--- title: "Robotics Startups Raised More Money in Six Months of 2026 Than in All of 2025" description: "PitchBook counts $33.4 billion into physical AI in the first half; veterans who watched autonomous vehicles see the same movie" author: "Luis Goa" published: 2026-10-21T09:00:01Z modified: 2026-10-21T13:33:38Z url: https://rews.cc/a/robotics-startups-raised-more-money-in-six-months-of-2026-th-0901a7 language: en tags: ["robots", "ai", "hardware", "investment", "labor", "tech"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # Robotics Startups Raised More Money in Six Months of 2026 Than in All of 2025 *PitchBook counts $33.4 billion into physical AI in the first half; veterans who watched autonomous vehicles see the same movie* By Luis Goa · October 21, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/robotics-startups-raised-more-money-in-six-months-of-2026-th-0901a7 ## In brief - Robotics and physical-AI startups raised $33.4B in H1 2026, vs $28.7B in all of 2025 and under $5B in 2020, per PitchBook - Largest rounds: Anduril $5B, Saronic $1.75B, Skild AI $1.4B, Physical Intelligence about $1B - Veterans warn of “hardware tourists” and point to the 2010s autonomous-vehicle bust as precedent - Figure AI holds a $39B valuation while deployments remain limited to small factory pilots - Field AI passed $100M in revenue and contracts; Skild AI reports $100M ARR from 60-plus customers Robotics and physical-AI companies raised $33.4 billion globally in the first six months of 2026, according to PitchBook data cited by [Business Insider](https://www.businessinsider.com/why-silicon-valley-vcs-are-investing-billions-in-robotics-2026-10). That is more than the $28.7 billion the sector took in across all of 2025, and roughly seven times the just-under-$5 billion raised in 2020. A category that spent decades on venture capital’s do-not-call list is now absorbing capital at about $1.3 billion a week. The individual rounds are sized like acquisitions, not experiments. Defense contractor Anduril raised $5 billion in May, co-led by Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. Autonomous shipbuilder Saronic raised $1.75 billion in March in a round led by Kleiner Perkins. Skild AI, which builds control software meant to work across different robot types, raised $1.4 billion in January, led by SoftBank. Physical Intelligence, which is building an AI model to command robots, raised about $1 billion in May, co-led by Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness and Lux Capital. “In my 45 years in this field, this is the most funding and energy and interest in robotics that I’ve ever seen,” Ken Goldberg, a UC Berkeley robotics professor and cofounder of warehouse robotics startup Ambi Robotics, told Business Insider. He called the moment “off the charts.” The pitch rests on a Goldilocks set of conditions: cheaper hardware, AI models good enough to let robots perceive and adapt rather than follow scripts, labor shortages, and competition with China. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who popularized the term “physical AI,” has described robotics as the industry’s first shot at “a $50 trillion industry that has largely been void of technology until now.” That $50 trillion is an addressable-market figure from a CEO whose company sells the chips into it, not a measurement — but many Nvidia veterans have launched robotics startups on the strength of it. ![A watering can pours gold coins onto a pile around a small plant with a robotic arm growing from it against a teal background.](https://rews.cc/img/e7ae1006abd50d5193f8f9feee4bafb0c8b7b2b7.webp) ## Hardware was where VC money went to die For decades, the economics ruled robotics out. Robots required expensive hardware, factories and supply chains, and the result was usually a machine that could do exactly one task. Sarah Guo, founder of the venture firm Conviction, used to tell fellow investors that robotics was a good way to lose a lot of money over many years. “The models didn’t work,” she said. “Every robot was a brittle, single-purpose system hand-built for one task.” The instructive exception is Kiva Systems. Ajay Agarwal of Bain Capital Ventures backed the warehouse-automation company in 2004, when its fleets of mobile robots brought shelves to human pickers. Kiva was “not able to raise money on Sand Hill Road,” Agarwal told Business Insider, so Bain led every successive round, and by the time Amazon bought the company for $775 million in 2012, Bain was its only institutional investor. One exit, eight years, one buyer — that was the best case the old model produced. What changed is machine learning: robots can now perceive their surroundings, make decisions and adapt to new tasks, which raises the hope of building one versatile machine instead of engineering a new robot per job. Cheaper computing and hardware help the arithmetic. The returning names show how far the shift has gone. Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick’s Atoms raised $1.7 billion in July to automate food, mining and transportation. Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe’s Mind Robotics has raised $900 million this year. Former Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt’s home robotics startup, The Bot Company, has raised at least $300 million. OpenAI has listed robotics jobs with base salaries up to $500,000 a year; Meta bought robotics startup Assured Robot Intelligence in May and is testing robots in its data centers; Google has invested in humanoid maker Apptronik, which also works with DeepMind on robot AI models; Elon Musk is staking Tesla’s future on the Optimus humanoid. In August, Andreessen Horowitz raised a dedicated $1.1 billion fund, “Machine Age,” its first focused on the physical infrastructure behind AI. ![A cream and navy robot with orange joints uses four arms to hold a cube, spoon, broom, and wrench against a bright blue background.](https://rews.cc/img/d98a6af4cc1c9396d04b2ec95712daa0cc053c8a.webp) ## Priced as if the robots already work The valuations assume the breakthrough has happened. Figure AI, a humanoid maker, secured a $39 billion valuation last year while its deployments remained limited to small factory pilots, and other startups still in research and development command multibillion-dollar prices with little revenue and few deployments. Guo, whose firm invests in robotics startups Sunday Robotics and Watney, holds both sides of the trade at once: “Robotics is going to happen, and a lot of money will still be lost. Both things are true.” Longtime robotics investors have a name for the new money: “hardware tourists,” investors drawn in by AI hype who underestimate how hard it is to build machines that work reliably in the physical world. There is a precedent. Venture firms poured billions into autonomous vehicles in the 2010s; most startups folded or consolidated when self-driving proved harder and more expensive to commercialize than pitch decks assumed, and years later only a handful of deep-pocketed players operate robotaxis for the public. > The most difficult part of physical AI is the physical part. The next few years are going to be really, really hard for the robotics industry as companies go from the lab to deployments. — Charly Mwangi, partner at Eclipse, an investor in The Bot Company and Genesis AI The technical gap is data. Large language models train on internet-scale text and images; robots have no comparable corpus showing how to act in the physical world. Dozens of startups are scrambling to collect such data, and nobody knows how much will be enough. Even a smarter model does not remove the cost of manufacturing, maintaining and deploying expensive hardware. ![A white humanoid robot steps through a doorway onto a jagged yellow mountain against a bright blue background.](https://rews.cc/img/eca22af7636f22dd9ece1c8d54ea3437251be204.webp) The most speculative corners are drawing the biggest checks: humanoids and general-purpose robot models were the two fastest-growing areas of robotics investment last year, according to venture firm F-Prime. “You cannot raise money on demos forever,” said Sanjay Aggarwal, an F-Prime partner and coauthor of its annual robotics report. “I would personally be surprised if all these companies independently exist two or three years from now.” ## The revenue that exists so far A few startups have numbers instead of demos. Field AI, which builds an AI “brain” that works across robots, has crossed $100 million in revenue and customer contracts from more than 30 customers, including construction firms, data center operators and defense companies, Business Insider previously reported — note that figure blends booked revenue with signed contracts. Skild AI said last month it reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue from more than 60 customers; its projects include robots assembling Nvidia’s Blackwell chips with Foxconn and kitchen pilots with the Japanese conglomerate Mitsui. ARR is a run rate, not money collected, but $100 million of it is a different claim from a valuation. Brad Porter, former head of Amazon Robotics and now CEO of workplace robotics startup Cobot, says the field could be nine to 18 months from major advances in dexterous manipulation — robots handling objects with something like the ease of human hands. “When I think of a ‘ChatGPT moment’ for robotics, it is cracking dexterous manipulation,” Porter said. “Then there will be a Cambrian explosion of robots.” That is a projection from a founder selling into the boom, not a measurement. The numbers that will settle it are the two above: whether Skild’s and Field AI’s revenue curves keep climbing before the two-to-three-year window Aggarwal gives the demo-funded companies runs out.