The Belt 
Meta built a working humanoid in about three months, and it did not build it in California. The prototype, internally called Max, was developed with Shanghai robot maker Fourier Intelligence, according to The Information. It stands roughly 1.5 metres, weighs 48 kilograms, runs on Nvidia’s Jetson Thor, carries five-fingered hands and wears a display face … Read more
Physical Intelligence is raising again, and the number it wants has no precedent in robotics. Bloomberg reported that the two-year-old San Francisco company is in talks to raise at least USD 1 billion at a valuation of about USD 20 billion, with existing backers Avenir and Lux Capital expected to lead the round. Physical Intelligence … Read more
Most embodied model launches come with a polished video: an arm performing a few clean motions, cut at the right moment. Poke Robotics did the opposite. It published RoboAPI, an embodied interface aimed at the physical world, and invited the whole industry to try it. Alongside it came Poke-Aurora, the company’s own world-action model, and … Read more
Maxinsights, a physical AI company headquartered in Silicon Valley with its Chinese entity in Shanghai, has closed a USD 30 million seed round led by Peak XV, with Tola Capital, South Park Commons, Yingce Capital and Alumni Ventures participating. None of the money goes to compute or robot hardware. All of it goes to the … Read more
At the 140th Canton Fair, a humanoid wearing a black bow tie took drinks off a retail shelf. Another carried coffee to guests in the VIP lounge. Both came from Guangzhou Zhidong Weilai, the fair’s humanoid service partner, running five scenarios at once. The detail worth noticing is smaller: a staff member stood beside every … Read more
World models have a physics problem. Simulators built on game engines and hand-written rules generate data that never quite matches real-world dynamics. Models trained on video predict beautiful frames but drift on physical and geometric consistency over long horizons. Models that predict in abstract latent space save compute but cannot be evaluated cleanly. The fourth … Read more
Wang Xingxing, the 36-year-old founder of Unitree Robotics, entered the Hurun China Rich List for the first time on 27 October with a personal fortune of RMB 69.5 billion, ranked 78th. Hurun’s chief researcher called him the year’s biggest story in robotics and the second-largest new entrant on the list. That number is now being … Read more
Sharpa used IROS 2026 in Pittsburgh to launch three products at once, and the combination reveals a thesis that most dexterous hand companies have not adopted. On 28 September the company showed D01, a humanoid robot with electronic skin across its body. W02 is a full-palm tactile dexterous hand with 21 active degrees of freedom. … Read more
China’s two most closely watched industrial automation companies reported within days of each other, and the contrast between them is a better guide to the sector than either result alone. Inovance released its third-quarter report on the evening of 26 October. Revenue for the first nine months reached RMB 37.96 billion with net profit of … Read more
Renault’s third-quarter revenue beat expectations, and the composition of the beat says more about the European car market than the headline number does. Group revenue reached EUR 11.6 billion, about USD 13 billion, up 1.4 per cent at constant exchange rates. Analysts had forecast a decline of 0.3 per cent. Global volumes fell 6 per … Read more