Reports

Eka Robotics raised a $150 million Series A at a $1.45 billion valuation on October 20 on lab numbers of about 1,500 picks an hour, 2.5 times a human, at more than 95% success. Co-founder Pulkit Agrawal also said the gripper, which costs under $1,000, is rated for 5 million duty cycles against the 20 million bar of standard industrial arms. At the advertised speed that rating runs out in about 139 days of round-the-clock work, so cycles per gripper, not picks per hour, is the number that decides whether the model gets onto a line.

German auto and industrial supplier Schaeffler opened a plant in Taicang, China, on October 20 where six humanoids at five stations assemble actuators for other humanoids. A week earlier it put its humanoid order book at about €400 million, with five customers in series production and 83 sample orders. That figure needs a signed series-production order, takes a haircut of more than 50% per customer, and on Schaeffler's own description leaves out NEURA, Humanoid and Hexagon, the three robot makers it has pledged to buy roughly 6,000 humanoids from. What decides the rest is conversion: two customers in mass production now, three more by about April 2027.

On October 15 Leju Robotics and Zhaofeng said 15 Leju humanoids are in routine operation loading auto parts at a Hangzhou plant: 15 stations, more than 10 part types, a company-reported 98% loading success rate, about 1,000 hours and more than 60,000 parts. Each robot cycle takes 35 to 40 seconds against about 15 for a worker at the same station, and one engineer still looks after roughly four robots. The chairman says he did not start by calculating the cost. The 98% is the lab's number; cycle time, supervision and months of reliability are the factory's.

On October 12 Stryker put about $400 million of preferred equity into Cambridge-based CMR Surgical, took exclusive U.S. sales rights to Versius, a board seat, and an exclusive option to buy the rest later. Versius Plus is cleared in the U.S. for gallbladder removal, CMR has treated more than 45,000 patients abroad, and its CEO says about 50 U.S. cases are done so far. The Orthopaedics company that bought Mako for $1.7 billion in 2013 is entering soft tissue by renting someone else's channel first.

Ultra Robotics disclosed $62 million on October 9 for OP1, a two-armed packing robot that sits on locking casters at a human packing station, plugs into a 120-volt outlet and is leased by the month. The half-million-order count was mostly earned by three first-generation machines, the autonomy figure is one shift, remote pilots cover the rest, and the AI is rented from Physical Intelligence. It is still the design doing paid work at volume while walking humanoids wait for early access and safety rules.

South Korea cleared 20 Robros humanoids on October 13 to work beside people at a chip plant, an auto supplier, a shipyard and a cold-chain site without the 1.8-meter fence its rules require. The ISO standard for balancing robots is still a committee draft, the EU's new machinery rules apply in January, and the companies logging hours on shared floors are the ones writing the rule.

Physical Intelligence opened the Pi API beta on 13 October 2026. Upload data, fine-tune on their managed infrastructure, run inference through a hosted gateway. The named early result is Almond’s Axol deburring spacers after four days of iteration. Most shown applications used cloud inference, and the page flags network connectivity as a challenge for some.

DeepSeek is set to lead a seed round valuing Winverse AI at about $400 million, one thirty-fifth of Skild AI's price, on the same day Unitree's founder said his biggest mistake was not believing in AI enough. China builds the robot bodies; the market pays more for the brains, and prices US ones far above Chinese ones.

Mecka says it passed $100 million in run-rate revenue in June and XDOF was reported near $50 million, together about 60 percent of what Unitree, the world's top humanoid seller, booked in all of 2025. The first physical-AI layer with real revenue sells recordings of people doing chores, and it is paid for by labs that may decide to collect their own.

Taiwan's Main Drive plans up to 10 million harmonic reducers a year by late 2027, while China's Leaderdrive and Laifual target a combined 2.16 million run rate by the end of 2026 and prices keep falling. The joint that was supposed to bottleneck humanoids is turning into a commodity. The scarce parts now are steel, process, and signed orders.

The IFR's 2025 numbers say the robot boom was an arm boom: full-size humanoids were about 1.2 percent of industrial installs and were outsold by surgical robots. And the 7,000 uses a 140 cm, non-research ruler. Swap the ruler and the count roughly doubles.

Rohit Prasad, who ran Alexa and Amazon's Nova models, takes over Boston Dynamics on October 7. The plan he inherits is a factory ramp: roughly four Atlas a month on record against a 30,000-a-year plant by 2028, an actuator line that has to exist first, and a data loop the company says it still has to build.

Unitree's UnifoLM-WLA-1.0, Runway's Praxis-1 and Reka's Rho-1 all got filed as physical AI models released. Only Unitree's ships weights, an Apache 2.0 license, fine-tune code and G1 datasets today, with a default fine-tune sized for a single 24GB GPU. Read robot-model launches by what you can run.

Citi's 1,500-a-week check, the Yangtze River Delta supplier audits, and a reported $685 million actuator buy all measure parts moving toward Fremont. Citi's own note says one supplier may ship double what finished robots need because assembly yield is low. Track yield and rework, not purchase orders.

Sakana AI and the University of Tokyo let Gemini Robotics-ER 1.5 fail in simulation before a LeRobot SO-101 moves. Across six ALOHA tasks, one shot averages 25 percent. Forty-five nodes reach 73. The physical record is five of six on one placement, open-loop.

Week of 7 September 2026. Eight sourced rounds, one $1.35 billion silicon stake, and no Canadian name at this cheque size.

NVIDIA’s Halos for Robotics, restated on 12 September 2026, puts IGX Thor, Halos OS, and an inspection lab under one roof. Agility’s Digit is first in. The stack is the product.

Munro Live opened a Unitree G1 actuator on 11 September 2026. Encoder, rotor, stator, planetary housing, output. The missing part is the one most humanoid decks still budget for.

LimX Dynamics sells a three-body research robot out of Nanshan. The numbers are lab numbers. The clips are real. The work still has a human in the loop.

The first next-gen IRON walked off a Guangzhou line XPENG says runs above 80 percent core-process automation under automotive-grade consistency standards. Here is what that proves about the body, what it borrows from the EV supply chain, and what it leaves untested.

Agility's S-4 is the first public ledger from an American humanoid company, and it puts 65,000 hours of robot work on the same page as $1.8 million in 2025 sales and a $2.5 billion price.

Figure's two late-summer announcements, a paid video app called Index and a $3.5 billion GPU deal with Nscale, show a humanoid company buying training data and reserving compute before the robot is a product. The walking machine is the last stop on that loop, not the business.

Two independent trackers put AGIBOT first and Unitree second in H1 2026. That agreement is the signal. The 15 percent gap in totals, the conflicting application mix, and a nearly 5x spread in revenue per robot are the lesson.

Factories are full of industrial robots that cannot handle a wire that flexes. Sanctuary is betting the way in is new software on those arms, and a 313-trial plug test is the first evidence for the bet.

Tesla's Robotaxi interest form is collecting leads and partners — not proof the fleet is ready to run.

NVIDIA supplies the compute, simulation, models, and tools behind much of the humanoid market, making robot makers its customers rather than competitors.

Europe's humanoid sector has strong certification and sensing capabilities, but it still depends on imported motors and lacks the deployments and supply-chain pull of a global robotics hub.

World Labs' new world model cuts the cost of scanning a real space by roughly two orders of magnitude. That is a supply-chain story for humanoids, not a competitor to them.

NVIDIA's acquisition of Hugging Face puts LeRobot's open robotics workflow under the same owner as the compute and simulation stack it often runs on.

Citrini already quantified the Optimus stack. The trade narrows to motion control. We keep the names that actually cut metal.

Longhua actuator rows, a reducer house that will not put a logo on the door, one startup floor a quarter.