Unitree launches R1 humanoid at Circuit Launch, SVR robotics startups host investor event in SF.
Skild AI raised $1.4 Billion, Mytra raised $120 Million, Model.inc humanoid out of stealth
What a great week! On Jan 14, Cavalla hosted a curated robotics founder/investor evening at their San Francisco headquarters. The event was well attended with many high quality conversations. Sign up for the SVR investor/startup database to stay in the loop for more events like this. Here’s a short recap with more to follow next week.
Participating companies:
Cavalla Industries is a market disruptor with tremendous growth potential, addressing the global autonomous forklift market estimated at USD $4.84 billion in 2024 and projected to reach USD $9.49 billion by 2030. Their cost-effective, modular retrofit kit is designed for a sector where high initial investment costs for new autonomous systems, often between $100,000 to $200,000 per unit, deter mid-sized businesses.
3Laws Robotics operates at the crucial intersection of safety and autonomy, a non-negotiable requirement as the $50 billion robotics market accelerates its integration of AI. The company, a California Institute of Technology (Caltech) spin-out, has developed an AI Supervisor software that provides real-time "guardrails" for autonomous systems operating alongside humans in dynamic environments. This innovative technology has attracted significant investor confidence, highlighted by its successful $4.1 million seed funding round led by TenOneTen Ventures with key participation from the Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund.
Rovex is addressing critical inefficiencies in the healthcare sector's logistics, a market segment for pharmacy and hospital automation robots projected to grow from $3.9 billion in 2023 to $18.4 billion by 2033, a staggering CAGR of 16.8%. The company offers autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) for tasks like patient and medical supply transport, directly addressing the pain points of high labor costs, which account for 50-70% of typical warehousing budgets, and high employee turnover rates that can reach 49% annually.
Conduit Inc. (ex FleetGlue) is an industrial AI powerhouse designed to catalyze the next phase of American manufacturing by providing an AI-driven "command center" for factory floors. The global factory automation market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 9.3%, reaching $399.12 billion by 2029. Conduit's platform addresses these needs by offering seamless integration of disparate factory systems (robots, machines, sensors), enabling manufacturers to deploy factory-wide AI in days and reduce production delays by an estimated 20% to 40%.
Saphira AI is accelerating the pace of hardware innovation across the automotive, robotics, and aerospace industries by automating the traditionally slow and manual safety certification process. The AI safety market is a high-growth area expected to see a 21.6% CAGR, from $8.9 billion in 2024 to $41.2 billion by 2033. Saphira AI's platform allows companies to reduce the time required to prepare a complete safety case by an estimated 60-80%, a massive competitive advantage in industries where speed to market is critical.
Skyfront is a Silicon Valley company that builds high-end, hybrid-electric multirotor drones (like the Perimeter series) known for extremely long flight endurance (hours, not minutes) for defense, surveillance, and commercial tasks, using a gas-powered generator to create electricity in flight, allowing them to carry large sensors for tasks like pipeline inspection, unexploded ordnance detection, and search & rescue at a fraction of the cost of helicopters.
Model.inc is building Unitree for the home. Developer-friendly humanoids that are light, soft and safe to be around. Model came out of stealth to give us a quick look at their new humanoid as they commence their pre-seed fundraising. Model is currently six months old, bootstrapped and founded by industry veterans, Jonas Blanck, Josh Chen and Tom Jacobs.
Silicon Valley Robotics (SVR) serves as the strategic nexus for the world's leading robotics cluster, positioning itself as the indispensable gateway for global investment and innovation. SVR represents companies and researchers in the region, which fosters a substantial share of the over $2.26 billion in global robotics funding raised in Q1 2025 alone. As a key industry association, SVR provides unparalleled access to cutting-edge trends in AI, collaborative robots, and computer vision, which are key for identifying future market leaders.
Unitree showcases their affordable humanoids, G1 and R1 and their industrial H1 robot at Circuit Launch in Mountain View to a full capacity crowd. We kicked the evening off with a panel covering a broad range of perspectives from Unitree’s Tony Yang, Alex Dantas from Circuit Launch, Andra Keay from Silicon Valley Robotics and Women in Robotics, and Tonya Long from K2X Capital. Discussion ranged from the technologies and tasks which are ready for market to the ones that aren’t, to how we manage human expectations about robots, particularly humanoid ones.
Tony Yang from Unitree gave an in depth presentation about their roadmap and next feature releases, which provides roboticists entry points into the humanoid and robotics model ecosystems. It was quite fascinating to learn how Unitree first developed quadrupeds and then used their learnings on humanoids, leveraging the latest advances in deep learning.
The talks were followed by demonstrations of the industrial H1, G1s and Gos and the new $4,900+ R1 robot. According to Unitree, the R1 has 20-26-DOF for adaptation to complex scenarios; its 2-DOF head enhances environmental perception. The R1 is ultra-lightweight at about 29kg, easy maintenance ≤123cm agile form, ready out-of-the-box with fully open control interfaces for joints and sensors and support for mainstream simulation platforms.
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.
Call For Participation for the HRI 2026 Special Session on “HRI and Consumer Robots: Building Robots that are Useful and Acceptable”
(sponsored by Meta) taking place on March 16, 2026 in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK.
Applications (required) and paper submissions (optional) are due on January 22, 2026. The session is open to academics and industry practitioners and is free to attend, but has limited space.
Meta is also providing travel support of up to $1,500 per person for people who submit an 1-2 page paper that is accepted. Session Information
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
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Robotics News
Mytra has raised $120M for their warehouse operations robotics solutions. They raised $120 million in a Series C round led by Avenir. Founded in 2022, California based Mytra has raised close to $200 million to date, with other investors including Eclipse Ventures.
Pittsburgh based Skild AI has raised $1.4B for their “omnibodied” brain designed to operate any robot for any task. This brings Skild’s valuation up to more than $14 billion. The SoftBank Group led the latest financing which comes only seven months after Skild raised a Series B at a $4.5 billion valuation.
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 the IEEE Hard Tech Venture Summit in Silicon Valley!
1/29 – AMBayArea Winter Forum (San Jose) via AMBayArea
2/19 – Bay Area Regional Manufacturing Executive Roundtable (Virtual) via AMBayArea
Bots & Beers - San Francisco or Silicon Valley - Feb 4
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
Unitree’s sub-$5k humanoid is moving Embodied AI from "demo theater" to a developer ecosystem; it’s no longer about hardware novelty, but accessibility. Recent $1B+ funding rounds confirm the new logic: the moat is in the control plane, uptime, and repeatable ROI, not just DOF. Exciting time for the community to be bridging the gap between builders and investors.