The bulk of robotics funding this year has gone to companies in China, with $13.2 billion invested, and the United States, with $12.1 billion. Germany trails in third place with $1.7 billion.
Among the largest rounds in China were a $900 million raise by Guangzhou-based Xpeng Robotics, which builds AI models and physical robots, and a $736 million Series C for Shenzhen’s AI² Robotics, which develops intelligent robots for manufacturing, healthcare and services. In the US, billion-dollar rounds were raised by Los Angeles-based Atoms, which includes a ghost kitchen business and robotics divisions for mining and transport, and Pittsburgh-based Skild AI, which raised $1.4 billion for its robotics foundation model Skild Brain. Germany’s Neura Robotics also raised $1.4 billion for its cognitive robots, which incorporate AI and data infrastructure.
“We’re just seeing physical AI take off,” Ulrik Stig Hansen, co-CEO of San Francisco-based Encord, told Crunchbase News at its Long Horizon Physical AI Summit in San Francisco earlier this month. He noted that building for the physical world takes time because data first has to be collected and converted from sensor tokens to action tokens, unlike large language models that can draw on vast troves of internet text. Data sets are orders of magnitude larger for physical AI, requiring multimodal data combining vision, tactile, force and torque. Hansen called data storage, curation and validation a very expensive operation.
Around 75 robotics companies on the unicorn board have raised funding in the past three years, with more than half, 45, joining this year alone. Many competing companies are building data and models for varied use cases in heavy industry, manufacturing, logistics and households. The sector’s direction remains uncertain as companies race toward further breakthroughs.