Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. Austin-based humanoid startup Apptronik — born from a UT lab that once built robots for NASA — just stretched its Series A to a staggering $935M at a valuation north of $5B.

Now the question is whether its flagship humanoid Apollo, purpose-built for factories and warehouses and forged in partnership with DeepMind, can make "embodied AI" more than a buzzword — and do it faster than Figure and Tesla.

In today’s robotics rundown:

• Apptronik’s Series A hits $935M

• Alibaba’s robot brain tops Google

• This startup weaves a robot hand like rope

• Nvidia’s new world model for robots

• Quick hits on other robotics news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

APPTRONIK

🦄 Apptronik’s Series A hits $935M

Image source: Apptronik

The Rundown: Austin-based humanoid startup Apptronik stretched its Series A to a staggering $935M, pushing the University of Texas spinout to a roughly $5.5B post-money valuation — about triple where it stood a year ago.

The details:

• The company says it wasn't actively fundraising, just fielding inbound interest it couldn't turn down; backers include Google, Mercedes-Benz, and B Capital.

• CEO Jeff Cardenas said the company will use the funding to expand its Austin office, open a new location in California, and scale production of its robots.

• Apptronik’s Apollo is being developed for work in logistics and manufacturing, including pilots with Google DeepMind, Mercedes-Benz, and GXO.

• The company traces its lineage to UT’s Human Centered Robotics Lab and NASA’s Valkyrie program, with a decade-plus of experience in bipedal robotics.

Why it matters: Part of the excitement around Apptronik is its work with Google DeepMind and Mercedes-Benz on embodied AI — robots that perceive messy environments and act on reasoning. With rival Figure AI near $3B raised, Apptronik’s $935M buys it runway, but humanoids remain an extremely expensive business.

ALIBABA

🧠 Alibaba’s robot brain tops Google

Image source: Alibaba

The Rundown: Alibaba just released RynnBrain, an open-source “physical AI” model designed to power robots with better real‑world perception and planning, putting it in direct competition with Google and Nvidia in embodied AI.

The details:

• RynnBrain is trained on Alibaba’s Qwen3‑VL vision-language system, letting robots map objects, predict trajectories, and navigate cluttered spaces.

• The model targets a key weakness in current robotics stacks — poor spatial and temporal memory — by letting robots remember where items are.

• Alibaba says RynnBrain hits performance on 16 embodied-AI benchmarks and outperforms Google’s Gemini Robotics‑ER 1.5 and Nvidia’s Cosmos‑Reason2.

• Multiple versions, starting around 2B parameters, are already live on Hugging Face and GitHub for developers to drop into their own hardware.

Why it matters: RynnBrain is Alibaba’s bid to own the brains of China’s next generation of robots, not just sell the cloud around them. By open-sourcing a model that it claims beats Google and Nvidia on key benchmarks, Alibaba is angling to make its stack the default toolkit for anyone building bots that need to work in the real world.

ALLONIC

👉🏽 This startup weaves a robot hand like rope 

Image source: Allonic

The Rundown: Budapest-based robotics startup Allonic raised a record $7.2M pre-seed round to industrialize its “3D tissue braiding” process, which weaves biomimetic robot parts in minutes instead of from hundreds of rigid parts.

The details:

• The company’s platform “grows” robot bodies by braiding soft, load-bearing tendons and joints around a 3D-printed skeleton in a single automated process.

• This assembly-free approach aims to cut production of robot fingers, grippers, and arms to just a few minutes, while enabling more natural, biomimetic motion.

• More than a dozen investors from OpenAI, Hugging Face, ETH Zurich, and Northwestern University backed the round — Hungary’s biggest-ever pre-seed.

• Allonic envisions its platform as a customizable infrastructure for robot makers, with plans to scale from hands to full bodies across form factors.

Why it matters: Allonic is chasing the same lifelike hand space as Clone, but rather than engineering novel artificial muscles, it's using automated 3D braiding to grow the entire hand around a scaffold in one pass. If it scales, Allonic stops being just another hand startup and becomes the shared body shop everyone else plugs into.

NVIDIA

📽️ Nvidia’s new world model for robots

Image source: DreamDojo Github

The Rundown: A team of researchers led by Nvidia unveiled DreamDojo, a generalist robot world model trained on 44K hours of POV human video, aimed at teaching robots real‑world skills largely in simulation.

The details:

• The model learns how the physical world works by predicting future frames and actions, capturing dynamics like contact, friction, and object motion.

• Once this pre-learning is done, engineers only need a small amount of real robot data to teach specific arms and mobile robots how to perform tasks.

• DreamDojo was developed by a joint team from Nvidia and multiple academic labs, including UC Berkeley, Stanford, and the University of Texas at Austin.

• The research, detailed in an arXiv paper, reflects Nvidia’s push to become core infrastructure for the emerging robot “app store” ecosystem.

Why it matters: DreamDojo’s edge is a single physics model trained on massive first‑person human video that can be lightly fine‑tuned to many robots. It puts more weight on egocentric, contact‑rich video pretraining than Nvidia’s synthetic‑heavy GR00T‑Dreams and rivals like Gemini Robotics and Helix.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in robotics today

Waymo started testing fully driverless robotaxis on public streets in Nashville, paving the way for a commercial robotaxi service in the city later this year.

San Francisco robotics startup Weave Robotics opened orders for its $7,500 laundry-folding robot, Isaac 0, to Bay Area residents, with deliveries starting this month.

Mexico is deploying robot dogs to scout dangerous areas and stream live video to police as part of its security plan for the 2026 World Cup matches in Monterrey.

Gather AI, which makes AI‑powered warehouse drones that autonomously scan inventory, raised a $40M round led by former Salesforce co-CEO Keith Block’s VC firm.

China’s Agibot staged “Agibot Night 2026” in Shanghai, a 60‑minute gala billed as the world’s first large live show performed entirely by humanoids.

France’s ITER fusion project brought in a 13-foot-tall industrial robot nicknamed “Godzilla,” considered the most powerful industrial bot of its kind.

A YouTuber built and trained a laundry‑folding robot in just 24 hours, showing the low-cost bot folding towels after a single day of rapid prototyping and model training.

Boston Dynamics CEO Robert Playter is stepping down after more than 30 years at the company, with CFO Amanda McMaster taking over as interim chief.

Waymo says its robotaxis sometimes call human “response agents” in the Philippines for guidance in unusual situations, but those workers never directly drive the cars.

China launched the Ultimate Robot Knockout Legend in Shenzhen, a “world’s first” humanoid combat league using EngineAI’s T800 robots.

An Amazon Prime Air MK30 delivery drone crashed into the side of an apartment building in Richardson, Texas, sending up smoke but causing no injuries.

Australian aerospace engineer Benjamin Biggs pushed the latest version of his custom “BlackBird” quadcopter to a record-breaking top speed of 411 mph (661 km/h).

Corvus Robotics launched Corvus One for Cold Chain, an autonomous drone system that conducts continuous inventory scans in industrial freezers down to -20°F.

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See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — The Rundown’s editorial team