Learnings from 2025 in robots and startups
Addverb is hosting the next "Bots, Bevs & Devs" on Feb 11th and Women in Robotics scholarship entries close on Feb 1st
Los Angeles-based Serve Robotics announced Tuesday it was acquiring Diligent Robotics, a startup that builds robots named Moxi designed to assist in hospitals by delivering lab samples, supplies, and other tasks. The deal values Diligent’s common stock at $29 million. via TechCrunch
2025 had a total of $33 billion of investment in 1,138 separate funding rounds. Not the most funding rounds by number of recent years, but probably the biggest total amount going into robotics technologies. Some multi-billion dollar rounds went to late stage autonomous vehicle companies, some to new physical AI world model or robotics foundation model companies, some to humanoid startups and there was a steady increase in aerospace and defense force technology funding.
We’re also seeing consolidation as more small to medium sized robotics companies are acquired (Diligent Robotics by Serve) or restructured (iRobot).
I wasn’t going to publish my dataset’s investment totals without more factchecking, until I saw other people coming up with even bigger totals. Here’s some big totals from CBInsights via Ivan Landabaso @startupriders with bonus robotaxi joke.
Via Peter Zeihan on new semiconductor tariff plans:
Putting tariffs on semiconductors is nearly impossible to do cleanly. There are thousands of types, production stages, and end uses. So, the Trump admin thought it would be a good idea to tariff them based on the end use, rather than where they’re made. The only problem is that most importers don’t even know the final use of the chips upon import, creating a legally and financially risky situation for everyone involved.
This tariff will likely freeze access to advanced semiconductors and choke the US tech and manufacturing sectors. There are a few ways around the tariffs, but those offer little relief to existing manufacturers. But hey, let’s just keep trying to jam this square peg into that round hole.rough strong alliances will struggle to survive. And the next generation of kids (however small that cohort might be) will be studying those countries in the history books.
Please click below to watch the video
Women in Robotics Joanne Pransky Scholarship Applications close on Feb 1
Women in Robotics has run this biannual scholarship in honor of Joanne Pransky since 2024 with the generous support of donors, particularly The Joseph F. Engelberger Foundation and A3, the Association for Advancing Automation.
Via COMPARE Ecosystem Digest, January 26, 2026
New open-source hardware designs for tactile sensing and new object datasets have been added to robot-manipulation.org, workshops for ERF 2026 and competitions for ICRA 2026 have been announced, and the AI for Industry Challenge is coming up!
Open-Source Hardware Designs
Hardware Designs: 3 new entries (49 total):
DigiTac [tactile sensors]
Tactile SoftHand-A [end effectors, tactile sensors]
TacTip [tactile sensors]
Datasets
Object Datasets: 4 new entries (20 total):
ABC-Dataset [sim data; 3D object model meshes, metadata]
Omni6DPose [real and sim data; RGB images, depth images, metadata, 6D poses]
OmniObject3D [real data; RGB images, 3D object model meshes, point clouds, metadata]
PokeFlex [real data; RGB images, depth images, 3D object model meshes, point clouds]
Bracing for the Enshittification of Embodied AI and Robotics - Call for Papers
In November 2022, Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to viscerally describe the process by which two-sided marketplaces (i.e., platforms that connect buyers and sellers) have tended to degrade over the past decades, leading users on both sides of the market to experience a worse product. In its most basic form, enshittification describes the intentional decline of platform quality over time. Robots intended for home consumer use are often social in nature and use social interaction and relationship norms to keep users engaged. Turning such robots into two-sided market platforms, where users and advertisers both become targets of monetization, poses unique and significant risks.
Unlike static smart or connected devices, social robots actively engage users via gaze, gesture, language, and dialog, which makes them uniquely persuasive forms of technology. This raises unique potential risks related to deception and manipulation of end-users. This symposium will not focus on enumerating potential negative outcomes; instead, we will use these examples to motivate and support methods that AI researchers in particular can use to address enshittification before it takes over the embodied AI and robotics fields.
Committee: Paul Robinette (UMass Lowell), Alan Wagner (Penn State University), Ross Mead (Semio), Samantha Reig (UMass Lowell).
Potential topics include but are not limited to:
Case studies of dual-sided AI deployments
Privacy-aware AI
Ensuring trustworthy behavior of AI systems
AI Ethics/Responsible Computing
Discussion of societal impacts of robots that enshittify.
Consideration of the inequities caused by devices that advertise relentlessly.
Discussion of a research agenda to anticipate and prevent the enshittification of robots that provide services (e.g., in public, in homes).
Affective manipulation by consumer products and AI driven technologies
The symposium will combine invited talks, panels, lightning talks, poster sessions, discussion sessions, and working sessions. Attendance is open to all who are interested. At least one author of each accepted paper is expected to attend.
Submissions should be to https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sss26 by January 30, 2026. Papers should be 2–4 pages in length and use the two-column AAAI format. Selected papers will be asked to present as a lightning talk, panel discussion, and/or poster. Check the website for more information.
Please direct questions to enshittification2026aaai@gmail.com.
Symposium website: https://sites.google.com/view/bracing-for-enshittification/home
Silicon Valley Robotics Investor/Startup Database
Are you a startup fundraising atm? Fill out our "For Investors Eyes Only" sheet.
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 for great robotics deal flow!
Robotics News
LG launches Physical Intelligence Lab and humanoid actuator line
During CES 2026 in Las Vegas earlier this month, LG Electronics launched its robotic actuator brand AXIUM and outlined its goal of becoming a leader of the robotic actuator market. It also showcased its home robot CLOiD during the tech exhibition, which interacted with its surroundings by performing tasks such as folding towels and taking milk out of a refrigerator using its arms.
LG Electronics made an equity investment in robot developer Robotis and acquired the controlling stake of industrial robot manufacturer Robostar in 2018. Last year, it also acquired Bear Robotics and made a strategic investment in Chinese humanoid robot maker AgiBot.
LG Group Chairman Koo Kwang-mo has stressed that humanoid robots and physical AI are the group’s next growth driver. In 2024, he visited U.S. robot startup Figure AI to explore business opportunities in the robot value chain, which resulted in the group’s investment in Figure AI and other U.S. physical AI startups such as DYNA Robotics and Skilled AI. Read more at The Korea Times
LimX and Agibot deploying globally
Morgan Stanley is paying attention. The bank doubled its China humanoid sales forecast for 2026 to 28,000 units, up from an earlier 14,000 estimate, equity analyst Shen Zhong wrote in a report last week. “We expect sales to businesses to be the key driver this year, taking over from government, R&D and entertainment-related sales last year,” Zhong noted. By 2050, the firm predicts China’s humanoid market could hit 54 million annual units—a projection that would reshape global manufacturing and service industries. Read more at The Tech Buzz and CNBC’s The China Connection
Foxglove and Antioch featured as leaders in physical AI
Two New Zealand engineers who helped build the future of self‑driving cars in Silicon Valley are now quietly laying the foundations for the next great tech wave: physical AI. In the latest episode of The Business of Tech, I talk to Harry Mellsop, co‑founder of simulation startup Antioch, and Adrian Macneil, co‑founder and CEO of data platform Foxglove, for a fast‑paced tour of where robotics is really at as Elon Musk talks up his Optimus humanoid robots. Read more at Business Desk NZ
Send me your 2025 progress and 2026 plans for potential inclusion in Robots&Startups.
Robotics Events
The next SVR Robotics Leadership Event is coming in early 2026 followed by another IEEE Hard Tech Venture Summit in Silicon Valley!
Bots, Bevs & Devs at Addverb in Fremont on Feb 11
!! NOT the first Wednesday this month !!
SVR Robotics Leadership Event - TBC - March 24
Drones and Robotics AI Summit - New York - March 26
European Robotics Forum - Norway - Mar 23 - Mar 27
IEEE Haptics Symposium - Reno - March 29 to Apr 1
IEEE Hard Tech Venture Summit and Robotics Manufacturing Workshop (with Silicon Valley Robotics) - SRI International - April 16-17
ICRA 2026 - Vienna, Austria - Jun 01 - Jun 05
Robotics: Science and Systems - Sydney, Australia - Jul 13 - Jul 16
IROS 2026 - Pittsburgh
IEEE Humanoids 2026 - Silicon Valley - Dec 6-9
The annual IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots is the internationally recognized prime event of the humanoid robotics community. The conference is sponsored by the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society and coordinated by the Technical Committee on Humanoids.
Join the organizing team at Silicon Valley Robotics - bots&beer@svrobo.org
Robotics is now a capital-intensive industry: winners will be defined by scale, unit economics, and uptime—not demos. Semiconductor tariffs pose a major risk for those without supply chain leverage. In service robotics, workflow integration and contracts will beat humanoid design. Ultimately, in embodied AI, trust will be the lasting moat—making the early focus on