A humanoid robot named Sally was due to take a seat in a Western New York high-school classroom this autumn, silicone skin, long brown hair, and all. Instead she is on hold. A plan that had quietly cleared the Salamanca school board back in June turned…
Enigma, a robotics research lab less than a year old, is emerging from stealth with a $70 million seed round led by Index Ventures and Ribbit Capital, with participation from Sarah Guo’s Conviction Partners. The startup is not building a foundation mod…
Dopl Technologies raised $6.3 million in seed funding led by SpringTide Ventures to advance a telerobotic ultrasound platform toward FDA clearance. The system, called Traverse, lets sonographers remotely operate a robotic arm via haptic controllers and…
Gravis Robotics, an ETH Zurich spinout, fits autonomy kits to excavators. A tie-up would extend Masayoshi Son’s robotics buying spree from the factory floor to the building site. SoftBank is weighing a deal for Gravis Robotics, a Swiss startup that fit…
Genesis AI, the startup building foundation models that it hopes will run inside a wide range of robots, is in talks to raise about $500m, according to Bloomberg. A round of that size would value the company at roughly $3bn, capping a fast climb for a …
Researchers at OIST gave a virtual robot curiosity, and it learned language twice as fast, playful detours and toddler grammar slip-ups included.
Elon Musk told investors on Tesla’s second-quarter earnings call that Optimus will be “the hardest product to scale manufacturing that we’ve ever made at Tesla,” warning that the humanoid robot has no existing supply chain and that every component is n…
Travis Kalanick is back, and Uber is helping to fund him. The founder Uber forced out in 2017 has raised $1.7 billion for Atoms, an industrial-AI and robotics company he has built in near-total stealth for years. Andreessen Horowitz led the round. Its …
The hard part of medical robotics is not the robot. It is the practice. A surgical system needs thousands of attempts to learn a delicate task, and you cannot run those on real patients. Nvidia thinks the answer is to let the robot rehearse inside a si…
NEURA Robotics is opening ‘gyms’ where robots train under real-world conditions, starting with two German universities. Its bet is that the thing holding humanoids back is not intelligence, but a shortage of real experience. The German robotics firm NE…