This Week's Good ReadsBloomberg — Robotics Startup Physical Intelligence Valued at $5.6 Billion in New Funding

‍Bloomberg covers how Physical Intelligence, a San Francisco robotics-AI startup building general-purpose “brains” for embodied robots, has raised $600 million at a $5.6 billion valuation to scale real-world data collection and reinforcement-learning models that can power many types of robots across messy, human environments. Read the funding story.

‍New York Magazine Intelligencer — The Droids Taking Over One of England’s Strangest Towns

Novelist Joanna Kavenna visits Milton Keynes, where thousands of Starship delivery robots quietly trundle along garden fences and boulevards, using the city as a living lab to explore how cute, AI-enabled delivery bots change the feel of public space, local routines, and our sense of what it means to share streets with machines. Read the essay.

This Bloomberg piece looks at Spot, Boston Dynamics’ four-legged robot, as it becomes standard equipment for dozens of bomb squads and SWAT teams across the US and Canada, dispatched to armed standoffs, hostage rescues, and hazmat incidents while civil-liberties groups warn about the normalization of militarized, high-surveillance policing. Watch the video and read the report.

Robotics Companies Funding

• Parallax Worlds – $4 M, Seed round (20 Nov 2025), led by Pear VC (Tracxn). San Francisco–based platform that turns simple iPhone walkthroughs of factories into hyper-realistic 3D digital twins to stress-test industrial robots before they hit the factory floor.
• Buildroid.ai – $2 M, Pre-seed round (Nov 2025), led by Draper Associates (Tim Draper) (PitchBook). Construction-robot orchestration stack that converts BIM models into simulated workflows and then coordinates multi-robot “crews” (block-laying and mobile robots) for non-load-bearing walls on UAE projects.
• Sunday – $35 M, Early-stage (undisclosed) round (19 Nov 2025), led by Benchmark with participation from Conviction (publicly disclosed; additional investors not yet announced) (Crunchbase). Mountain View startup behind Memo, a wheeled two-armed home robot trained on ~10M real household episodes via the company’s Skill Capture Glove to handle chores like dishes, laundry and espresso pulls.
• Robot Era – ≈¥1 B (≈$140 M), Series A+ round (Nov 2025), led by Geely Capital. Beijing/Tsinghua spin-out pairing its ERA-42 AI “brain” with humanoids such as L7 and STAR1, with 200+ robots shipped and major customers including Lenovo, Haier, Geely, SF Express, Renault and TCL.
• Flexion – $50 M, Series A round (Nov 2025), led by DST Global Partners (PitchBook). Zurich-based “brain for humanoids” providing a language-driven command layer, vision-language-action models and transformer-based whole-body control for hardware-agnostic humanoid deployments in industrial settings.
• Physical Intelligence – $600 M, Late-stage growth round (20 Nov 2025), led by CapitalG (PitchBook). San Francisco “robot brain” startup building foundation models and multi-task policies for real-world robots, bringing total capital to roughly $1B with backing from investors including Jeff Bezos, Lux Capital, Thrive Capital, Index Ventures and T. Rowe Price.
• RapidSOS – $100 M, Growth round (19 Nov 2025), led by Apax Digital Funds (Tracxn). New York intelligent-safety platform linking rich data from 600M+ devices into 22,000+ emergency agencies to power AI-assisted 911 dispatch and nationwide emergency response.
• PicoJool – $12 M, Seed round (18 Nov 2025), led by Playground Global (PitchBook). Palo Alto optical-connectivity startup developing pixel-level photonics and VCSEL-based parallel optics to deliver high-bandwidth, copper-like-cost links for 800G/1.6T AI data-center interconnects.
• Distalmotion – $150 M, Series G round (17 Nov 2025), led by Revival Healthcare Capital (PitchBook). Swiss medtech company behind the DEXTER robotic-surgery system, targeting outpatient and ASC settings with a compact, mobile platform and “on-demand” robotic workflow.

Robotics News

• A Chinese humanoid robot walked 66 miles in 3 days, right into the Guinness World Records — Shanghai-based robot maker AgiBot’s A2 humanoid walked 66 miles over three days from Suzhou to Shanghai’s Bund, navigating varied road and city surfaces while obeying traffic rules to set a Guinness World Record for the longest distance ever walked by a humanoid robot, underscoring China’s push to lead in physical AI and service robotics. CBS News
• Disney Research Unveils Aquatic Robotics, Possibly Sea Creatures for New Avatar Land — Disney Imagineers showcased several autonomous aquatic robot prototypes inspired by creatures from Avatar, including Ilu-like underwater “planes,” a dolphin-like swimmer, and a GPS-guided hydrofloat platform that could bring lifelike robotic sea animals to a future water-based Avatar land at Disney California Adventure. WDW News Today
• Kraken Robotics Reports Record Q3 2025 Financial Results — Marine robotics firm Kraken posted 60% year-over-year revenue growth driven by record sales of subsea batteries, synthetic aperture sonar systems, and subsea LiDAR services, reflecting rising global demand for uncrewed underwater vehicles in defense and offshore energy markets. GlobeNewswire
• Nokia Plans to Expand U.S. Investment by $4 Billion in R&D and Manufacturing for AI-Ready Network Connectivity — Nokia announced a multi-year $4 billion expansion of its U.S. R&D and manufacturing footprint to build AI-optimized mobile, fixed, optical, and data center networks, strengthening the infrastructure that underpins advanced automation, edge AI, and connected robotic systems. Nokia Newsroom
• Figure Humanoid Robot Hand Showed Skull-Cracking Force in Trials, Whistleblower Warns — A whistleblower lawsuit alleges Figure AI fired its former head of product safety after he warned that the company’s humanoid robots were powerful enough to fracture a human skull, citing an incident where a malfunctioning robot allegedly gashed a steel refrigerator door, intensifying scrutiny on physical safety in next-gen humanoid robotics. Interesting Engineering
• Xiaomi Open-Sources AI Model Spanning Autonomous Driving and Robotics — Xiaomi released MiMo-Embodied, an open-source vision-language foundation model that jointly tackles autonomous driving and embodied AI tasks, claiming state-of-the-art performance in planning, perception, and spatial understanding for both vehicles and robots as it deepens investment in EVs, quadruped robot dogs, and humanoid platforms. South China Morning Post
• WeRide’s Robotaxi Receives Driverless Permit in Switzerland; Autonomous Vehicles Now Licensed in 8 Countries — WeRide secured a driverless permit from Switzerland’s Federal Roads Office for robotaxi operations in the Furttal region near Zurich, the first passenger-carrying driverless robotaxi approval in the country and a milestone that gives the company autonomous permits across eight global markets. WeRide (Investor Relations)
• Waymo Gets Permission to Expand Robotaxi Service to East Bay, North Bay, Sacramento — California regulators granted Waymo approval to extend its driverless robotaxi operations beyond its core Bay Area zones into the East Bay, North Bay, and Sacramento, paving the way for a much larger contiguous service area powered by its autonomous driving stack. The Mercury News
• Google DeepMind Hires Former CTO of Boston Dynamics as the Company Pushes Deeper Into Robotics — Google DeepMind recruited former Boston Dynamics CTO Aaron Saunders as VP of hardware engineering, as CEO Demis Hassabis outlines a strategy to turn the Gemini AI model into a kind of “Android for robots,” capable of controlling humanoids and other robot forms out of the box. WIRED
• Waymo Is Bringing Fully Autonomous Driving to Five More Cities — Building on millions of driverless miles, Waymo is removing in-car safety drivers in pilot programs across Miami, Orlando, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio, a key step toward opening fully autonomous robotaxi services to the public in those cities next year. Fast Company
• China Telecom, ZTE and DeepRobotics Unveil Revolutionary 5G+ Quadruped Robot for Intelligent Emergency Response — China Telecom, ZTE, and DeepRobotics introduced a 5G-connected quadruped rescue robot equipped with panoramic cameras, thermal imaging, and gas sensors, designed to traverse rubble and hazardous environments so it can stream real-time data from disaster zones and reduce risk for human first responders. The Register

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