Four days, four stories, one theme: money and management are moving toward physical AI faster than the robots themselves. Between Sunday and Wednesday morning, Boston Dynamics hired an AI executive rather than a roboticist to run the company, a German cobot maker crossed a $1 billion valuation, Teradyne bought into AI-server manufacturing, and a new humanoid startup chose remote piloting over autonomy.
Boston Dynamics names former Amazon AI chief Rohit Prasad CEO
Boston Dynamics announced on 6 October that Rohit Prasad becomes chief executive on 7 October — only the third permanent CEO in the company’s history, after founder Marc Raibert and Robert Playter. Prasad spent 12 years at Amazon as senior vice president and head scientist for Alexa and AGI, where he led the Nova foundation-model family, and nearly 14 years before that at Raytheon BBN. He takes over from interim CEO Amanda McMaster as Hyundai prepares to deploy Atlas at scale, a programme we covered when the Georgia training plant opened. Hiring a model-builder signals where the board thinks the bottleneck now sits.
Minerva Humanoids leaves stealth with $10 million for VR-piloted robots
Minerva Humanoids raised a $10 million pre-seed led by General Catalyst on 6 October to build Roger, a humanoid a trained operator pilots through a VR headset into oil rigs, bomb-disposal calls and hazmat sites. The founders come from MIT CSAIL, Tesla Optimus and Boston Dynamics’ Stretch team; no specification, latency figure or named customer has been published yet. Read our full report.
RobCo doubles to a $1 billion valuation in nine months
German robot maker RobCo said on 5 October it is now valued at $1 billion, double its January figure, after a roughly $40 million transaction that was mostly an employee secondary sale rather than fresh capital. Existing backers Sequoia and Lightspeed were joined by Cherry Ventures and European Tech Collective. CEO Roman Hölzl is relocating to the U.S., where RobCo is building assembly in Austin and a lab in San Francisco ahead of the commercial launch of Alfie, its two-armed mobile robot, on 4 March 2027.
Teradyne invests in Bright Machines to automate AI-server production
Teradyne, owner of Universal Robots and MiR, announced an undisclosed strategic investment in Bright Machines on 5 October. Bright Machines runs 130+ microfactories in more than 10 countries for over 60 customers, and the two companies will integrate robotic assembly, automated test loading and autonomous material movement into a single data thread from design to electrical test. It is a robotics company buying exposure to the AI hardware boom through the factory floor rather than the chip.
Sources
- Boston Dynamics — Boston Dynamics Appoints Rohit Prasad as Chief Executive Officer (6 October 2026)
- Minerva Humanoids — Emerges From Stealth With $10M Pre-Seed Round (6 October 2026)
- RobCo — RobCo Becomes a Unicorn (5 October 2026)
- Teradyne / Bright Machines — Teradyne Makes Strategic Investment in Bright Machines (5 October 2026)
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