🦾 HardTech Reads: The AI & Robotics Revolution vol.50

Welcome to the exploration of the world where founders embark on bold quests and solve non-obvious problems🤘

Paulina Szyzdek / HardTech VC

Oct 05, 2025

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🚀 HARDTECH NEWS: Robotics & AI Innovations

What’s in today?

🤖 Kepler’s mass-produced humanoids, 🧲 Chinese scientists’ record magnetic field, 🤖 IBM’s Granite 4.0 & quantum trading, 🤖 Meta’s humanoid software pivot, 🤖 Figure’s $1B Series C, ⚛️ Pacific Fusion’s NM campus, 🏭 IperionX’s titanium expansion, ☁️ Modal Labs’ unicorn status, 🔬 Europe’s self-driving labs, 🛰️ ClearSpace’s debris cleanup, 🚚 Einride’s autonomous trucks, 🤖 ANYbotics’ inspection robots, 🤖 Periodic Labs’ AI scientists, 💎 imec’s sub-2nm breakthrough, 💎 Element Six’s diamond manufacturing

🏭Project DIAMOnD Launches Revolutionary Peer-to-Peer 3D Printing Network

Automation Alley and Oakland County have launched the nation’s largest distributed 3D printing marketplace, allowing companies to submit manufacturing jobs that get collaboratively fulfilled by small manufacturers across Michigan. The secure platform protects intellectual property while distributing orders and payments across the entire network of participating manufacturers.
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💎Google Unveils Gemini Robotics 1.5: AI Agents Enter Physical World

Google’s newest vision-language-action (VLA) model transforms visual information and instructions into robot motor commands, thinking before acting and showing its reasoning process. The system learns across different robot embodiments and can reason about the physical world while creating detailed multi-step plans to complete missions.

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🤖 Kepler Robotics Begins Mass Production of Humanoids

Shanghai-based Kepler Robotics has officially entered mass production of its K2 “Bumblebee” humanoid, marking the first commercially available hybrid-architecture humanoid robot to reach the market.

The K2 stands out for its hybrid serial-parallel design, which combines planetary roller screw linear actuators with rotary motors. This setup provides smoother motion, longer durability, and the ability to handle heavier loads than the quasi-direct-drive designs used by most rivals. With a dual-arm payload of 30 kg and up to 81.3% energy efficiency, the K2 can work eight hours on a single charge.

Its straight-knee gait makes it adept at navigating complex industrial environments like warehouses and production floors. Onboard intelligence supports sorting, assembly, and other multi-step tasks, while its RMB 248,000 price tag (~$34,000) breaks through the million-yuan threshold that has kept earlier humanoid prototypes out of reach.

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🤖 Meta Pivots to Become the Android of Humanoid Robotics

Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth revealed the company wants to become the “backbone” of humanoid robots by licensing software instead of manufacturing hardware. Meta’s new Superintelligence AI lab is building “world models” for dexterous robot movements, positioning robotics as their next “AR-sized” bet after $100B invested in VR/AR. This strategy aims to create a standardized software platform for the emerging humanoid robotics industry, similar to how Android dominates the mobile OS market.

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⚛️ Pacific Fusion Plants Its Flag in New Mexico for Magnetic Fusion Revolution

Pacific Fusion announced a major R&D and manufacturing campus in New Mexico dedicated to pulsed magnetic fusion systems, targeting net energy gain by 2030 and commercial deployment in the mid-2030s. The company claims its approach will deliver 100× performance improvement at lower cost compared to traditional fusion methods, marking a significant bet on alternative fusion pathways beyond tokamaks.

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⛓️AI Revolutionizes Supply Chain Management at Scale

Starbucks partnered with NomadGo to deploy computer vision and 3D spatial intelligence across thousands of coffee shops, counting inventory eight times more often for real-time restocking. The technology uses tablet cameras to automatically scan refrigerators and storage areas, recording quantities and ingredient types with plans to automate replenishment orders soon.

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🛩️Joby Aviation Doubles Manufacturing Capacity for 2026 Air Taxi Launch

Electric aviation pioneer Joby Aviation is doubling U.S. manufacturing capacity across California and Ohio facilities as it pursues FAA certification for its eVTOL aircraft. The company integrates vertically from component design to customer experience and has secured strategic partnerships with Toyota, Uber, and Delta to scale its air taxi network for commercial launch.
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🏭Dirac’s BuildOS Platform Tackles Manufacturing’s Tasks

Dirac is seeing surging demand for its BuildOS platform that automates production planning and work instructions across aerospace, defense, and heavy industry. The AI-powered system addresses the critical problem of tribal knowledge loss on factory floors by structuring context-aware data, positioning manufacturing for the AGI era where structured knowledge becomes essential for value delivery.
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📰Unitree data sharing?!

According to this paper, the Unitree G1 humanoid robot secretly and continuously sends sensor and system data to servers in China without the owner’s knowledge or consent. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14139

🧲 Chinese Scientists Set World Record Magnetic Field 700K Times Earth’s

Researchers achieved a record-breaking magnetic field 700,000 times stronger than Earth’s, pushing the boundaries of materials science and quantum research. This breakthrough could enable new discoveries in superconductors, fusion energy, and advanced materials that require extreme magnetic conditions for testing and development.

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🔬 Europe’s Five Self-Driving Labs Accelerate Materials Discovery

Berlin’s Dunia launched IRIS, a 3rd-generation self-driving lab combining physics-informed AI with chemical robotics to cut material discovery from decades to days ($11.5M Series A led by Elaia). London’s Automata serves NHS Trusts with space-saving robot-enabled lab benches ($40M Series B led by Dimension). Paris-based Altrove uses AI-driven synthesis to find sustainable rare earth alternatives (€3.7M led by Contrarian Ventures). These labs are redefining scientific R&D across clean energy, pharma, and advanced materials.

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🛰️ ClearSpace Builds Spacecraft to Clean Up Orbital Debris

Lausanne-based ClearSpace is developing spacecraft to grab dead satellites and guide them to controlled ocean landings, addressing the 140 million pieces of orbital debris tracked by ESA. The European startup represents a critical piece of the global space infrastructure supply chain, with space debris cleanup emerging as essential for sustainable space operations.

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🤖 IBM’s AI Innovations: Granite 4.0 & Quantum Trading Edge

IBM’s new Granite 4.0 LLM family combines Transformer and Mamba architectures, cutting RAM requirements by 70%+ in production environments. The 4-model family (3B to 32B parameters) offers both token efficiency and contextual precision, with Granite 4.0 Micro already surpassing Gemma 3 4B and Alibaba’s Qwen3 1.7B on intelligence benchmarks. In a separate breakthrough, HSBC and IBM have achieved the world’s first empirical evidence that current quantum computers can add measurable value in real-world trading scenarios. This demonstrates quantum advantage in financial applications, moving beyond theoretical possibilities to practical business value in one of the most demanding computational environments.

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🤖 ANYbotics’ Four-Legged Robots Scale Industrial Inspection Deployments

Zurich-based ANYbotics builds autonomous four-legged robots that navigate complex terrain in energy facilities, manufacturing plants, and industrial sites to perform real-time inspections. The company’s robots keep humans out of hazardous areas while providing continuous monitoring in harsh environments — from offshore oil platforms to nuclear facilities — where traditional wheeled robots fail and human presence poses safety risks.

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📰 imec Cracks Sub-2nm Logic with High-NA EUV Breakthrough

Belgian semiconductor research institute imec achieved breakthrough single-patterning High-NA EUV lithography results, proving a viable path toward sub-2nm logic nodes. This advancement addresses critical bottlenecks in next-generation chip manufacturing, potentially extending Moore’s Law into the 2030s.

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💎 Element Six Pushes Diamond Manufacturing Into New Frontiers

Element Six’s global innovation center, one of the world’s leading synthetic diamond labs that grows diamonds for uses far beyond jewelry — from drill bits to medical equipment and laser components. The company is advancing rapidly toward using diamonds in semiconductors, though significant technical hurdles remain before this becomes reality.

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🔬 STARTUPS FUNDING: Game-Changers in HardTech & AI

•Empower Semiconductor, a semiconductor company developing SoCs with integrated voltage regulators, raised $140M Series D to advance power delivery solutions for AI and data centers. The technology addresses growing power challenges in next-generation processors, enabling more efficient power management directly on chip as AI workloads push energy demands to unprecedented levels.

•Hubble Network, a satellite communications company, raised $70M Series B led by Y Combinator and RPM Ventures for Bluetooth satellite communications technology.

•Icarus, a space cargo robotics company, raised $6.1M Seed led by Soma Capital and Xtal Ventures to advance autonomous space logistics solutions.

•Until Labs, an organ cryopreservation technology company, raised $58M Series A led by Founders Fund, Lux Capital, and Field to revolutionize organ preservation and transplant logistics.

•DualEntry, a NYC-based AI-native ERP platform, raised $90M Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures, with GV (Google Ventures), Contrary, and Vesey Ventures participating. This brings total funding to over $100M in just 15 months as the company aims to revolutionize enterprise resource planning with AI-first infrastructure.

•Einride, a Swedish logistics startup, secured $100M led by EQT Ventures and IonQ to expand its fleet of electric, cabless self-driving trucks. The funding will support U.S. expansion, autonomous technology refinement, and freight network growth as Einride’s trucks are already operating commercially.

•Phaidra, a Seattle-based startup, secured $50M Series B led by Collaborative Fund to scale its AI agents that optimize data center operations for energy efficiency. Helena, Index Ventures, Nvidia, and Sony Innovation Fund also participated, addressing AI’s biggest infrastructure challenge of reducing energy footprint while improving performance.

•Cerebras, an AI chip maker, raised a massive $1.1B at $8.1B valuation to scale its inference infrastructure, which claims 20x faster speeds than Nvidia GPUs. The company serves trillions of tokens monthly to major enterprises and government agencies, positioning itself as a formidable alternative to Nvidia’s dominance in AI compute.

•Groq, an AI chip maker, secured $750M at $6.9B valuation, more than doubling its worth in one year. The company’s Language Processing Unit (LPU) delivers up to 10× lower latency and 10× higher memory bandwidth than GPUs for AI inference, using on-chip SRAM with 80 TB/s bandwidth and deterministic execution architecture.

•Nscale, a London-based hyperscaler, secured $1.1B Series B led by Aker ASA, with participation from Blue Owl, Dell, Fidelity, Nokia, and NVIDIA. The company is building next-generation data center infrastructure to compete with AWS and Azure, representing one of Europe’s largest infrastructure investment rounds.

•Factory, a San Francisco-based startup, raised $50M Series B led by NEA, with Sequoia Capital, NVIDIA, and J.P. Morgan participating. The company develops AI technology for software development, automating coding workflows as demand for AI-assisted programming tools explodes across enterprises.

•Radiant Nuclear, a nuclear startup, secured $165M Series C to develop the first new commercial reactor design in over half a century. The company is addressing growing energy demands from AI and data centers with next-generation nuclear technology.

•Anode, a San Francisco-based startup, secured $9M seed led by Eclipse Ventures to provide on-demand power through mobile microgrids. The company addresses critical infrastructure gaps as extreme weather events and grid instability drive demand for distributed, resilient power solutions.

•Divergent, a manufacturing technology company, raised $290M Series E at $2.3B valuation for software-defined manufacturing. The platform integrates design automation, metal additive manufacturing, and robotic assembly for aerospace and defense parts.

•Morse Micro, an IoT connectivity company, raised $59M Series A to scale advanced IoT connectivity solutions, positioning them as a key player in the massive Internet of Things expansion connecting smart cities to industrial equipment.

•Corintis, a semiconductor cooling startup coming out of stealth, raised $24M Series A led by BlueYard Capital with participation from Founderful, Acequia Capital, Celsius Industries, and XTX Ventures. The company addresses chip cooling challenges and collaborates with Microsoft for breakthrough cooling technology, bringing total funding to $33.4M.

•Modal Labs, a cloud infrastructure provider for AI/ML workloads, secured $87M from Lux Capital, reaching a $1.1B valuation in the competitive AI infrastructure market. The company joins the growing ecosystem of companies building the picks and shovels for the AI gold rush.

•Periodic Labs, founded by Liam Fedus (co-creator of ChatGPT) and Ekin Dogus Cubuk (who led Google Brain’s materials team), is building autonomous robotic laboratories where AI agents conduct real-world physical experiments. The company raised $2B in stealth mode and is targeting breakthroughs in superconductors and semiconductors.

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