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The Robotics Data Debate, Gemini Robotics, RSS 2025 papers and Humanoids
Silicon Valley Robotics Startup & Investor Database
As well as facilitating investor/startup matchmaking and mentorship events (via Silicon Valley Robotics, Creative Destruction Lab, IEEE Entrepreneurship, and IEEE Robotics and Automation Society), I’m trying to solve for when your startup is fundraising (or you’re writing checks) but it’s weeks or months until the next robotics investor event.
How? I share a spreadsheet of fundraising startups (80+) with select accredited investors (40+) on a regular basis, including VCs like Amazon Ventures, Emerson Collective, Teradyne Ventures, Meta, Calibrate Ventures, Azure Capital Partners, Core Nest Ventures, E12 Ventures, ST Engineering Ventures, Dolby Family Ventures, FOV Ventures, CDIB Capital, RA Capital, G Vision Capital BRV Capital Management, Family Offices and Angels. These investors write checks anywhere from angel and seed stage to $5-50 million.
Feedback from the startups - high quality inbound interest from investors.
Feedback from the investors - incredible depth and range of robotics startups.
If you’re an accredited investor and haven’t already signed up for the spreadsheet - Sign up here!
Are you an accredited investor interested in seeing robotics startups? Sign up here!
Are you a startup fundraising atm? Fill out our "For Investors Eyes Only" sheet.
CB Insights on Humanoid Robots
Humanoid robots are moving from science fiction to commercial reality. Companies building these robots attracted a record $1.2B in 2024 funding and are projected to reach $2.3B in 2025, according to CB Insights data.
By combining AI with physical dexterity, humanoids can perform complex tasks once limited to people, without the expensive facility modifications that traditional automation requires.
While manufacturing and warehousing use cases lead in early adoption, humanoids are expanding into healthcare, retail, and hospitality sectors, signaling widespread potential in industries that need human-like movement and flexibility.
We mapped 61 companies across 8 different use cases for humanoid robots to help companies and governments understand the current humanoid robot landscape. While many of these companies position themselves as developers of general-purpose humanoid robots, our analysis categorizes them by industry application to provide insight into market segmentation.
More Videos from ICRA 2025
Another great video from ICRA 2025 is the annual robotics debate. This year the topic was “Data Will Solve Robotics and Automation: True or False?” moderated by Ken Goldberg. Representing True were Russ Tedrake, Daniela Rus and Animesh Garg, while the speakers for False where Aude Billard, Leslie Kaebling and Frank Park. Note, the speakers were assigned their viewpoints and may not necessarily agree with their own arguments.
The full ICRA playlist includes 61 videos covering keynotes, demos, panels, and more.
COMMUNITY NEWS
Hello Robot shared a paper from RSS 2025 from Arjun Gupta, Michelle Zhang*, Rishik Sathua*, and Saurabh Gupta from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Opening Articulated Structures in the Real World
What does it take to build mobile manipulation systems that can competently operate on previously unseen objects in previously unseen environments? This work answers this question using opening of articulated structures as a mobile manipulation testbed. Specifically, our focus is on the end-to-end performance on this task without any privileged information, ie the robot starts at a location with the novel target articulated object in view, and has to approach the object and successfully open it. We first develop a system for this task, and then conduct 100+ end-to-end system tests across 13 real world test sites.
Our large-scale study reveals a number of surprising findings: a) modular systems outperform end-to-end learned systems for this task, even when the end-to-end learned systems are trained on 1000+ demonstrations, b) perception, and not precise end-effector control, is the primary bottleneck to task success, and c) state-of-the-art articulation parameter estimation models developed in isolation struggle when faced with robot-centric viewpoints. Overall, our findings highlight the limitations of developing components of the pipeline in isolation and underscore the need for system-level research, providing a pragmatic roadmap for building generalizable mobile manipulation systems.
For the full Paper
Gemini Robotics on device brings AI to local robotics devices - Carolina Parada
We’re introducing an efficient, on-device robotics model with general-purpose dexterity and fast task adaptation.
In March, we introduced Gemini Robotics, our most advanced VLA (vision language action) model, bringing Gemini 2.0’s multimodal reasoning and real-world understanding into the physical world.
Today, we’re introducing Gemini Robotics On-Device, our most powerful VLA model optimized to run locally on robotic devices. Gemini Robotics On-Device shows strong general-purpose dexterity and task generalization, and it’s optimized to run efficiently on the robot itself.
Since the model operates independent of a data network, it’s helpful for latency sensitive applications, and ensures robustness in environments with intermittent or zero connectivity.
We’re also sharing a Gemini Robotics SDK to help developers easily evaluate Gemini Robotics On-Device on their tasks and environments, test our model in our MuJoCo physics simulator, and quickly adapt it to new domains, with as few as 50 to 100 demonstrations. Developers can access the SDK by signing up to our trusted tester program.
Model capabilities and performance
Gemini Robotics On-Device is a robotics foundation model for bi-arm robots, engineered to require minimal computational resources. It builds on the task generalization and dexterity capabilities of Gemini Robotics and is:
Designed for rapid experimentation with dexterous manipulation.
Adaptable to new tasks through fine-tuning to improve performance.
Optimized to run locally with low-latency inference.
Gemini Robotics On-Device achieves strong visual, semantic and behavioral generalization across a wide range of testing scenarios, follows natural language instructions, and completes highly-dexterous tasks like unzipping bags or folding clothes — all while operating directly on the robot.
In our evaluations, our On-Device mode exhibits strong generalization performance while running entirely locally.
The IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE) is the flagship automation conference of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) and constitutes the primary forum for cross-industry and multidisciplinary research in automation. Its goal is to provide broad coverage and dissemination of foundational research in automation among researchers and practitioners.
CASE 2025 will be held on August 17 – August 21, 2025, in Los Angeles, California, USA. The pre-conference workshops will be held on August 17, 2025. This is a great opportunity to showcase to the world’s leading automation, robotics and engineering community.
Sponsor and exhibitor information can be found here and you can also apply for the IEEE RAS IAB Startup Zone (discounted exhibit space and conference registration).
Robotics News
Amazon’s One Millionth Robot - Bytes: Week in Review - Marketplace Tech
Amazon launches a new AI foundation model to power its robotic fleet and deploys its 1 millionth robot - About Amazon
Unicorn Startup That Makes ‘Superhuman’ Robots Plots Path to IPO - WSJ
Robotics will have a ChatGPT moment in the next 2-3 years - Vinod Khosla - Business Insider
Genesis AI Debuts From Stealth With $105 Million - Silicon Valley Daily
Galbot picks up $153 Million to commercialize G1 semi-humanoid - The Robot Report
Zoho acquires Asimov Robotics - Economic Times India
Kawasaki and Foxconn build robot nursing assistant to tackle hospital scutwork - The Register
Elon Musk's Optimus boast in doubt as humanoid robot production plans halted — Telsa’s projections for 10,000 robots in 2025 cast into doubt, according to supply chain sources - Tom’s Hardware
How China is leading the humanoid robot race - Fast Company
Tesollo to present humanoid robot hand at AI for Good Global Summit - The Robot Report
Robotics Events
Coming soon - Open Robot Gym Hours, Workshops and more
Actuate - Sep 23-24
SVR Robotics Investment Summit - Sep 25
ROSCON UK
ROSCON Singapore - Oct 27-30
SVR Robotics Leadership Summit - Dec 10
Humanoids Summit - Dec 11-12
Join the organizing team at Silicon Valley Robotics - bots&beer@svrobo.org
