Event coverage of the humanoid industry — every reveal, deployment, and milestone that moved the market, with links back to primary reporting. Plus editorials from the store.
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.
Read →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.
Read →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.
Read →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.
Read →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.
Read →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.
Read →June 10, 2026 — Germany's NEURA lands a record Series C backed by NVIDIA, Amazon, Qualcomm and Tether, valuing the company near $7B.
Read →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.
Read →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.
Read →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.
Read →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.
Read →April 2026 — Figure says its BotQ factory now builds a Figure 03 humanoid every hour, a 24x throughput jump in under 120 days.
Read →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.
Read →Twenty-nine humanoids are shipping, piloting, or taking pre-orders. Here's how to think about buying one.
Read →Same silhouette, different physics. Why the humanoid you buy for your factory won't be the one you buy for your kitchen.
Read →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.
Read →Six numbers on a humanoid product page — and what each one is actually telling you.
Read →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.
Read →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.
Read →January 6, 2026 — Europe's leading humanoid contender debuts a Porsche-designed 4NE1, a 4NE1 Mini, and a quadruped, all aimed at series production.
Read →January 5, 2026 — Jensen Huang puts NVIDIA at the center of the humanoid stack, naming Boston Dynamics, NEURA, LG and Caterpillar as partners.
Read →January 5, 2026 — Boston Dynamics moves Atlas from lab prototype to a committed, revenue-generating product, with every 2026 unit already spoken for.
Read →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.
Read →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.
Read →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.
Read →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.
Read →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.
Read →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.
Read →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.
Read →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.
Read →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.
Read →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.
Read →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.
Read →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.
Read →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.
Read →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.
Read →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.
Read →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.
Read →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.
Read →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.
Read →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.
Read →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.
Read →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.
Read →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.
Read →Late 2024 — Chinese humanoid pure-play UBTECH reports 500+ industrial Walker S1 orders and begins production deployments at BYD's Shenzhen EV factory.
Read →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.
Read →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.
Read →August 18, 2024 — Shanghai-based AgiBot unveils a family of five humanoids for commercial deployment, with October deliveries.
Read →June 27, 2024 — GXO and Agility Robotics announce a multi-year Robots-as-a-Service agreement with Digit at GXO's Spanx facility.
Read →May 13, 2024 — Unitree Robotics unveils the G1 at ICRA 2024 with a starting price that redraws the humanoid affordability curve.
Read →April 25, 2024 — Sanctuary AI reveals the seventh generation of Phoenix, with expanded range of motion, better perception, and 50× faster task automation.
Read →April 17, 2024 — one day after retiring the hydraulic Atlas, Boston Dynamics unveils a fully electric platform built for real customer deployments.
Read →March 15, 2024 — Apptronik and Mercedes-Benz announce a commercial pilot of the Apollo humanoid inside Mercedes manufacturing facilities.
Read →January 18, 2024 — Figure and BMW Manufacturing announce a commercial agreement to bring general-purpose humanoids into the Spartanburg plant.
Read →December 13, 2023 — Tesla releases a demo video of Optimus Gen 2, showing custom actuators, 10 kg of weight reduction, and dexterous end effectors.
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