Newsletter #73

This Week's Good Reads

Humanoid Analytics - 19,100 Humanoid Robots Shipped in Six Months. Where Are They Working? - Global humanoid shipments rose 272% year over year in the first half of 2026, but vendor disclosures show that shipment totals still blur research, rentals, demonstrations, and productive industrial work; named customers, operating hours, task success, and repeat deployments are the more useful adoption metrics. Humanoid Analytics
Hugging Face - Physical AI Is Entering the Systems Phase - Physical AI is becoming a systems-integration contest spanning perception, world models, control, safety, telemetry, manufacturing, and service, while the strongest long-term advantage may come from deployment data loops that make fleets safer and more capable over time. Hugging Face
MIT News - Personalized physical therapy: Stroke rehabilitation powered by AI - MIT engineers combined diffusion models with real-time force feedback so a dual-arm therapy robot can learn contact-rich assistance from physical therapists and adapt it to each patient's effort, with therapist-specific models now being developed through an ongoing clinical study. MIT News
MIT News - AI agents create virtual playgrounds to help robots get crucial training data - SceneSmith uses collaborating vision-language-model agents to generate more than 1,300 physics-ready indoor environments for robot training and evaluation, producing denser scenes than prior systems while helping identify faulty robot policies before costly real-world tests. MIT News

Robotics and AI Companies Funding

Pre-seed / Seed

Clementine - EUR 1.7M, Seed round led by Healthy.Capital. Clementine builds an AI hearing-care agent that answers patient questions, provides hearing-care education, and converts conversations into clinic bookings.
Sharpi - $4M, Seed round led by NXTP and ONEVC, with Clocktower Ventures and MAYA CAPITAL. Sharpi automates B2B sales on WhatsApp by turning text, audio, images, and files into ERP-ready orders, product suggestions, and follow-ups.
S-transistors - EUR 2.6M, Pre-seed round led by Lifeline Ventures, with an undisclosed angel investor. S-transistors builds superconducting transistor circuits for compact, energy-efficient cryogenic signal control in scalable quantum computers.
Bevel - $6M, Seed round backed by SHAKTI, Resolute Ventures, and Bessemer Venture Partners. Bevel combines AI-native software with dedicated advisors to identify coverage gaps, match homeowners with carriers, and automate insurance risk analysis.
Verascient - $1.2M, Pre-seed round led by Founder Collective with Cambridge Enterprise, Andrena Ventures, Summit.Deals, Alan Knott-Craig, and Shayne Mann. Verascient builds a temporal knowledge graph that gives enterprise AI agents permissioned, provenance-aware context across company systems.
Multiplier (YC P26) - $6M, Seed round led by Lux Capital, with Y Combinator, GoAhead Ventures, Rebel Fund, General Advance, Unpopular Ventures, Amino Capital, Mercator Partners, and individual investors. Multiplier builds a firm-specific AI operating system that embeds shared agent infrastructure into asset managers' existing research, data, evaluation, security, and decision workflows.
Multiplier (YC P26) - $6M, Seed round led by Lux Capital with Y Combinator, GoAhead Ventures, Rebel Fund, General Advance, Unpopular Ventures, Amino Capital, Mercator Partners, and angel investors. Multiplier deploys firm-specific AI infrastructure that turns asset managers' proprietary research, workflows, and decision history into operating context for agents.
Riven Systems - $7.9M, Pre-seed round led by Cerberus Ventures with Scout Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Lightscape Partners, CLAI Ventures, and New System Ventures. Riven Systems combines autonomous laboratories, computational modeling, and process data to develop and scale separation chemistry for critical minerals.
Transfyr - $25M, Seed round led by General Catalyst with Lux Capital, Breakout Ventures, Factory, Neo, SV Angel, MVP Ventures, Underscore VC, Lyda Hill, and other angels. Transfyr develops integrated sensors and multimodal models that capture laboratory work as machine-readable data for reproducibility, technology transfer, and automation.
Gestala - RMB 420M, Angel+ round backed by HSG, Lens Technology Company Limited, Sinovation Ventures, C Capital, Dalton Venture, Seas Capital, Tsing Capital, and Gobi Partners. Gestala develops non-invasive ultrasound brain-computer interfaces and a multimodal brain foundation model for neurological and psychiatric conditions.
Motion1 - $2M, Pre-seed round led by Extantia, with Norrsken Evolve. Motion1 provides OEM-agnostic humanoid robot deployment, integration, financing, insurance, compliance, maintenance, and fleet management to European factories for a monthly fee.
Atorie - $9.5M, Seed round backed by a16z speedrun, Night Capital, and Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed. Atorie connects high-end factories directly with consumers and uses AI agents to forecast demand, identify material shortages, analyze trends, and personalize outfits.
Agentrys - $19.1M, Seed round led by Etna Labs. Agentrys builds an open agentic design automation platform that lets chip teams create, own, and improve AI agents inside existing EDA workflows.
Discernis - $2.5M, Seed round led by Newfund with Triple Impact Capital, Remarkable Ventures, and C2 Ventures. Discernis analyzes entire litigation document collections to connect evidence across millions of records while keeping privileged data inside secure client environments.
Arga Labs - $10M, Seed round led by General Catalyst, with BoxGroup, Emergence Capital, Gradient, and SV Angel. Arga Labs builds resettable digital twins of enterprise software so AI agents can practice complex workflows in realistic parallel environments.
Teragen Energy - $6M, Pre-seed round co-led by BEVC and ENERGY CAPITAL VENTURES with AP Ventures, AIC Ventures, Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, and UntroD Capital. Teragen Energy develops modular solid oxide fuel-cell systems that provide onsite power and optional energy storage for AI data centers and other frontier industries.
Oliver AI - Undisclosed, Pre-seed round backed by Menlo Ventures and Unusual Ventures. Oliver AI builds an analytical data platform that combines database performance, access policies, and agent observability for machine-generated workloads.
CoreOpto - CNY 100M (about $14.9M), Angel round from sole investor Qiming Venture Partners. CoreOpto develops optical interconnect products for AI computing clusters, beginning with near-packaged optics and progressing toward co-packaged optics and optical I/O.
Machineflows - Undisclosed, Seed round from LG Electronics and Bluepoint. Machineflows develops a logic-graph platform that lets teams preserve software architecture and coordinate multiple AI coding agents across enterprise projects.
ItoFlow - $2.5M, Pre-seed round led by Balderton Capital, with Barney Hussey-Yeo. ItoFlow turns investment mandates, risk limits, and review criteria into governed AI workflows for research, backtesting, and multi-asset portfolio monitoring.
Repodo - EUR 8.2M, Pre-seed round co-led by Hedosophia and Seed Capital. Repodo is building an AI-native authorized audit firm that automates data collection, reconciliations, documentation, and transaction analysis while licensed auditors retain final judgment.
Keenable.ai - $26M, Seed round led by Accel with Conviction. Keenable.ai builds web-scale search infrastructure and a live-source retrieval layer designed for repeated, machine-speed queries from AI agents.
OmicsBank - $2.25M, Seed round led by Redesign Health with Orbit Ventures. OmicsBank deploys hospital infrastructure that standardizes and de-identifies EHR, imaging, pathology, and multi-omics data for healthcare and AI research.
eComID - $17M, Seed round led by Systemiq Capital, with Regeneration.VC, Course Corrected, Stadium, CapitalT, and H&M Group. eComID provides retailers with a shared Shopping Passport for size, fit, taste, and behavior data that powers AI sizing, search, and personalized discovery.
Zenalyst.AI - INR 3 crore, Pre-seed round backed by SKIL Cabs Private Limited, GERP Technologies Private Limited, Anurag Jain, Manish Jeloka, Pratap Padode, Siddarth Razdan, and P H Corp. Zenalyst.AI builds agents that execute treasury, purchasing, and contract workflows across ERP, CRM, and banking systems.
Embedd.it - $2.7M, Pre-seed round led by Seedcamp with Cocoa, Connect Ventures, 2100 Ventures, Vesna Capital, u.ventures, Underline Ventures, Common Magic, and Roosh Ventures. Embedd.it converts chip documentation into structured hardware models and production-ready software for hardware and physical AI teams.

Series A

ABLE Labs - KRW 12.1B (about $8.7M), Series A round led by Innopolis Partners, with Industrial Bank of Korea, Capstone Partners, Horizon Investment, Magna Investment, Futureplay, and NAU IB Capital. ABLE Labs builds lab automation robots and self-driving laboratory infrastructure that automates repetitive processes and generates experimental data for AI training.
Digs - $25.3M, Series A round led solely by Builders FirstSource. Digs provides digital-twin technology and AI project workflows for homebuilders.
Metriport - $26M, Series A round led by Matrix with ARTIS and Y Combinator. Metriport builds open-source healthcare infrastructure that connects, standardizes, deduplicates, and enriches patient records into usable clinical context.
SiFly - $20M, Series A round led by Shield Capital with Qudit, BBK Capital, and Alumni Ventures. SiFly develops long-endurance electric aircraft and infrastructure for persistent multi-drone operations.
Deep Cogito - $43M, Series A round led by TQ Ventures with Benchmark, Nexus Venture Partners, Atreides Management, South Park Commons, and Zscaler. Deep Cogito provides a post-training platform that uses reinforcement learning and recursive self-improvement to help enterprises build specialized AI capabilities.
Lupin Dental - EUR 15M, Series A round led by Fynveur, with existing shareholders, new private investors, and a Bpifrance loan. Lupin Dental builds next-generation dental robotics designed to bring surgical robotics into dental care workflows.
OptQC Corp. - JPY 7.0 billion (about $47M), Series A2 round led by NTT with KDDI Corporation, Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, Global Brain Corporation, and SBI Investment. OptQC Corp. develops room-temperature photonic quantum computing hardware and is working toward a successor processor with roughly 10,000 qubits.
Ringg AI - $10M, Series A extension round from Peak XV Partners. Ringg AI builds voice and messaging agents that complete enterprise workflows across appointment booking, KYC, collections, support, and browser-based tasks.
Runable - $21M, Series A round co-led by Susquehanna Venture Capital and Nexus Venture Partners, with Together and Array Ventures. Runable builds an AI agent that creates and deploys websites, apps, and presentations, then extends into advertising, social media, SEO, and AI-search optimization.
Hike Medical - $22.5M, Seed and Series A financing led by Saga Ventures, with Indicator Ventures, Fifth Down Capital, RiverPark Ventures, Orthofeet, Sam Blond, and Jerod Mayo. Hike Medical combines AI agents, mobile clinical scanning, and in-house 3D printing to deliver custom medical devices from prescription through reimbursement and manufacturing.
Onos Health - $17M, Series A round led by Costanoa Ventures with Flare Capital Partners and CVS Health Ventures. Onos Health turns claims, utilization data, and unstructured clinical documentation into behavioral-health care-quality intelligence for health plans.
Airbound - $37M, Series A round led by Greenoaks, with DoorDash, Lachy Groom, Lightspeed, and Humba Ventures. Airbound builds autonomous aircraft designed to make small aerial deliveries cost-competitive with road freight by weighing less than their payloads.
Emerald AI - $150M, Series A round co-led by Energize Capital and DCVC with NVIDIA and other strategic and institutional investors. Emerald AI coordinates data-center computing workloads and onsite energy resources so electricity demand can shift when the grid is stressed.
Mundo AI (YC W25) - $20M, Series A round led by GreatPoint Ventures with Y Combinator, E12 Ventures, and Next Frontier Capital. Mundo AI builds multimodal datasets, evaluations, and applied research for natural speech, video understanding, and other forms of perceptual intelligence.
Newcode.ai - $13.5M, Series A round backed by Relativity, OnDean Forward, Antiportfolio Ventures, and The LegalTech Fund. Newcode.ai provides configurable, firm-owned infrastructure for legal agents, workflows, knowledge systems, and data.
Quintessent Inc. - $40M, Series A round led by Cycle Capital with Goldman Sachs, The Hina Group, Susquehanna International Group, InterVest, Safar Partners, Ciena, Foothill Ventures, M Ventures, Osage University Partners, and SIERRA Ventures. Quintessent develops quantum-dot laser and optical-engine technology for lower-cost, more reliable AI datacenter interconnects.

Series B

Faro - $37.3M, Series B round co-led by Merck Global Health Innovation Fund and S32 with General Catalyst, Northpond Ventures, Polaris Partners, PTX Capital, Zetta Venture Partners, and Ankona Capital. Faro structures scientific, medical, regulatory, and operational intent so software and AI agents can reason across clinical-development workflows.
Instinct - $250M, Series B round co-led by Index Ventures and Benchmark. Instinct builds a personal AI assistant that connects to users' apps and devices to carry out multi-step tasks through text or phone calls.
Breedr - $27M, Series B round led by Partech, with Latitude | Phoenix Court and Outsiders Fund. Breedr tracks cattle weight, health, and ancestry from birth to processing, then uses AI to improve sale timing through its livestock marketplace.
Arintra - Approximately $25M, Series B round led by Define Ventures with Yale New Haven Ventures, Endeavor Ventures, Y Combinator, TEN13, Counterpart Ventures, Spider Capital, and Peak XV Partners. Arintra combines large language models and clinical knowledge graphs to autonomously generate auditable medical codes and write them into health-system billing workflows.
Stability AI - $76M, Series B round backed by Electronic Arts, Sony Music Group, Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, AMD Ventures, Pacific Alliance Ventures, Coatue Management, Greycroft, Kadmos Capital, Sean Parker, and Eric Schmidt. Stability AI develops generative media models and professional creative-production tools built around licensed data and artist workflows.
Celera Semiconductor - $30M, Series B round fully funded by Maverick Silicon. Celera Semiconductor uses AI-driven design automation to create synthesizable and optimizable digital twins of analog chip functions.
Risk Ledger - GBP 24M, Series B round led by Axiom Equity, with Mercia Asset Management PLC. Risk Ledger provides a shared, continuously updated network for assessing and modeling third-, fourth-, and nth-party supply-chain cyber risk.
Standard Metrics - $20M, Series B round led by 8VC with Salesforce Ventures, Spark Capital, January Capital, First Trust Capital Partners, Socii Capital, Kindergarten Ventures, Calm Ventures, and Gaingels. Standard Metrics provides an AI-native operating layer for private-market portfolio reviews, valuations, LP reporting, and diligence.

Series C and beyond

Owner.com - $240M, Series D round led by Goldman Sachs with Meritech, Redpoint, Headline, and Jack Altman. Owner.com builds an AI-native operating platform that runs digital marketing, ordering, customer service, and commerce systems for local businesses.
wrtn technologies - KRW 100 billion (about $72.23M), Series C round backed by Coreline Ventures, Eugene Asset Management, Goodwater Capital, Antler, Woori Venture Partners US, and Korea Development Bank. wrtn technologies operates consumer AI services, including the OOC AI entertainment platform and the Crack AI character-chat platform.
Gatik - $200M, Series D round co-led by Qatar Investment Authority and Koch Disruptive Technologies with Millennium, ARK Investment Management LLC, Intact Private Capital, and Arca Continental. Gatik operates driverless commercial trucks on repeatable middle-mile routes between distribution centers and stores.
Cityblock Health - $116M, Series E round led by General Catalyst. Cityblock Health operates an AI-native care platform that predicts and ranks the next best actions for teams serving Medicare and Medicaid members.

Growth / Strategic / Other

Clipto.AI - $15M, Funding round backed by HSG, GL Ventures, EnvisionX Capital, Palm Drive Capital, Hans Tung, Lu Zhang, and 522 Ventures. Clipto.AI builds on-device AI that indexes video, audio, images, meetings, and documents for natural-language and agent-based retrieval.
Blue Voice Inc. - $6M, Funding round led by SignalFire and Las Olas Venture Capital. Blue Voice builds evidence-linked AI that helps police officers search department-specific laws, ordinances, and policies in the field.
Sharpa - Undisclosed, Funding round backed by Alibaba Group, Meituan, Tencent, JD.COM, Transsion, HSG, Qiming Venture Partners, Meituan DragonBall Capital, and Luminous Ventures. Sharpa builds dexterous robot hands, teleoperation systems, and a data platform for training robotic manipulation.
Wonik Robotics - KRW 350 billion, Growth equity from the National Growth Fund and private investors. Wonik Robotics develops dexterous robot hands and related components and is expanding production for humanoid and industrial robotics.
Zencore - Undisclosed, Strategic investment from Superstep Capital. Zencore is a Google Cloud consultancy that combines agentic AI with architecture, migration, and delivery expertise for enterprise software, data, and infrastructure operations.
Nevvon - Undisclosed, Strategic investment from BVP Forge. Nevvon provides mobile, multilingual training and portable compliance credentials for home-care and home-health workers.
Future Maintenance Technologies - Undisclosed, Late-stage institutional funding round led by QIC with Next Wave Partners and Taronga Group. Future Maintenance Technologies combines autonomous robots, AI, and predictive analytics to automate inspection and maintenance across rail, aviation, and industrial infrastructure.
PsiBot - More than US$100M, Funding round backed by TUOPU Group, a Chery Holdings-backed fund, Lens Technology Company Limited, 37Games, Wuhu Investment Holding Group, Fosun Capital, and existing shareholder Zhuhai Technology Industry Group. PsiBot develops embodied AI models and human-operation datasets for dexterous robots used in logistics and advanced manufacturing.
Cyclic Materials - $75M, Strategic growth financing led by accounts advised by T. Rowe Price, with ERI, Energy Impact Partners, Microsoft, Amazon, BMW i Ventures, JLR, and Hitachi Ventures. Cyclic Materials recovers rare earths from end-of-life products and manufacturing scrap, then converts them into high-purity oxides for permanent magnets.
Laser Light Holdings, Ltd. - Up to $75M, Investment commitment from Keystone Optical Network. Laser Light is building a carrier-neutral optical fabric that combines terrestrial fiber, subsea systems, future satellite links, and intelligent orchestration for AI-era data transport.
InfiMaker - Tens of millions of U.S. dollars, Funding round from IDG Capital. InfiMaker builds desktop five-axis CNC systems and software that shorten the path from digital designs to finished parts.
Lambda - $1B, Private debt arranged by JPMorganChase. Lambda operates an AI cloud that finances and deploys Nvidia GPU infrastructure against contracted customer workloads.
Socure - Undisclosed, Strategic growth investment led by Summit Partners with Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Docusign, and others. Socure provides identity, fraud, and compliance technology that combines a proprietary decision graph with agentic operations workflows.
fileAI - Undisclosed, Strategic investment from SMBC Asia Rising Fund and Singtel Innov8. fileAI builds governed enterprise AI workflows that map, capture, validate, match, and reconcile data from unstructured files into core systems.
Corvus Robotics - $20M, Funding round led by Catalyst Investors, with S2G Investments, Spero Ventures, f7 Ventures, and Cibus Capital. Corvus Robotics builds autonomous systems that capture and analyze inventory data inside operating warehouses without localization infrastructure.
Legato Audio, Inc. - $12M, Funding round backed by Neotribe Ventures, Listen Ventures, and Village Global. Legato Audio develops ordinary-looking eyewear with embedded hearing assistance and AI-powered voice separation.
Nauta - Undisclosed, Strategic investment led by BMW i Ventures, Bosch Ventures, Hitachi Ventures, and Yamaha Motor Ventures with Construct Capital and Predictive. Nauta unifies supply-chain data into a live operational model and deploys purpose-built AI agents across inventory, logistics, and procurement.
Generalist - Around $200M, Funding round led by 8VC. Generalist develops embodied foundation models designed to transfer robot intelligence across arms, humanoids, and other machines.
Alice (Formerly ActiveFence) - $140M, Funding round led by Apax Digital. Alice builds an AI security platform that continuously tests, defends, and monitors models using a dataset of real-world adversarial techniques.
Nourish Care - Undisclosed, Strategic growth investment from Hg, with Livingbridge retaining a minority stake. Nourish Care builds social-care software that helps residential, home, and community care teams plan, record, and coordinate support while AI reduces administrative work.
XPENG Robotics - Over US$900M, First funding round led by IDG Capital with Gaorong Ventures, Tencent, and Alibaba Group. XPENG Robotics develops vertically integrated humanoid robots using proprietary chips, controllers, actuators, dexterous hands, and physical AI models.

Robotics and AI News

TechCrunch - Robot brain builders are pushing out of their GPT-2 era - Physical AI teams still face a shortage of diverse, high-quality training data and commercially reliable end-to-end learning; focused deployments create revenue and real-world data today, while general robot intelligence will require better simulation, compute, and shared model-building infrastructure. TechCrunch
36Kr Europe - How far have we come with humanoid robots taking up factory jobs? - China's leading humanoid deployments are beginning to prove daily operation in narrow factory tasks, but high success-rate requirements, short-lived dexterous hands, expensive actuators, and limited replication mean no vendor has yet demonstrated full commercial viability. 36Kr Europe
KrASIA - JD.com wants to build the infrastructure robots still lack - JD.com is extending its retail, supply-chain, repair, and data networks into shared robotics infrastructure, including battery standardization, 80 planned RoboBase facilities, and a target of 10 million hours of real-world scenario data to lower deployment and service costs across brands. KrASIA
Quartz - Anthropic is testing a new standard to let AI agents control robots and lab hardware - Anthropic's Model Hardware Standard gives agents a common driver layer for discovering and operating programmable equipment, with early laboratory trials accelerating workflows while also showing that physical failures and safety limits still require expert oversight. Quartz
AI Insider - Perceptron AI Launches Open-Weight Robotics Model Called Isaac 0.5 - Perceptron released a 36-billion-parameter embodied model trained on three trillion multimodal tokens, one million hours of general video, and 100,000 hours of robotics experience, alongside open weights and adaptation code; the company reports that scaled video training cut task-specific teleoperation needs roughly 210-fold. AI Insider
TechCrunch - Waymo robotaxis are headed to Munich - Waymo plans to map and test Munich with safety drivers before seeking fully driverless operations, targeting public commercial service toward the end of 2027 as it works through Germany's Level 4 regulatory process. TechCrunch
TechCrunch - Nvidia's $3.5B MediaTek bet reveals its plan for tackling Big Tech's AI chip buildout - Nvidia's $3.5 billion investment will let MediaTek build custom AI chips around NVLink Fusion, showing how Nvidia intends to remain the dominant rack-scale infrastructure layer even as hyperscalers and AI labs design their own accelerators. TechCrunch
TechCrunch - Open-weight AI companies are the Valley's hottest acquisition targets - Reported and completed multibillion-dollar deals around Hugging Face, Poolside, and OpenRouter show open-weight model distribution and inference infrastructure becoming strategic assets, even though enterprise adoption remains modest and concentrated in high-volume, configurable workloads. TechCrunch
TechCrunch - Hugging Face is selling a cute $399 open source duck robot, Microduck - Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics launched a 25-centimeter, $399 open-source robot whose behaviors can be trained in simulation and deployed through a public reinforcement-learning stack, lowering the cost of physical-AI experimentation while leaving application-level privacy safeguards to developers. TechCrunch

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