A Red Bull engineer got bored with Formula One. His robotics startup just raised $55 million. - Business Insider
Subscribe Newsletters You're currently following this topic! Want to unfollow? Unsubscribe via the link in your email. The latest news and analysis on robotics, from humanoid AI to real-world automation.
Key takeaways
- The most recent headlines show a rapid expansion of humanoid robots across industry, consumer markets, and healthcare.
- Chinese automaker BYD, now the world’s top EV seller, is leveraging its fleet of about 200 factory‑floor robots to develop new humanoids for production lines, dealerships and, eventually, homes, with a goal of placing three units in every household.
- XPeng unveiled its next‑generation IRON robot, a 5‑foot‑8‑inch machine that combines 82 degrees of freedom with an electronic‑skin‑covered, bionic spine and a 3‑D curved facial display for lifelike expressions.
- Unitree continues to dominate volume shipments, reporting roughly 10,000 humanoids sold to date, including 5,500 in 2025, as it prepares for a Shanghai IPO.
- In the consumer space, San Francisco startup Weave Robotics began delivering its wheeled Isaac 1 home robot, priced at $7,999, to perform chores such as laundry folding and bed‑making.
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You're currently following this topic! Want to unfollow? Unsubscribe via the link in your email.
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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