HaloBraid raises $7M to build the first robotic braiding assistant for hair salons
HaloBraid raises $7M to build the first robotic braiding assistant for hair salons

HaloBraid, a robotics startup that builds an automated braiding assistant for hair salons, has raised seven million dollars in a seed round led by Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s venture firm Seven Seven Six. The device works alongside professional …

Luminvera bets on immersive software for robotics
Luminvera bets on immersive software for robotics

For most of Luminvera’s short life, the pitch came with an AR wearable. The company, incorporated in March 2026 and run out of Silicon Valley, started as a bet that the right device could pull an industrial engineer out of what its founder, Lu Yang, li…

Delivery robot startup Robot.com bets its next act on wheeled humanoids for kitchens and warehouses
Delivery robot startup Robot.com bets its next act on wheeled humanoids for kitchens and warehouses

Robot.com, the San Francisco startup formerly known as Kiwibot, is expanding from campus delivery robots into workplace humanoids. The company told Business Insider it will launch R-noid, a humanoid on wheels designed to package orders, load and unload…

JD.com says robots will replace its 700,000 couriers
JD.com says robots will replace its 700,000 couriers

JD.com robots will eventually replace the company’s 700,000 couriers, its founder says. It is a rare admission that automation is coming for blue-collar jobs. Most tech bosses hedge when asked whether machines will take people’s jobs. Richard Liu just …

The developer behind VLC’s 6 billion downloads now wants to connect hundreds of millions of robots
The developer behind VLC’s 6 billion downloads now wants to connect hundreds of millions of robots

Jean-Baptiste Kempf, the lead developer of VLC Media Player, has raised $5 million for his startup Kyber, an infrastructure layer for controlling remote devices in real time. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, which also led Mistral AI’s…

MIT built a memory system that lets robots remember where you left your keys
MIT built a memory system that lets robots remember where you left your keys

Robots are still surprisingly bad at remembering where things are. You might recall that your keys were on the kitchen counter last night. A robot working beside you would struggle to connect that object and location in a useful way. MIT researchers bu…

Collecting robot training data is dirty, unglamorous work. Some AI labs are already paying XDOF to do it.

If physical AI is going to match the accomplishments of LLMs, there’s a data problem that needs to be solved.

Genesis AI thinks the humanoid hype is wrong. Its wheeled robot is the counterargument.
Genesis AI thinks the humanoid hype is wrong. Its wheeled robot is the counterargument.

On Tuesday, while the robotics industry continued pouring billions into machines that walk like humans, a startup called Genesis AI unveiled one that deliberately does not. Eno is a wheeled robot with a foldable tower, dexterous hands, and a foundation…

This two-year-old startup already programs Blue Origin’s rockets. It just raised $20M.
This two-year-old startup already programs Blue Origin’s rockets. It just raised $20M.

The hottest pitch in AI right now is not another chatbot. It is software that can run the machines on a factory floor, and a two-year-old Israeli startup has just raised $20m on the strength of programming parts for Jeff Bezos’s rockets. Limitless Labs…

Alibaba unveils AI models for robots as China’s focus shifts to agents
Alibaba unveils AI models for robots as China’s focus shifts to agents

Alibaba has revealed its first suite of AI models for robots, a move that says as much about where Chinese technology is heading as about the models themselves. The launch came as the industry pivots away from chatbots and towards agents, the systems m…