Humanoids This Week, Issue #1
October 12-19, 2026. Our collector processed 1,600+ items from 245 feeds in English and Chinese and grouped them into 830 stories. Here is what mattered.
In brief
- China keeps raising the most money. Astribot (星尘智能) closed a round of about RMB 1 billion at a RMB 15 billion valuation. AgiBot has reportedly started a new round at about RMB 50 billion, according to Caijing.
- Agility Robotics is one step from Nasdaq. The SEC declared its SPAC registration effective. The listing is expected in November, making it the first US-listed pure-play humanoid maker.
- OpenAI confirmed it is building a humanoid. Sam Altman says a demo could come in 2027.
- Leadership shake-up at Boston Dynamics. Rohit Prasad (ex-Amazon Alexa) is the new CEO. Meanwhile, Google DeepMind opened a robotics lab in Cambridge and reportedly hired Boston Dynamics' CTO.
China
China remains the center of the industry. One estimate this week puts Chinese makers at 97% of global humanoid shipments in H1 2026 (Startup Fortune).
Money
- Astribot (Shenzhen): about RMB 1 billion at a RMB 15 billion valuation, its fourth round in six months. Investors reportedly include Shenzhen Investment Holdings. The story ran in 19 outlets (封面新闻).
- AgiBot: new round at about RMB 50 billion. Its Hong Kong IPO filing is reportedly on hold (www.mycaijing.com).
- Fair Innovation (法奥机器人): nearly RMB 1 billion, with Meituan investing for the second time (www.gasgoo.com).
- Huawei's Hubble fund joined the angel round of startup 视塔机器人 (凤凰网科技).
Markets
- Unitree (宇树科技): shares lost about RMB 281 billion in market value in the two months after its STAR Market IPO (腾讯新闻). On October 19 the stock jumped 11-17% and market value returned to RMB 200 billion, on the OpenAI news and the publication of China's first six national humanoid standards (新浪财经).
Shipments and deployments
- AgiBot delivered the Yuanzheng A3 to its first customers (新浪财经). Its robots are also working as reception guides at Peking University People's Hospital (搜狐).
- UBTECH: the U1 ships in small batches, and a cheaper "youth" version is due in Q4 (finance.sina.com.cn). Walker S is in a pilot at FAW-Volkswagen, from inspection to factory logistics (reddit.com). UBTECH tops an industry ranking of humanoid revenue (凤凰网).
- XPeng promises IRON mass production by the end of 2026 and deliveries from H1 2027 (搜狐网).
- AiMOGA (Chery) opens pre-orders for its Mobo home robot on October 21 (humanoidsdaily.com).
Policy and clusters
- Shanghai wants 8,000 humanoids working in factories by 2028 (humanoidsdaily.com).
- Hong Kong opened a testing hub for embodied AI. Unitree and Galbot are among the first partners (scmp.com).
- Talent: former UBTECH co-CTO Liao Hongtao joined Tencent to lead embodied AI (iheima).
- DexForce cuts robot training costs with synthetic data (Reuters, Devdiscourse).
Money and markets: rest of world
- Agility Robotics: S-4 effective, Nasdaq listing expected in November (Unite.AI, Seoul Economic Daily).
- Figure AI: NVIDIA is reportedly weighing an investment of about $1 billion (Tech Times).
- Hyundai is moving toward full ownership of Boston Dynamics (Tech Edition).
Products and technology
- Agility Digit 5 gets fast charging from Nyobolt: about 9 minutes of charging for 90 minutes of work (www.machinery.co.uk).
- NEURA Robotics unveiled Neuron AI, a multimodal foundation model for physical AI (neura-robotics.com).
- Google DeepMind used Gemini to teach Apptronik Apollo to play cornhole, via a video-to-sim-to-real pipeline (youtube.com).
- Physical Intelligence opened the Pi API beta (Unite.AI). Skild AI trains robots through self-play (Robotics & Automation News).
- Boston Dynamics builds an Atlas from its own parts in one day and is aiming for one hour (TechEBlog -).
- Faraday Future launched FF Nova at $2,490 for schools and developers (humanoid.guide).
Risks and skepticism
- A former Figure safety engineer claims the company's home robot can fracture a human skull (Startup Fortune).
- Optimus development is reportedly slowed by China's magnet export restrictions (Drive Tesla Canada).
- A former NVIDIA robotics executive says the industry is still in its "Lego era" and has not had its ChatGPT moment (Cryptopolitan).
Video of the week
- Apptronik Apollo and Gemini play cornhole (Google DeepMind, YouTube) (youtube.com).
- IEEE Spectrum's Video Friday (spectrum.ieee.org).
What to watch next week
- AiMOGA Mobo pre-orders (October 21) and Chery's global innovation conference in Wuhu (October 20).
- The shareholder vote on Agility's SPAC deal.
- Tesla's Q3 earnings call (October 21) and what it says about Optimus.
Stories are gathered by our news collector and edited by Andrei Sheshenin. Funding and valuation figures come from media reports; check the primary source before republishing.