Shenzhen loves building robots, not just dancing with them.
San Francisco also loves building with robots, Medra and Foundry launch
Of course there is a robotics festival almost every week in China, but FAIRplus was unique. No dancing robots, just hardware for robots. On April 22-24 some colleagues and I attended the 2nd FAIRplus expo, focused on the AI and robotics supply chain. There were approximately 500 exhibitors and a number of other international robotics clusters, from EU Robotics, VDMA and the IFR to the Cameroon Robotics Association. As well as visiting the exhibitors, talks and panels, we were able to tour some local robotics companies, Dobot and Ubtech and the AIR Design House.
The newly launched AIR Design House is a cowork space near Shenzhen Airport in the tech district for the use of foreign robotics and AI companies spending time in Shenzhen. As well as work and meeting space, the AIR Design House provides displays of all the robotics and robotics component vendors in the local ecosystem.
Shenzhen Robotics Association deserves congratulations for both these initiatives, FAIRplus and the AIR Design House. I would love to provide something of similar scale in Silicon Valley! Although where Shenzhen excels at supply chain, Silicon Valley excels at investment. And where the Chinese robotics industry excels in hardware manufacturing, the US robotics industry excels in physical AI development.
Medra and Foundry Robotics launch their US robot factories
This week, Foundry Robotics opened the doors to their 8000 sq ft Mission headquarters to celebrate their $19 Million raise. Foundry is building ‘The Everything Factory’, autonomous systems to automate manufacturing and assembly.
Medra also launched a 38,000 sq ft autonomous biotech lab in the heart of San Francisco. Medra Lab 001 has more than 100 robots running 24/7 and was built in less than 90 days. Medra has raised $52 Million to accelerate drug discovery and provide a platform for AI teams building the next generation of foundation models for biology.
Here’s an earlier video of Medra founder Michelle Lee on Bloomberg:
Henrik Christensen releases his Global Robotics Roadmap
The master of the robotics roadmap, Henrik Christensen, has just released his thoughts about the comparative state of robotics from Europe to Asia to America. Robotics has changed so fundamentally over the last decade that assumptions about the strengths and weaknesses of each region has to be reevaluated.
The roadmap recommends that Europe consolidate its regulatory advantage into a positive differentiator for responsible robotics manufacturing and healthcare robotics export; that Asia pursue diversification beyond industrial automation toward service and healthcare sectors to hedge against demographic aging; and that the United States leverage its AI software supremacy to build vertically integrated robotics stacks spanning simulation, foundation model training, and hardware. Read more here
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Ardalan Tajbakhsh, Applied Scientist at Amazon Robotics is skeptical about the ‘ChatGPT moment for robotics’.
Even if a "GPT for robotics" existed today, it wouldn't magically scale to a million robots. Anyone who has deployed robots in production knows how difficult solving one problem for one real customer actually is. The path from pilot to paid contract and scalable solution is really messy and difficult. The robot often barely solves part of the use case after many iteration cycles, with a long tail of exception paths still requiring human intervention. None of that shows up in a demo. All of it shows up in production. Read more here
Toyota Research Institute shares VLA Foundry, a unified open-source framework
Our researchers built VLA Foundry to remove those constraints by bringing multimodal training of LLMs, VLMs, and VLAs into a single, modular codebase. This gives researchers and practitioners direct control over each stage of the pipeline, enabling them to iterate quickly and push towards more foundational breakthroughs in the field. Read more here
New episode of RoboPapers with Kaan Doğrusöz from Weave Robotics
It’s always a pleasure listening to Chris Paxton and Jiafei Duan and guests on RoboPapers podcast. This episode with Kaan Doğrusöz, co-founder of Weave Robotics, gets into the process of developing an AI-enabled robot as a consumer product. This is when hardware does get hard!
Bilal Zuberi describes three deep tech periods via Brad Porter’s Deployed podcast
Bilal talks about how the venture industry got deep tech wrong, initially by backing industry veterans that were insufficiently agile. Then by backing risk takers but not giving them enough time. Now he’s left a $5.5 billion firm to bet on the third wave of deep tech thesis. One in which AI is compressing the design to ship cycle, margins are improving and the best founders are no longer in enterprise software but now focusing on the difficult deep tech that builds the defining companies of the next decade. Deployed Episode Three
Silicon Valley Robotics Investor/Startup Database
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Avik De, CTO at Ghost Robotics, analyzes Honor’s half marathon ‘better than human’ performance
Avik really gets into the nuts and bolts of the design, which is fascinating as he is an expert in legged locomotion. But ultimately, as he points out, the Honor robot was designed specifically to race fast in a display, not to compete in the real world or to perform any other kind of real work. The majority of humanoid robot companies are putting their time and money into optimizing for other outcomes.
More Robotics News
Hesai announces full color LiDAR - Hesai
A&K Robotics Raises $8 Million to Build Autonomous Mobility Infrastructure for Airports - BusinessWire
Reliable Robotics Announces $160M in New Investment: Company to begin autonomous cargo operations in 2026 - BusinessWire
China plans to invest billions on a robot army to run its power grid - South China Morning Post
Pudu Robotics raises nearly $150M at $1.5B valuation to deploy embodied AI technology - Silicon Angle
Inside the company building America’s first mail-order servant robot - Dezeen
X Square Robot Unveils New Embodied AI Model, Says Robots Will Arrive in Homes in 35 Days - AAP
Smeg CEO surprises industry with robotics collaboration - Appliance Retailer
Figure Is Doubling Humanoid Robot Deliveries Every Month - Forbes
Why Autonomous Robotics Still Takes Decades to Scale in the Real World - Korea Tech Desk
Robotics Events
Bots, Bevs & Devs
May 5 - 6pm to 8.30pm at Circuit Launch Oakland
Matt Brown, CEO Thoughtforge
“The Next Control Layer: Autonomy for the Messy, Variable, Real World”
Most robots are trained once and deployed hoping the world holds still; this talk is about what changes when the world is allowed to move and the robot learns to move with it.Prachi Sethi, Developer Relations at Open Mind
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Dominic Lee, Founder of GyroPalm
What if you could train robots, control computers, and monitor environments with a flick of your wrist? Learn how these gesture-controlled AMRs were designed and brought into real-world environments using ROS2, and what it actually takes to move from prototype to deployment.
More Robotics Events:
Robotics Invest - Boston - May 26-27
ICRA 2026 - Vienna, Austria - Jun 01 - Jun 05
IEEE Hard Tech Venture Summit - Boston - June 10 - June 11
Automate - Chicago - June 22 - Jun 25
Deep Tech Week - SF - Jun 21 - Jun 25
Robot Fringe Festival - London - Jul 2
Robotics: Science and Systems - Sydney, Australia - Jul 13 - Jul 16
Open Sauce - San Francisco - Jul 17 - Jul 19
ROSCon Global - Toronto - Sep 22 - Sep 24
IROS 2026 - Pittsburgh - Sep 27 - Oct 1
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.
Send me your 2026 progress, plans or posts for potential inclusion in Robots&Startups. Or join the organizing team at Silicon Valley Robotics - bots&beer@svrobo.org
Thank you for the roundup and the mention!