Robotics won the funding argument. The expo hall shows it has not won the hardware one.

Actuate, a robotics conference held this week in a former Army warehouse at Fort Mason in San Francisco, drew 1,500 investors, founders and engineers ^[1]. The machines were the thing that did not show up, and the distance between the size of the crowd and the amount of working hardware on the floor is the most useful planning input the event produced ^[6].

The attendance curve is the clean part of the story. The inaugural event in 2024 drew about 250 people, 500 came the following year, and attendance tripled this year ^[2][3][1]. That is roughly a sixfold increase in two years ^[23]. Adrian Macneil, cofounder and CEO of Foxglove, the startup that runs the conference, said they could have sold more than 2,000 tickets with a bigger venue ^[4]. Macneil, whose company sells software for analysing data off robots, also told the audience that for most of the past two decades venture capitalists saw robotics as an unsuccessful money pit ^[5][12].

The capital has followed the sentiment. According to Crunchbase, robotics startups raised a record $15 billion globally in 2025 and another $18.8 billion so far this year ^[7][8], which puts the partial year about 25 percent above the full-year record ^[24].

What that money has not yet bought is machines. Business Insider's reporter counted a few robot dogs doing backflips at a booth and Andromeda's companion humanoid, Abi, blowing bubbles during CEO Grace Brown's talk, and little else ^[6]. "Hardware is the missing piece," Theophile Gervet, cofounder and president of Genesis AI, said at the conference. "There's less hardware being built than what the industry needs" ^[9]. In the expo hall, data vendors outnumbered hardware companies ^[10]. Uber AI Solutions pitched data collection and labelling; Instawork showed a wearable camera system that lets gig workers gather real-world data for robots ^[11]. There is no equivalent of the open internet corpus for physical movement, which is why a panel called "The Data Wars" pulled researchers from Nvidia, Physical Intelligence and Generalist ^[13][14]. Macneil described the current state as an absolute feeding frenzy of people producing and buying data ^[15].

The supply side got harder last month, when the Federal Communications Commission imposed restrictions on new foreign-made "advanced robotic devices" ^[16]. Chinese companies accounted for roughly 90 percent of global humanoid shipments last year ^[17]. US manufacturers welcomed the protection; startups and researchers argued that losing cheap Chinese hardware sets the country back ^[18]. Sebastian Thrun, who founded the Google self-driving project that became Waymo, called the rule "a bit of a problem" in a surprise keynote, then disclosed a new robotics startup of his own, Dulo ^[19][20]. Fred Parietti, CEO of Multiply Labs, said he had anticipated decoupling and built much of his supply chain in Europe, and still depends on Chinese humanoids to load and unload equipment without contaminating it: "There is no alternative right now" ^[21][22].

For anyone budgeting around physical automation, the sequencing matters more than the headline numbers. Money is arriving years ahead of fleets you can buy, install and staff. Watch whether next year's expo floor is still dominated by data vendors, watch procurement lead times and certification paths for any device with a foreign bill of materials, and treat vendor deployment dates that assume unrestricted access to Chinese hardware as unpriced risk rather than a schedule.