Tesla is turning the Fremont line that built the Model S into a production line for Optimus, and Musk says output will start slow for a concrete reason: the robot has roughly 10,000 all-new parts with no existing supply chain behind them. The V3 reveal keeps slipping, but the factory conversion is real and underway. It’s a useful reminder that the hard part of humanoids was never the demo, it’s the supply chain, and even Tesla has to build one from scratch.

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➡️ Figure 03 Returns to BMW Spartanburg — This Time for Complex Sequencing

Figure is back at BMW Group Plant Spartanburg, and the assignment got harder. After Figure 02 helped assemble 30,000 BMW X3s doing sheet-metal loading, Figure 03 now handles logistics sequencing in Hall 52: picking unsorted parts from containers, sorting them into sequencing trolleys, and pulling heavy carts down the line. The workflow runs on Helix 02, Figure’s pixels-to-actions model, which coordinates hands, arms, torso, and feet at once. BMW says the parts then flow “just in sequence” to assembly workers building the X3 and the electrified iX5.

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➡️ Sanctuary AI Proves Production-Ready Physical AI at a Tier 1 Auto Supplier

Sanctuary AI achieved a 99.5%+ success rate on a wire-plugging task at a global Tier 1 automotive supplier, at 2.54 seconds per task, validated against live production benchmarks. The task sounds simple until you look closer: inserting flexible wires into moving targets on a conveyor demands contact-rich dexterity, force sensing, and real-time adaptation that traditional automation has never cracked. Instead of waiting for humanoid hardware to mature, Sanctuary deployed its Physical AI on an existing Universal Robots platform, making the solution hardware-agnostic from day one. Deploy on what factories already have, scale to humanoids later.

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➡️ Apptronik Opens Robot Park, a 90,000 Sq Ft Data Factory for Humanoids

Apptronik CEO Jeff Cardenas has a blunt take on today’s humanoid robots: they are all still prototypes. His answer is Robot Park, a nearly 90,000-square-foot facility in Austin where Apollo 2 robots work real shifts across logistics, manufacturing, and retail use cases, generating the training data that feeds the AI models behind Apollo 3. That next-generation robot, expected in 2027 in both bipedal and wheeled configurations, is positioned as Apptronik’s first true commercial product for industrial customers. The data flows into its research partnership with Google DeepMind and the Gemini Robotics models.

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➡️ Weave Robotics Launches Isaac 1 — a $7,999 Robot for Your Home

Weave Robotics unveiled Isaac 1, a wheeled home robot that folds laundry, tidies living spaces, and makes beds, priced at $7,999 upfront or $449 a month. The robot extends from 3 feet to 5’9” depending on the task and works autonomously by default, with remote human assistance stepping in when needed to guarantee task completion. Preorders are open with a refundable $250 deposit, and first deliveries start this fall in California before a broader US rollout through 2027. For context, 1X’s Neo runs around $20,000, so Weave is making an aggressive bet on price.

👉 Learn more

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➡️ FieldAI Crosses $100M in Revenue and Contracts

FieldAI reportedly passed $100M in revenue and customer contracts, deploying its “field foundation models” across construction sites, mines, defense zones, and other messy real-world environments. The company’s software brains run on many different robot bodies, from quadrupeds to wheeled platforms, in places where conditions change by the hour. Real revenue at this scale is still rare in robotics software, which is what makes the number worth paying attention to.

This is the kind of Physical AI traction I like most: less humanoid theater, more autonomous systems quietly proving they can work where conditions are unpredictable.

👉 Learn more

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🔬 STARTUPS FUNDING: Game-Changers in HardTech & AI

➡️ AI² Robotics — develops wheeled humanoid robots and the vision-language-action models that control them, now commercializing AlphaBot 2 across industrial, biotech, and retail settings. Raised ~$735M in new funding at a ~$2.8B post-money valuation. Location: Shenzhen, China.

➡️ X Square Robot — builds embodied AI foundation models and robots for household, industrial, and logistics tasks. Closed four consecutive rounds culminating in a Series C at a $2.8B+ post-money valuation, with backing from IDG, HongShan, Xiaomi, Meituan, Alibaba, and ByteDance. Location: Shenzhen, China.

➡️ XDOF — builds data pipelines, collection tools, and annotation systems for training robots, already serving 20 customers including frontier AI labs. Raised $70M from Thrive Capital, Spark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Lux Capital, and WndrCo. Location: Bay Area, USA.

➡️ Mecka AI — captures human motion data through body sensors and iPhones to build training datasets for humanoid and embodied AI models. Raised $60M across a Series A and follow-on, both led by Framework Ventures, with Menlo Ventures, SV Angel, and Kindred Ventures. Location: New York, USA.

➡️ Proception — develops dexterous humanoid robotic hands, launching the tendon-driven ProHand 1.0 with 22 degrees of freedom alongside its ProGlove data-collection system. Raised $11M Seed led by First Round Capital, with Y Combinator and BoxGroup. Location: Palo Alto, USA.

➡️ Acumino — builds AI-powered robot models for highly dexterous industrial automation tasks, from flexible object handling to bimanual assembly. Raised $11.7M Seed led by Radar Ventures, with Schaeffler, Big Pi Ventures, MegaChips Corporation, and LDV Partners. Location: Seattle, USA.

➡️ Channel Robotics — develops a handheld endoscopic robotic platform for minimally invasive surgery. Raised $4.6M total, including a $2.5M Seed+ led by True Ventures and $2.1M in seed funding from Defined VC, Old Line Capital Partners, and others. Location: San Diego, USA.

➡️ Zeroth — builds affordable home companion robots, including the $2,499 M1 humanoid with 30,000+ units on backorder and revenue up 600% year over year. Raised ¥500M (~$74M) in Pre-A, led by Ant Group, with Monolith, Geely Capital, 37 Interactive Entertainment and Hua Capital. Location: Suzhou, China.

➡️ Striding AI — develops world foundation models for general-purpose robots and is building its own humanoid fleet, starting with retail deployments. Raised ~$100M in an Angel round, backed by CP Group, Huaqin Technology and Jiu’an Medical. Location: Beijing, China.

➡️ Lightwheel — provides simulation, synthetic data and model evaluation infrastructure for embodied AI, with ¥550M in new orders in Q1 alone. Raised ¥1B (~$140M) in a strategic round, its third round this year, bringing 2026 fundraising past ¥2B. Location: Beijing, China.

➡️ CarbonSix — develops deployment-ready physical AI and robotic automation for manufacturing, founded by the team behind SuaLab (acquired by Cognex). Raised $40M in Series A, co-led by DSC Investment and LB Investment, with IMM Investment, Korea Development Bank, SV Investment, Cortentia and ASQ. Location: South Korea.

➡️ Maritime Robotics — builds autonomous surface vessels and sea drones for offshore energy, hydrography, fisheries and maritime security, with revenue up nearly 5x in five years. Raised €28M in growth funding, led by Mustard Seed + Partners, with EnvisionTech, Nysnø Climate Investment and Umoe. Location: Trondheim, Norway.

➡️ Traysar — the first subterranean defense tech company, building autonomous boring and underground systems with a team of early SpaceX and Boring Company hires. Raised $25M in Seed, led by Silent Ventures, with Lux Capital, Ora Global and angels including Steve Blank. Location: Austin, USA.

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📚 FAVORITE RESOURCES

How robots learn?!

Watch a Reactor Go Critical on July 4th | Aalo Criticality Highlights

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🎤 EVENTS — Let’s meet in person!

Actuate 2026 — August 18–19, San Francisco. Robotics and automation builders’ conference – see you there!

RoboBusiness 2026 — October, Santa Clara. The call for speakers just closed, registration is open – see you there!

🌍 Other Global Hard Tech Events: hardtechnews.com

If you are interested in AI, Robotics & HardTech check my other publication HardTech Deep Dives:

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#AI #Robotics #Humanoids #HardTechReads #Startups #DeepTech #Automation #PhysicalAI