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Maven Robotics, a California-based startup developing general-purpose robots for industrial work, said on Thursday it raised $100 million in Series A funding to expand its logistics and manufacturing platform. The round included RoboStrategy, LocalGlobe, Vine Ventures and XTX Ventures, among others. Maven will use the proceeds to scale deployments and advance its system as it moves beyond palletizing and tote handling into broader industrial tasks. The company cited U.S. labor shortages expected to worsen as demand grows. It says its platform combines hardware, software and AI across robot, fleet and factory levels, and connects deployment data through a Maven network designed to share learning across systems. It targets industrial applications requiring reliable performance over multiple shifts. CEO Hamza Derbas, who...

Lightwheel and Peritas AI announced they have formed a strategic partnership to bring robots into perioperative healthcare workflows by combining infrastructure and orchestration technologies to enable deployment in clinical environments. According to the companies, the collaboration will integrate Peritas AI’s orchestration platform with Lightwheel’s physical AI infrastructure, allowing robotic systems to be trained, validated and operated within real-world hospital workflows. The companies said the multi-phase initiative, valued at about $56 million, could support deployment of up to 200 humanoid robots across 2026 and 2027. The companies noted healthcare operations, particularly in perioperative settings, remain highly fragmented, spanning sterile processing, operating rooms, logistics and equipment coordination across disconnected systems. The partnership is designed to address those gaps by enabling continuous, real-time...

Samsung is accelerating development of a humanoid robot prototype with the goal of an unveiling at the CES 2027 consumer electronics show in Las Vegas. The robotics project is being led by the company’s RX (Robotics eXperience) business group, which reports directly to co-CEO Roh Tae-moon, who also heads the Device eXperience (DX) division. In a rare organisational move, both the hardware development team and the AI software team within the RX group are being overseen by a single executive – Yoon Jang-hyun, president and chief technology officer of the DX division. Industry insiders said the decision to unify leadership of the robot’s “brain” (AI software) and “body” (hardware) from the earliest development stage is aimed at compressing the development...

Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, predicted on Tuesday that artificial intelligence could expand the global economy by 20% to 30%, generating up to $30 trillion in annual economic output, while forecasting that at least 1 billion humanoid robots would emerge within the next decade. “The productivity gains from AI are already evident, and robotics will take that to a completely new level,” Musk said via video link at the G20 summit in Asheville, North Carolina. “To put this in perspective, I think AI could increase the size of the global economy by 20% to 30% – that’s a rough estimate – which means roughly $20 trillion to $30 trillion per year in additional output”. Musk expressed his...

Lyte, a U.S.-based physical AI perception infrastructure startup, has raised $165 million in a Series C funding round, valuing the company at $1.6 billion post-money, the company said. The round was led by Maverick Silicon, with participation from existing investors including Fidelity Management & Research, Atreides Management, Key1 Capital, and Ora Global. Proceeds will be used to boost sensor chip production, scale its LyteVision integrated perception platform, and expand its workforce. Founded in 2021, Lyte emerged from stealth in January this year and had previously raised approximately $107 million. The company develops chips, multimodal sensors, and spatial perception software to help robots navigate environments more safely. Its flagship unified spatial intelligence platform, LyteGalaxy, integrates sensors, compute, software, and algorithms into...

Humanoid robotics company Figure has signed a multi-year strategic partnership with Nscale, a UK-based AI cloud infrastructure provider, to deploy up to 100,000 GPUs on the NVIDIA Vera Rubin platform. The initial compute commitment is valued at $3.5 billion, with both parties intending to scale the deal to over $6 billion. First deployment is targeted for the second half of 2027 at Nscale’s data center in Barstow, Texas. As part of the agreement, Nscale will also make a strategic equity investment in Figure and become its preferred compute provider. The two companies will explore using humanoid robots to expand Nscale’s own supply chain operations. Nscale, which counts NVIDIA as an investor following its participation in the firm’s Pre-Series C SAFE...

Fei-Fei Li’s startup World Labs has released Atlas, a next-generation world model billed as the first multimodal system capable of pixel-level camera-controllable image and video generation paired with native 3D scene reconstruction. Trained from scratch on text, image, video and 3D data, the so-called “omni model” unifies four distinct modalities within a single unified architecture. Its flagship innovation, termed “spatial context”, grounds each input image in a precise 3D coordinate space with explicit camera pose parameters. By treating geometric camera controls as native inputs, Atlas eliminates reliance on textual prompts to describe camera motion, letting users specify exact viewing angles and trajectories to generate up to 1440p-resolution videos with a maximum one-minute duration. World Labs frames the upgrade as letting...