2025: Another Year Of Humanoid Hype

A central challenge is safety: whether humanoid robots are reliable enough to operate in close proximity to humans. At this year’s World Humanoid Robot Games, a Chinese-made Unitree robot lost control and collided with a person, knocking him over. Last month, Figure’s former head of safety systems sued the company for wrongful termination, alleging he was fired after raising serious safety concerns with management. Those concerns included an incident in which a robot malfunctioned, narrowly Market estimates are escalating rapidly: last year, Goldman Sachs said the humanoid robot market could reach $38 billion by 2025; this year, Morgan Stanley raised the bar when they said the humanoid market would reach $5 trillion by 2050. These astronomical figures are catnip for venture capitalists, who are taught to invest in companies that can scale broadly. Since the promise of humanoids is to do anything a human can do, they are a vast market opportunity. Robotics in Silicon Valley has long played second fiddle to software. But the sector heated up this year as investors—buoyed by generative AI’s success—turned to humanoid robotics as the next frontier. In the third quarter of 2025, venture capitalists wrote more checks for industrial humanoid robots than for any other sector, including AI coding startups and large language model developers, according to CB Insights.