Robotics

Delta Intelligence has raised close to $70m in six rounds in half a year, betting the humanoid race is won on 3D perception

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Six rounds in half a year Delta Intelligence, a Chinese humanoid foundation-model company founded in January 2026, has closed an angel++ round worth close to 500m yuan, the sixth financing the company has raised in the six months since incorporation. Investors in this round include listed-company strategic backers and tier-one financial institutions. Proceeds will fund … Read more

Only five companies in China make money on ego data, says the founder of one of them

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At most five companies in China are genuinely making money on ego data this year. The person making that call is Yuan Rizheng, an entrepreneur in embodied data. His name may be unfamiliar, but people in the field know the company: EgoScale. The obvious assumption is that the name rides on a trend, given that … Read more

Tesla, Hyundai and BMW are betting on humanoids, and disagreeing about what they are for

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From Optimus to Atlas, and on to the humanoid pilot running inside BMW plants, carmakers have become one of the main forces pushing embodied intelligence towards industrialisation. Behind the different routes they have chosen, a contest over the future of manufacturing has already started. The past decade put the car industry through electrification, intelligence and … Read more

A Shenzhen firm has put six-axis touch under a robot’s foot

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PaXini, the Shenzhen company that has spent the past few years trying to give machines a sense of touch, has launched PX-FOOTRIX, which it describes as the world’s first multi-dimensional tactile sensor for the sole of a robot foot. The product is built on a 6D Hall-effect tactile array that the company says is the … Read more

Google ships robot models, Ant LingBo already works a pharmacy

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On 30 July Google DeepMind released Gemini Robotics 2, a family spanning a vision-language-action model, a reasoning model and an on-device model, and for the first time delivering whole-body control of a humanoid. Google’s play is simple to state: own the robot brain layer. In the phone era it sold few handsets but reached most … Read more

China’s dexterous-hand ‘new four’ move from demo to volume

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One year ago China’s dexterous-hand field was a pile of demos. Capital was thin, most makers were still validating designs, and annual output sat in the hundreds or low thousands, good for trade shows but not for factories or whole robots. That phase is over. Money moved first. Full-year dexterous-hand funding reached 16.88 billion yuan … Read more

Estun buys loss-making robot unit for $68m

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On 5 August, Estun, China’s leading industrial-robot maker, said it would buy 100 per cent of Estun Cube for 487 million yuan, about 68 million US dollars, in cash through a subsidiary. The deal is a related-party transaction: Cube’s largest outside shareholder is Estun’s own controlling holder, with 39.07 per cent. What makes investors uneasy … Read more