🦾 HardTech Reads: Robotics & Physical AI Awards — Apply‼️
A special announcement for the HardTech community!
Mid-week post?! Yes, I couldn’t wait to tell you about Nebius’ Robotics & Physical AI Awards! 🤩
As you all know, I’m a huge enthusiast of physical AI and have massive respect for the founders, engineers, and researchers building in this space.
It’s one thing to create intelligence in the digital world, but it’s another challenge entirely to make it see, touch, and interact with our physical reality. That’s why I’m so excited to support this initiative and encourage every single one of you to participate.
Nebius, a leader in AI infrastructure, has just launched this global awards program to celebrate the most innovative startups and scale-ups at the frontier of robotics and physical AI. This isn’t just another awards program; it’s a mission to spotlight the transformative technologies that are redefining how we automate and interact with the world around us.
⏰ Save the Date! The winners will be announced at the Nebius Robotics and Physical AI Summit & Awards Ceremony at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, on December 9, 2025.
The Awards: Categories & Prizes
The program will recognize winners and runners-up across five crucial categories:
➡️ Foundation Models, Robot Brains, and Runtime: For teams building the core intelligence and operating systems for next-gen autonomous systems.
➡️ Data Engines, Synthetic Data, and Simulation: Recognizing the critical work in creating data platforms, synthetic tools, and digital twins for training and validation.
➡️ Industrial Robotics Deployment and Transformation: For large-scale, real-world deployments in sectors like manufacturing, logistics, and healthcare that show measurable ROI.
➡️ Vision AI and Streaming Video Analytics: Highlighting AI systems for video analytics in smart cities, industrial monitoring, and safety.
➡️ Platforms for Benchmarking, Visualization, and Evaluation: For the essential tools and frameworks that ensure testing, compliance, and shared standards.
🏆 The prizes are designed to fuel real progress. Grand prize winners in each category will receive $100,000 in high-performance AI compute credits from Nebius AI Cloud, accelerated by NVIDIA infrastructure!
🏆 On top of that, winners get global recognition and introductions to top investors and industry leaders.
Meet the Judges
The panel of judges features a distinguished group of leaders from Nebius, NVIDIA, and other top global technology companies and academic institutions. This means your work will be seen by people who truly understand the depth of your technical innovation and market potential.
How to Apply
Applications are open now and will close on October 20, 2025.
If you are building something that pushes the boundaries of AI in the physical world and fit in into the below criteria (but don’t overthink it! If you are reading this, you most probably do!) this is your call to action!
APPLY FOR THE AWARDS
Let’s show the world what the HardTech Reads community is made of. I can’t wait to see your submissions!
🤝 Passionate about HardTech?
Have comments, want to share some thoughts or ask about sponsorships? Send me a note!
