Dispatches from the humanoid market.

September 8, 2026 — XPeng commissioned what it calls the world's first automated production line for advanced humanoid robots, and an IRON unit built on it walked off under its own power — a real manufacturing milestone that still stops short of mass production or a single outside sale.

September 4, 2026 — French robotics firm Wandercraft says it has signed 12 blue-chip customers for Calvin-40, its heavy-lifting industrial humanoid, days after reports it is raising about €100 million — a European bet that a focused, exoskeleton-derived robot can beat general-purpose rivals to useful factory work.

September 3, 2026 — Figure signed a multi-year deal for up to 100,000 NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs through cloud provider Nscale, an initial $3.5 billion compute commitment with intent to scale past $6 billion, betting that data and compute — not hardware — are what stand between it and a shippable humanoid.

August 28, 2026 — UBTECH's first-half results showed revenue from full-size humanoids surging 1,445% to 590 million yuan on 921 units sold, making the robots its single biggest business — even as the company stayed loss-making and its industrial fleets are still being proven task by task.

August 27, 2026 — SoftBank is in talks to take a majority stake in 1X Technologies, maker of the NEO home humanoid, at a roughly $6 billion valuation — below the $10 billion 1X chased last year, and a bet placed before a single NEO has reached a paying customer.

August 26, 2026 — At the second World Humanoid Robot Games, two robots broke Usain Bolt's 100-meter record, yet the more telling result was AgiBot topping the medal table with mass-produced robots — the same models already deployed in factories — sweeping the dexterity and real-world work events.

August 26, 2026 — At its CEO Investor Day, Hyundai restated plans for a US plant making 30,000 Atlas humanoids a year from 2028, with 25,000 already committed, and insisted 'robots are not replacing humans' one day after its Korean union ended a walkout that demanded exactly that protection.

August 25, 2026 — Figure AI came out of stealth with Index, a crowdsourced pipeline that has already gathered 16 million task videos from 108 countries, and pledged to spend more than $1 billion over the next year collecting the real-world data its robots still need to learn to generalize.

August 24, 2026 — Unitree's newly listed shares fell about 45% from their debut-day peak within four sessions even as its founder cautioned a home-ready robot is still years off, while five days later XPeng's robotics unit raised more than $900 million at a $6.3 billion valuation — the two poles of a sector being repriced on execution rather than spectacle.

August 19, 2026 — China's World Robot Conference opened with 300-plus makers, Xiaomi's humanoid debut and an on-sale companion robot, yet the show floor put the buyer's real question front and center: the distance between a dancing demo and a machine that can hold down a shift.

August 19, 2026 — Unitree's shares opened 629% above their IPO price on Shanghai's STAR Market and still closed up 487%, turning a roughly $9 billion listing into a company worth around $53 billion on day one and handing the humanoid industry its first market-cleared benchmark.

August 13, 2026 — ASIMO's maker resurfaced in humanoid coverage this week with an 'Avatar' robot and a multi-fingered hand it says can thread a needle and lift five kilograms — a dexterity-and-teleoperation bet that sidesteps the autonomous-worker race.

August 13, 2026 — LG signed an MOU with NVIDIA to build its first bipedal humanoid on Isaac GR00T and Jetson Thor for a first-quarter 2027 reveal, and will put its wheeled CLOiD robot on a Tennessee washing-machine line this year to earn the data first.

August 11, 2026 — Retail investors flooded Unitree's roughly $900 million Shanghai IPO with about $1.2 trillion of orders, oversubscribing the retail tranche more than 8,000 times even as analysts warn the ~$9 billion maker is priced at 219 times last year's profit.

August 10, 2026 — New industry data puts Chinese makers above 97% of global humanoid shipments in the first half of 2026, with Shanghai's AgiBot overtaking Unitree for the top spot — a scale gap U.S. buyers now have to plan around.

August 6, 2026 — Unitree priced its Shanghai IPO at roughly a $9 billion valuation, becoming the first pure-play humanoid maker to list on mainland China — with DeepSeek among its backers, days after Washington moved to lock its future robots out of the U.S.

August 5, 2026 — San Francisco's Avatar Robotics raised a $6.5 million seed to scale warehouse humanoids that pair remote human operators with AI, claiming 900,000 products already packed and shipped in customer facilities.

August 4, 2026 — The world's biggest EV maker confirmed its first humanoid robot, reportedly called Xiao Di, will debut this month as a showroom greeter in China — a working prototype with no price, no confirmed specs, and no path into the U.S.

July 30, 2026 — Google DeepMind's new robotics model controls a full humanoid's whole body for the first time, walking Apptronik's Apollo across a room to put an object away — while conceding the fingers are still the hard part.

July 28, 2026 — The FCC added foreign-made humanoid and quadruped robots to its Covered List, blocking new Chinese models from the equipment authorization they need to be sold in the United States.

July 23, 2026 — Italian IIT spin-out Generative Bionics gave its Gene.01 humanoid a U.S. debut, betting that full-body electronic skin and a 'sovereign' European supply chain beat raw horsepower on the factory floor.

July 22, 2026 — Tesla told investors it is still installing Optimus production lines, promised builds 'soon,' and said the first robots go to a data-collection academy rather than customers, all while free cash flow turned negative on a 142% jump in capital spending.

July 21, 2026 — London's Humanoid closed a $152 million Series A at a $1.35 billion valuation, backed by Schaeffler and Bosch, betting that a wheeled robot it can certify next year beats bipeds to European factory floors.

July 16, 2026 — Hyundai will buy SoftBank's remaining roughly 10% of Boston Dynamics for about $325 million, taking full control just as it sets Atlas's first factory deployment for 2028.

July 14, 2026 — Shenzhen's LimX Dynamics closes a $200M pre-IPO round at a $2.21B valuation, with its founder calling a public listing 'a must' amid a China-wide race to go public.

July 13, 2026 — Robot.com commercially launches R-noid, a wheeled humanoid sold only as a service, claiming an eight-to-twelve-week path from first site visit to autonomous work.

July 9, 2026 — 1X unveils a 25-degree-of-freedom, tendon-driven hand that ships on every NEO, arguing that manipulation, not walking, is the real bottleneck for home humanoids.

June 10, 2026 — Germany's NEURA lands a record Series C backed by NVIDIA, Amazon, Qualcomm and Tether, valuing the company near $7B.

June 1, 2026 — NVIDIA's Isaac GR00T reference robot pairs a Unitree H2 body with Jetson Thor compute and Sharpa hands, aiming to standardize research humanoids.

June 1, 2026 — China's securities regulator approved Unitree's Shanghai listing, capping a path to a roughly $610M IPO for the world's top humanoid seller.

May 22, 2026 — Hyundai's plan to deploy tens of thousands of Boston Dynamics Atlas units in its own plants runs into a labor-agreement roadblock.

May 2026 — JAL launches a multi-year humanoid pilot for ground operations at Tokyo's Haneda, a first for Japanese aviation and a test of service-sector demand.

April 2026 — Figure says its BotQ factory now builds a Figure 03 humanoid every hour, a 24x throughput jump in under 120 days.

April 30, 2026 — 1X moves NEO from pre-order to full-scale manufacturing, targeting U.S. homes first with a $20,000 unit and a $499/month subscription.

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March 20, 2026 — The world's top humanoid seller reveals $248M in 2025 revenue, 59.8% gross margins, and a customer base still dominated by research and education.

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February 11, 2026 — John Deere, AT&T Ventures and Qatar's QIA join Google and Mercedes-Benz to fund Apollo's scale-up ahead of a new robot debut.

January 28, 2026 — On Tesla's Q4 2025 call, Musk concedes Optimus is still in R&D while promising a Gen 3 built for mass production and a million-unit line.

January 6, 2026 — Europe's leading humanoid contender debuts a Porsche-designed 4NE1, a 4NE1 Mini, and a quadruped, all aimed at series production.

January 5, 2026 — Jensen Huang puts NVIDIA at the center of the humanoid stack, naming Boston Dynamics, NEURA, LG and Caterpillar as partners.

January 5, 2026 — Boston Dynamics moves Atlas from lab prototype to a committed, revenue-generating product, with every 2026 unit already spoken for.

December 19, 2025 — Galbot's round set new marks for both single-round and cumulative funding in the sector, taking total capital to roughly $800M as it scales mobile-manipulator deployments.

December 10, 2025 — Latin America's largest e-commerce operator became the newest name to put Digit to work, extending Agility's logistics beachhead beyond U.S. supply-chain incumbents.

November 19, 2025 — Backed by $35M from Benchmark and Conviction, Sunday's wheeled home robot learns chores from a $200 wearable glove rather than simulation.

November 17, 2025 — UBTECH began delivering the first batch of several hundred full-size industrial humanoids, backed by more than $110 million in accumulated Walker orders.

November 5, 2025 — XPENG's redesigned Iron humanoid walked a catwalk with bionic muscles and a 22-DOF hand, targeting mass production by the end of 2026.

October 28, 2025 — 1X put a $20,000 home humanoid up for pre-order, with first units shipping to households in 2026 and a soft, tendon-driven body built for living among people.

October 9, 2025 — Figure's third-generation robot is a ground-up redesign for manufacturability, with a 12,000-unit-a-year factory and a path toward the home.

September 16, 2025 — Figure raised more than $1 billion in Series C funding at a $39 billion post-money valuation, one of the largest private raises in robotics history.

September 8, 2025 — Chinese humanoid startup X Square Robot raised roughly $100 million led by Alibaba Cloud, marking the tech giant's first direct investment in embodied intelligence.

August 25, 2025 — NVIDIA made its Blackwell-powered Jetson Thor compute modules generally available, with Figure, Agility, Boston Dynamics and Amazon among the named early adopters.

August 20, 2025 — Boston Dynamics and Toyota Research Institute demonstrated Atlas performing long, chained manipulation-and-locomotion tasks driven by one end-to-end Large Behavior Model.

August 20, 2025 — FieldAI closed $405 million across back-to-back rounds at a $2 billion valuation, backed by Bezos and NVIDIA, to build embodiment-agnostic autonomy software.

August 17, 2025 — The inaugural World Humanoid Robot Games drew 280 teams and 500-plus robots to Beijing, with Unitree hauling in the headline gold medals.

July 25, 2025 — Unitree launched the R1, a 25kg developer humanoid priced from $5,900, resetting the floor for what a walking, talking robot costs.

June 17, 2025 — Hexagon launched AEON, an industrial humanoid developed with NVIDIA, Microsoft and maxon, targeting inspection, manipulation and reality-capture work with early pilots at Schaeffler and Pilatus.

April 19, 2025 — Beijing staged the world's first humanoid half-marathon; Tiangong Ultra finished the 21.1km course in 2:40:42, but only six of about 20 robots completed it.

March 31, 2025 — Reports emerged that Agility Robotics was raising roughly $400 million at about a $1.75 billion pre-money valuation to scale production of its Digit warehouse humanoid.

March 19, 2025 — Boston Dynamics released footage of its electric Atlas performing walking, running, crawling and cartwheels using reinforcement-learning policies trained from human motion capture.

March 18, 2025 — At GTC, NVIDIA released Isaac GR00T N1, billed as the first open, customizable foundation model for humanoid reasoning and skills, plus simulation tooling and the Newton physics engine.

March 16, 2025 — Figure unveiled BotQ, an in-house high-volume plant designed to build up to 12,000 humanoids a year, with robots eventually assembling robots.

March 12, 2025 — Google DeepMind unveiled Gemini Robotics and Gemini Robotics-ER, vision-language-action models built on Gemini 2.0, and named Apptronik its lead humanoid hardware partner.

February 21, 2025 — Norwegian robotics company 1X reveals NEO Gamma, the next generation of its household humanoid, with a knitted polymer exterior and tendon-driven actuation.

Late 2024 — Chinese humanoid pure-play UBTECH reports 500+ industrial Walker S1 orders and begins production deployments at BYD's Shenzhen EV factory.

November 6, 2024 — At XPENG AI Day, the EV maker introduces its first humanoid, Iron, standing 178 cm with more than 60 joints and an in-house 40-core AI chip.

October 15, 2024 — Beijing-based Robotera runs its STAR1 humanoid at 3.6 m/s (about 8 mph) in the Gobi Desert, the fastest recorded pace for a full-size biped.

August 18, 2024 — Shanghai-based AgiBot unveils a family of five humanoids for commercial deployment, with October deliveries.

June 27, 2024 — GXO and Agility Robotics announce a multi-year Robots-as-a-Service agreement with Digit at GXO's Spanx facility.

May 13, 2024 — Unitree Robotics unveils the G1 at ICRA 2024 with a starting price that redraws the humanoid affordability curve.

April 25, 2024 — Sanctuary AI reveals the seventh generation of Phoenix, with expanded range of motion, better perception, and 50× faster task automation.

April 17, 2024 — one day after retiring the hydraulic Atlas, Boston Dynamics unveils a fully electric platform built for real customer deployments.

March 15, 2024 — Apptronik and Mercedes-Benz announce a commercial pilot of the Apollo humanoid inside Mercedes manufacturing facilities.

January 18, 2024 — Figure and BMW Manufacturing announce a commercial agreement to bring general-purpose humanoids into the Spartanburg plant.

December 13, 2023 — Tesla releases a demo video of Optimus Gen 2, showing custom actuators, 10 kg of weight reduction, and dexterous end effectors.