Category: Business & Funding

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 handed the top job to an AI executive rather than a roboticist, a Munich-born robot maker crossed a $1 billion valuation, Teradyne bought into the factories that build AI servers, and a new humanoid startup chose a human pilot over full autonomy. Here is what happened and why it matters.

Boston Dynamics names former Amazon AI chief Rohit Prasad CEO

Boston Dynamics said on October 6 that Rohit Prasad becomes chief executive on October 7. Prasad spent 12 years at Amazon, most recently as senior vice president and head scientist for Alexa and artificial general intelligence. He helped build Alexa from its earliest days and later led development of Amazon’s Nova foundation-model family. Before Amazon he spent nearly 14 years at Raytheon BBN Technologies running machine-learning research. The company says he is also expected to join its board, subject to approval.

The announcement leans hard on two words: “Physical AI.” Hyundai Motor Group vice chair Jaehoon Chang, who chairs the Boston Dynamics board, framed the hire as pairing the company’s robots with Prasad’s record of turning AI into products at global scale and Hyundai’s manufacturing muscle. That matters because Hyundai is preparing to put Atlas to work at scale, a programme we covered when the Georgia Atlas training plant opened.

Why it matters: Boston Dynamics has never lacked for hardware. Hiring a foundation-model builder signals that the board thinks the bottleneck is now software: getting Spot, Stretch and Atlas to do useful work in messy places without a team of engineers behind each deployment.

Minerva Humanoids leaves stealth with $10 million for VR-piloted robots

Minerva Humanoids, based in San Francisco, announced on October 6 that it has raised about $10 million in pre-seed funding led by General Catalyst, with Long Journey Ventures and Credo Ventures as co-leads. Its robot, Roger, is a semi-autonomous humanoid that a trained specialist operates through a VR headset. The company’s own AI layer, Minerva Intelligence, handles balance, fall recovery and navigation, while the human handles judgment and fine manipulation.

The target jobs are the ones people least want to do in person: onshore and offshore oil and gas work, explosive ordnance disposal and hazardous-material response. Minerva cites its own estimate, built from ILO and IEA data, that an energy worker dies on the job roughly every 75 minutes worldwide. CEO Sandor Felber previously worked on MIT CSAIL’s humanoid research and Tesla’s Optimus programme; CTO Maurice Rahme spent six years at Boston Dynamics as a technical lead on Stretch. Minerva says it went from idea to a walking humanoid in five months and plans paid pilots this fall.

Why it matters: Teleoperation sidesteps the hardest problem in humanoids, full autonomy, and sells into markets where a single avoided injury justifies the cost. Minerva has not yet published specifications, latency figures or named customers. Read our full report on Minerva.

RobCo doubles to a $1 billion valuation in nine months

RobCo said on October 5 that it has passed a $1 billion valuation, double where it stood nine months ago. The deal was structured largely as an employee secondary sale, letting long-time staff cash out part of their equity, while also bringing new money into the company. Existing investors including Sequoia, Lightspeed, Greenfield, Kindred, Lingotto and Promus Ventures took part, joined by new backers Cherry Ventures and European Tech Collective.

RobCo, founded in Munich in 2020, delivers end-to-end industrial robotics systems on a robotics-as-a-service model with no upfront cost. The US is now its fastest-growing market, with customers in more than a dozen states, assembly in Austin, Texas, and a lab in San Francisco. Co-founder and CEO Roman Hölzl has moved to the US to lead that push. RobCo will commercially launch Alfie, its autonomous industrial robot, at its first RobCoN summit in Munich on March 4, 2027.

Why it matters: A secondary-heavy round is a confidence signal more than a war chest. It shows investors are paying up for industrial robotics companies with real factory revenue, not just humanoid demos. For context on how fast factory automation is growing, see our report on five million robots now working in factories.

Teradyne invests in Bright Machines to automate AI-server production

Teradyne, the test-equipment giant behind Universal Robots, announced a strategic investment of undisclosed size in Bright Machines on October 5. Bright Machines builds software-defined “microfactories” and says it has deployed more than 130 of them in more than 10 countries for over 60 customers. It already runs AI-infrastructure production in the United States and counts BlackRock, NVIDIA, Microsoft and Eclipse among its backers.

The two companies say they will explore combining Bright Machines’ manufacturing platform with Universal Robots cobots and Teradyne board-test systems on the same production floor. Connecting assembly, robot and electrical-test data would give customers a single production record running from design to final test. Teradyne chief AI officer James Davidson put the goal plainly: robots that can pick up a new task in hours instead of being re-engineered over weeks.

Why it matters: The AI hardware boom needs factories that can retool as fast as chip designs change. Teradyne is betting that robotics plus test data is how those lines keep up.

The takeaway

Strip away the press-release language and the week has one message: the capital and leadership in robotics are flowing to whoever can make AI work in the physical world. Watch for Prasad’s first product moves at Boston Dynamics, Minerva’s first pilot results, and RobCo’s Alfie launch in March.

Sources

• Boston Dynamics: Boston Dynamics Appoints Rohit Prasad as Chief Executive Officer (Oct 6, 2026)
• Minerva Humanoids via GlobeNewswire: Emerges From Stealth With $10M Pre-Seed Round (Oct 6, 2026)
• RobCo: The next frontier for AI is physical: RobCo becomes a unicorn (Oct 5, 2026)
• Bright Machines via GlobeNewswire: Teradyne Makes Strategic Investment in Bright Machines (Oct 5, 2026)

Minerva Humanoids emerged from stealth on 6 October with a $10 million pre-seed round led by General Catalyst, co-led by Long Journey Ventures and Credo Ventures. The company is building Roger, a semi-autonomous humanoid that a trained specialist pilots remotely through a VR headset, and it is pointing the machine at four markets where the fatality rate does the selling: onshore and offshore oil and gas, explosive ordnance disposal, hazardous-material response and airport public safety.

Why it matters: a human in the loop, not a robot on its own

Almost every well-funded humanoid programme is chasing full autonomy in a warehouse. Minerva is betting the first revenue arrives earlier and from the other direction — keep the human judgment, move the human body out of the blast radius. Roger’s balance, fall recovery and navigation run on Minerva Intelligence, the company’s own software stack; the decisions stay with the operator, who works from an office or from home.

The founders have the pedigree the pitch needs. CEO Sandor Felber worked on humanoid research at MIT CSAIL and contributed to Tesla’s Optimus programme. CTO Maurice Rahme spent six years at Boston Dynamics as a technical lead on Stretch, the box-moving robot that is arguably the only commercially deployed non-humanoid from that company’s catalogue. Minerva says it took a fully functional prototype from nothing in five months, and plans manufacturing in both Germany and the United States.

The round itself is small. Figure, 1X and Apptronik are raising at valuations three orders of magnitude above a $10 million pre-seed, and the investor list here — which also includes MVP Ventures, Kaya, RunwayVC, Compound, Founders Embassy, Hugging Face and Codecademy — reads as angel-heavy rather than institutional. What that buys is a prototype and a wedge, not a production line. Minerva has published no specification for Roger: no height, no payload, no teleoperation latency figure, no endurance number, and no named customer or pilot site in any of the four target industries. Those are the numbers that will decide whether an offshore operator lets the thing near a flare stack.

“People are dying every day doing jobs the rest of the world takes for granted. We set out to build a robot that lets them do the job efficiently from the comfort of their office or home.”

Sandor Felber, co-founder and CEO, Minerva Humanoids

Sources

• Minerva Humanoids — Emerges From Stealth With $10M Pre-Seed Round Led by General Catalyst (company press release, 6 October 2026)
• Minerva Humanoids — company website

LONDON — Tekever has closed the first tranche of a Series D round worth $580 million at a $6.4 billion valuation, the uncrewed-systems maker announced on 23 September. The round is co-led by UC Investments, the investment arm of the University of California, and Baillie Gifford, with Merlyn Advisors joining as a new strategic investor alongside existing backers Crescent Cove, Ventura Capital and Iberis Capital.

By the numbers

The valuation is a steep mark-up on where the company was trading in August, when Bloomberg reported it was seeking roughly €500 million at a €5.5 billion valuation. Tekever was founded in Portugal in 2001 and has since moved its headquarters to the UK. Its systems have logged more than 50,000 operational flight hours in Ukraine since 2022 — the operational record investors are explicitly pricing.

The order book behind the raise is concrete. In July the British Army selected Tekever’s AR5 for Project CORVUS, its Watchkeeper replacement, in a contract worth up to £400 million over 10 years, with airframes built in Swindon. The AR5 is a fixed-wing aircraft with 20 hours of endurance, a 100 km/h cruise, a 7.3-metre by 4.0-metre airframe and a 50 kg payload, launched and recovered from unprepared airstrips. Tekever markets it as Europe’s first UAS-based maritime surveillance system; the Portuguese Air Force flies it for exclusive economic zone patrol.

Tekever says the capital goes to international expansion, manufacturing and technology capacity, and acquisitions. That last item is not idle: on 22 September the company signed a memorandum of understanding with Estonia’s Threod Systems, a day before the raise went public. Neither revenue nor headcount was disclosed.

“Europe’s security will increasingly depend on its ability to build technology companies that can innovate at speed.”

Sir Ben Wallace, portfolio manager at Merlyn Advisors and former UK Defence Secretary

Baillie Gifford investment manager Chris Evdaimon credited Tekever’s “software-centric model and operational experience” with letting it turn technology into deployable capability quickly — the same argument every physical-AI company now makes, with the difference that this one has the flight hours to cite.

Sources

• Defence Industry Europe — Tekever raises US$580 million at US$6.4 billion valuation
• Tekever — Selected to deliver CORVUS, the British Army’s new surveillance capability
• Tekever — AR5 specifications
• GOV.UK — Fleet of spy drones to equip British soldiers

BEIJING — D-Robotics, the robot-computing chip company spun out of Horizon Robotics in 2024, has closed a $400 million Series C — about 2.68 billion yuan — announced on 17 September. The company named only “a leading global internet company” as the lead, alongside institutional investors and existing shareholders. It is the third round D-Robotics has raised this year, after Series B1 and B2, taking its 2026 total to roughly 4.5 billion yuan.

By the numbers

Cumulative shipments of the Sunrise chip series passed 8 million units by mid-2026. The flagship part is the Sunrise S600, launched in November 2025 and quoted at 4,800 TOPS with 1/2 sparsity — a figure worth reading carefully, since sparsity-adjusted throughput is not the same as dense compute, and D-Robotics has not published a dense number. The company says the S600 picked up more than 20 customers in its first six months and that first-half revenue grew several-fold year over year.

The named customer list is a fair map of China’s embodied-AI sector: UBTECH, Fourier, Astribot, X Square Robot, Spirit AI, Booster Robotics, PaXini Tech and TARS. Around that sits a developer ecosystem the company puts at more than 500 robotics companies, 500 universities and 100,000 developers in over 20 countries. D-Robotics claims coverage of more than half the Chinese embodied-intelligence market — a self-reported share with no independent audit behind it.

The money is earmarked for widening the Sunrise line across compute tiers and for the software stack that sits on top of it — the “brain for every robot” pitch that every silicon vendor in this category now makes, Nvidia included.

Why it matters

The July decision by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to add foreign-made mobile communicating robots over 2 kg to its Covered List bars imports of finished Chinese machines, not the chips inside them. But the practical effect is the same direction of travel: a Chinese robot-silicon supplier scaling on domestic demand, with a customer base that is almost entirely domestic, while U.S. builders consolidate around Nvidia and Qualcomm. Two stacks, diverging — and $400 million buys a lot of divergence.

Sources

• D-Robotics — Completes $400 Million in Series C Funding (PR Newswire)
• Gasgoo — D-Robotics Closes $400 Million Series C Funding Round

BEIJING — RobotPlusPlus has closed a Series C round the company describes as worth hundreds of millions of RMB, or tens of millions of US dollars, led by Qianggang Capital Fund. The Beijing company builds special-purpose robots for work at height, and its hull-derusting machines have now stripped and prepped more than 10,000 large cargo vessels across 100-plus shipyards worldwide — a share of that market the company puts above 70%.

By the numbers

GIG Capital Group, Sealand Innovation and Juntong Capital joined the round, with existing backer Fosun RZ Capital increasing its stake. The company reports more than 2 million cumulative operating hours across its fleet, 480-plus patents, and over 60% of staff in R&D. It says it is active in 18 countries, naming NOSCO Shipyard in Vietnam, Drydocks World in Dubai, ST Engineering Marine in Singapore, Saudi Aramco and Vopak as customers.

Hull derusting is one of the ugliest jobs in shipbuilding. Workers on suspended platforms blast rust and old coating off steel, breathing abrasive dust, for weeks per vessel. It is also the kind of job where a robot does not need general intelligence — it needs to stick to a curved steel wall, track its own coverage, and not fall off. That narrowness is why this corner of robotics has commercial scale while humanoids are still shipping in the hundreds.

The same platform is being pushed into tank surface preparation, wind turbine blade inspection and building facade cleaning — adjacent markets that share the core problem of holding position on a large vertical surface. RobotPlusPlus frames the operating hours as a data asset as much as a revenue line, arguing the fleet is training itself in the field.

“The true value of industrial robotics lies in real-world execution. Over ten years, we have built special-purpose robots that are genuinely deployable at scale, and this round lets us bring those solutions to more industrial sites around the world.”

Dr. Hua-Yang Xu, Founder and CEO, RobotPlusPlus

One caveat worth stating plainly: the company has not disclosed an exact figure, a pre- or post-money valuation, or revenue. The deployment statistics are the company’s own and are not independently audited. What is verifiable is that the round closed and who led it.

Sources

• GlobeNewswire — RobotPlusPlus Closes Series C to Scale Robots That Take Humans Out of Dangerous Work at Height
• GlobeNewswire — RobotPlusPlus Raises Series C to Scale Working-at-Height Robots