A Red Bull engineer got bored with Formula One. His robotics startup just raised $55 million. - Business Insider
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Key takeaways
- The most recent headlines show a rapid surge of activity across the global humanoid‑robot market.
- On July 22, 2026 a UK‑based company called Humanoid announced a $152 million Series A round that lifted its post‑money valuation to $1.35 billion, making it Europe’s first pure‑play humanoid‑robotics unicorn; the funding will accelerate development of its next‑generation wheel‑based humanoid platform, begin mass manufacturing, and expand deployments in logistics, manufacturing and retail, with a beta roll‑out slated for Q4 2026 and a landmark commercial deal with Schaeffler for thousands of units.
- In the United States, Agility Robotics, the maker of the bipedal Digit robot, opened a 60,000‑square‑foot “robot school” in Fremont and reiterated that it will avoid the talent‑bidding wars that dominate the AI sector, focusing instead on sustainable growth and continued commercial use of Digit across more than 65,000 hours of work.
- Meanwhile, Generative Bionics debuted its Gene.01 humanoid at AMD Advancing AI 2026, highlighting full‑body tactile sensing and physics‑native AI that allow the robot to interpret physical interactions more naturally, backed by a €70 million funding round raised in late 2025.
- At the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, AGIBOT unveiled the A3 Ultra, a 1.74 m, 60 kg full‑size humanoid with 51 active degrees of freedom, 8 hours of operation, and a multimodal perception suite including lidar, RGB‑D and UWB positioning for public‑facing and service roles.
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The latest news and analysis on robotics, from humanoid AI to real-world automation.
The latest news and analysis on robotics, from humanoid AI to real-world automation.
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A Red Bull engineer got bored with Formula One. His robotics startup just raised $55 million. Rya is a senior reporter at Business Insider covering physical AI and robotics. She writes about factory automation, humanoid robots, and the race to collect the real-world data needed to bring AI into the physical world. She previously worked at The San Francisco Standard, where she reported on tech culture and autonomous vehicles. She has a bachelor’s degree in history and politics from Pomona College and a master’s in history from the University of Cambridge. Rya lives in San Francisco. Contact her at rjetha@businessinsider.com or on Signal at rjetha.07. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device.Here's our guide to sharing information securely.
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HOME Subscribe shift is microagi's answer to one of robotics' biggest bottlenecks. Large language models were trained on vast amounts of text and images from the internet, but no comparable trove exists for robots. UC Berkeley roboticist Ken Goldberg has called this the "100,000-year data gap," referring to the disparity between the training data available to robots and chatbots.
shift competes with companies including Scale AI, Turing, and micro1, which also pay people to record themselves performing tasks that robots may eventually do.
Chasing a ChatGPT moment
Kilic said microagi will use the new funding to pay for the computing power needed to train robotics models, expand shift's data collection network, and grow its US presence from New York.
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