Research lab
AI lab building general-purpose foundation models for robot perception and control, aiming to give diverse robots broadly capable "brains."
Brooklyn startup Ultra raised $62 million to rent packing robots to warehouses by the month, running AI from Physical Intelligence. Its claimed pricing power leans on software that, Fortune reported, Physical Intelligence also supplies to numerous other robot makers.
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FieldAI is raising $700 million at a $10 billion valuation, five times last year's mark, Business Insider reported. The pitch is robots that cross changing sites like construction without a pre-built map, and so far only FieldAI has stated the setup savings.
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A $200M extension prices the robot foundation model startup at $3B, led by an investor already on the cap table. The field evidence is a company claim about three-second demos.
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Where a robot's inference runs decides what the machine costs to build. SemiAnalysis puts the industry's upfront compute bill in the trillions at a billion robots, paid by manufacturers on every unit before it does any work.
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The floor on Figure's compute commitment is about twice all the equity it has disclosed raising, and the vendor writing that contract now owns a piece of the customer owing it. Whether the $3.5bn is take-or-pay is undisclosed.
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Linear's $99m tender at a $2.5bn mark prices existing shares rather than new capital, while the blog beneath it puts agent-created work at half the total, a composition figure Atlassian answers with a 4x quarter off an undisclosed base.
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A software-only startup with no robots of its own is betting that open weights and human video can substitute for the fleet it cannot finance.
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Sources cited by TechCrunch say the 44-person lab is in talks at a $6 billion pre-money valuation, weeks after closing at $2.3 billion. That is a 2.6x step-up, and more than 3x pre-to-pre.
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Actuate went from 250 attendees in 2024 to 1,500 this year and could have sold 2,000. Almost none of them brought a working robot, which tells you where the bottleneck sits.
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