🦾 HardTech Reads: The AI & Robotics Revolution vol.57

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

What’s in today?

• 🚀 HARDTECH NEWS: Robotics & AI Innovations

• 🔬 STARTUPS FUNDING: Game-Changers in HardTech & AI

• 📚 FAVORITE RESOURCES

• 🎤 EVENTS — let’s meet in person!

🚀 HARDTECH NEWS: Robotics & AI Innovations

🤖 Wandercraft’s Calvin-40 in automotive, 🍳 Tangible’s Eggie home robot, 🥊 EngineAI’s T800 combat humanoid, 🚶 AgiBot’s A2 record-breaking walk, ✈️ Russian airline’s humanoid cabin crew, 📦 Locus Robotics’ Array at DHL, 🏭 Figure AI’s Gen 02 retires from BMW, 🤖 MindOn’s butler robot, 🧠 BrainPack AI for robots, 💥 Russian humanoid’s disastrous debut, 🤖 MindOn’s AI on Unitree G1, 💰 UBTech’s $112M humanoid orders, 🚀 Bezos’ Project Prometheus, 🚗 Hyundai’s Metaplant, 🛠️ Johns Hopkins’ robotic arm for maritime repair, 🖐️ 1HMX’s Nexus NX1 interface, 🤝 Foxconn & OpenAI partnership, 🧠 XCath’s remote brain surgery, 🤖 Physical Intelligence’s π-0.6 model

🤖 Wandercraft & SAPA to Deploy Calvin-40 Humanoid Robots in Automotive Manufacturing

Wandercraft has announced a partnership with SAPA Group, an Italy-based Tier 1 automotive supplier, to deploy its Calvin-40 humanoid robots in manufacturing facilities.

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This marks Europe’s first major integration of humanoid robotics in automotive production, demonstrating real-world applications of physical AI for assembly, material handling, and quality control tasks in demanding manufacturing environments.

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🍳 Tangible Robotics Unveils Eggie Home Robot

The California-based startup has unveiled Eggie, a home robot featuring wheel mobility and five-fingered hands.

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The platform’s compliant design is optimized for real-world contact tasks like wiping kitchen spills through human-like manipulation capabilities. This approach prioritizes stability and dexterous interaction over bipedal locomotion for domestic task reliability.

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🥊 EngineAI Reveals T800 Heavy-Duty Humanoid for Combat

EngineAI has revealed the T800, a heavy-duty humanoid designed for combat scenarios and boxing competitions.

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Standing 1.85m with an 85kg frame, the robot features 41 high-DOF joints, a solid-state battery, and an aluminum alloy exterior. The platform will test its dynamic stability and AI decision-making through competitive physical challenges on December 24th.

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🚶 AgiBot A2 Humanoid Sets Guinness World Record with 106-Kilometer Autonomous Journey

China’s AgiBot A2 humanoid robot achieved a Guinness World Record by walking 106 kilometers from Suzhou to Shanghai over four days without powering off once.

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The robot navigated highways, bridges, city streets, and changing light conditions while adapting to diverse terrain — a demonstration of unprecedented endurance and autonomy in humanoid robotics.

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✈️ Russian Airline Deploys Humanoid Robot as Cabin Crew on Moscow Flight

Pobeda airline has deployed a humanoid robot as cabin crew on a Moscow-bound flight, greeting passengers, delivering safety instructions, and posing for photos.

This follows Qatar Airways’ 2024 deployment of AI-powered humanoid attendants, signaling rapid commercialization of service robotics in aviation.

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🤖 Sunday Robotics and ACT-1: A frontier robot foundation model trained on zero robot data

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📦 Locus Robotics Deploys Locus Array Autonomous Picking System at DHL Facility in Ohio

Locus Robotics has begun deploying its new Locus Array system at a major DHL facility, marking a significant step toward fully autonomous warehouse picking and replenishment. The Robots-to-Goods model integrates AI-driven planning with robotic execution, reducing manual labor while improving order accuracy.

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🏭 Figure AI Retires Generation 02 Humanoids After BMW Manufacturing Validation

Figure AI has retired its Figure 02 humanoid robots following an 11-month operational stint at BMW’s South Carolina plant, where the robots successfully helped manufacture over 30,000 X3 vehicles. CEO Brett Adcock shared footage of the robots showing accumulated scratches and grime — tangible proof of their ability to withstand demanding industrial environments.

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🤖 MindOn Debuts Viral Butler Robot

Co-founded by former Tencent Robotics X researchers, MindOn has debuted a viral butler robot.

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The startup joins an exodus of talent spawning embodied AI ventures, as Tencent’s non-commercial lab fuels the startup ecosystem through researcher departures building companies like Astribot and Copilot Robotics.

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🧠 Autonomous Robots “Out of the Box” Available for Pre-Order

BrainPack is the first system that gives robots and humanoids real-world intelligence.

It’s a compact backpack that brings together mapping, object recognition, remote control, and self-charging. For the first time, developers, researchers, and early adopters can order a robot that has AI capabilities out of the box.

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💥 Russian Humanoid Robot’s Disastrous Debut

One of Russia’s first humanoid robots made headlines for all the wrong reasons.

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The much-hyped humanoid from Russian startup AIDOL walked out to Rocky’s iconic theme song, waved to the crowd, then face-planted on the stage and broke into pieces. The incident has exposed just how much ground Russia still has to cover in the robotics race.

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💰 UBTech announces mass production!

The Shenzhen-based startup has revealed that it has secured over $112M in orders for its Walker S2 humanoid robot this year, with Chinese factories snapping up the industrial models.

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The company made the announcement by dropping a video of its robot fleet standing in unison. Figure AI CEO Brett Adcock accused the Chinese company of using CGI, a claim that some social media users are contesting.

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🚀 Bezos’ Project Prometheus: $6.2B AI Manufacturing Venture

Jeff Bezos is back in operations as co-CEO of Project Prometheus, a bold $6.2 billion AI startup focused on engineering and manufacturing breakthroughs across aerospace, automotive, and computing sectors. Co-founded with physicist and chemist Vik Bajaj, Project Prometheus has already recruited ~100 employees including top researchers from OpenAI, DeepMind, and Meta.

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🚗 Hyundai’s Metaplant Demonstrates Next-Generation EV Manufacturing

Hyundai’s advanced manufacturing facility leverages 300 AI-guided autonomous vehicles, collaborative robots, and Boston Dynamics’ Spot robots for inspection to achieve unprecedented production efficiency. The plant combines human workers for high-skill craftsmanship with precision automation, reducing labor costs and material scrap while pursuing 100% renewable energy goals.

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🛠️ Johns Hopkins APL Deploys RAMLAB MaxQ Robotic Arm for Maritime Manufacturing Resilience

Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory has installed a RAMLAB MaxQ robotic arm for advanced repair and additive manufacturing of large ship components using wire arc additive manufacturing technology. The system enables faster, lower-cost repairs critical to U.S. maritime fleet readiness.

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🖐️ 1HMX Unveils Nexus NX1: Fully Immersive Human-Machine Interface

1HMX has released the Nexus NX1, integrating HaptX Gloves, Virtuix Omni One omnidirectional treadmill, Freeaim robotic shoes, and 72-degree-of-freedom motion capture into a unified teleoperations platform. Designed for humanoid robot control and embodied AI training, the Nexus NX1 delivers haptic feedback accurate to fingertip pressure and real-world physics.

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🤝 Foxconn and OpenAI Partner on AI Data Center Hardware

OpenAI and manufacturing giant Foxconn have announced a strategic partnership to co-develop and manufacture custom AI data center hardware, including specialized racks, accelerator modules, and supporting infrastructure. Foxconn will leverage its scale and supply chain expertise to help bring OpenAI’s proprietary compute designs to production.

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🧠 Remote Brain Surgery Breakthrough

In a world-first, US firm XCath has achieved a major breakthrough with its EVR robotic system, successfully treating three brain aneurysm patients in Panama. With sub-millimeter precision, physicians guided the triaxial neurovascular robot through delicate brain vessels to deploy stents and implants.

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🤖 Transatlantic Robot-Assisted Surgery

A Florida surgeon just performed the world’s first robot-assisted transatlantic thrombectomy — operating on a body in Scotland through a Lithuanian-made Sentante surgical robot. The system mimics real fingertip resistance with just 120 ms of lag, potentially cracking the brutal math where every six-minute delay in stroke care cuts survival odds by 1%.

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🤖 Physical Intelligence Unveils π-0.6 Embodied AI Model

Physical Intelligence released its π-0.6 visual language action model specifically designed to enable robots to understand and interact with complex physical environments. The model represents a breakthrough in embodied AI, allowing robots to perform manipulation tasks with improved spatial reasoning and adaptability.

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🔬 STARTUPS FUNDING: Game-Changers in HardTech & AI

➡️ Archetype AI raised $35M in Series A led by IAG Capital Partners and Hitachi Ventures, with participation from Bezos Expeditions, Venrock, Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund, Samsung Ventures, Systemiq Capital, E12 Ventures, Higher Life Ventures, and others. Archetype AI is introducing new tools to build and deploy Physical Agents that sense, understand, and act in real-world environments.

➡️ LambdaVision closed $7M in seed funding to scale its groundbreaking in-space manufacturing process for protein-based artificial retinas designed to restore vision. The company has completed nine ISS missions demonstrating 200-layer thin-film assembly in orbit. Led by Seven Seven Six and Aurelia Foundry Fund, the round validates the emerging market of orbital manufacturing for complex medical devices.

➡️ Neura Robotics, a six-year-old German startup building cognitive and humanoid robots for manufacturing, logistics, and consumer use, is reportedly in talks for a $1.2B round, with Tether as a possible lead.

➡️ Apptronik is in advanced talks to raise $400M at a $5B valuation, becoming one of the most highly valued robotics companies. The funding underscores intense investor interest in humanoid robots for manufacturing, logistics, and service industries.

➡️ Carbon closed a $60M funding round led by Sequoia Capital, Silver Lake, adidas, and other investors to scale additive manufacturing production. The company is approaching cash-flow positive operations while deepening partnerships with major manufacturers.

➡️ Naïo Technologies, the French agricultural robotics pioneer, has been relaunched under new leadership after court approval with a €6.4M financing package. The company is refocusing on its flagship weeding robots, Ted and Oz, strengthening dealer networks and rebuilding production to serve farmers in sustainable autonomous field management.

➡️ Sensetics, a Princeton-based company developing haptics and touch data technology, raised $1.75M in Pre-Seed funding led by MetaVC Partners and Fitz Gate Ventures with participation from Blue Sky Capital and AIC Ventures. The capital supports development of haptic sensing and feedback systems for immersive computing, robotics, and human-machine interfaces.

➡️ Terranova raised $7M in seed funding to deploy AI-powered terraforming robots that prevent urban flooding by lifting subsiding land through injected wood waste slurry. The startup quoted $92 million to protect 240 acres in San Rafael — a fraction of traditional infrastructure costs — and addresses critical climate resilience challenges.

➡️ Partner Robotics closed Series A funding to scale its AI-powered robotic systems for construction sites worldwide. The company is using cloud-based simulation and autonomous capabilities to automate labor-intensive, hazardous tasks — addressing a massive talent shortage in the construction industry.

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📚FAVORITE RESOURCES

North American Robot Orders Surge 11.6% in Q3 2025

🎤EVENTS — Let’s meet in person!

🇯🇵 Dec 1–4 — Intl. Conference on Space Robotics (Sendai, Japan)
🦿December 1–5: SOSV Robotics Matchup — online
🇦🇪 Dec 8–12 — Deep Tech Week Dubai 2025
🦿 Dec 11–12 — Humanoid Summit (Silicon Valley) — ping me if you are there!
⚛️ Jan 28 — Deep Tech New York, NY
🇬🇧 Mar 16–19, 2026 — Intl. Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (Edinburgh, Scotland)

Join the SOSV Robotics Matchup on December 1–5 for one of the largest robotics investment events of the year. This free and virtual matchmaking event brings together 500 innovative robotics startups and 500 investors for strategic 1:1 meetings scheduled at mutually convenient times.

Hosted by SOSV, a global leader in robotics investing, this event connects emerging robotics innovators with the capital they need to scale. Whether you’re seeking investment for your robotics venture or looking to discover the next breakthrough in automation, AI, manufacturing, or beyond — this is where the future of robotics gets funded. Register here.

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