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Apptronik soars to $5B valuation

PLUS: China's new border bots and a robot that plays basketball

Apptronik soars to $5B valuation

Welcome back to your Robot Briefing

Austin's Apptronik just joined the unicorn club with a $5 billion valuation, backed by Mercedes-Benz and Google's DeepMind as it races to put humanoid robots on factory floors.

With half a billion raised this year alone and a new manufacturing facility ready to scale, is this the moment humanoid robots finally cross from prototype to production line — or are investors betting too early on a workforce that's not quite ready?

In today's Robot update:

Apptronik hits $5B valuation milestone
China deploys border patrol humanoids
Flexion scores $50M for sim-to-real AI platform
Unitree robot demonstrates basketball skills
News

The $5 Billion Humanoid

Snapshot: Austin-based Apptronik has reached a $5 billion valuation following a significant new funding round, positioning the humanoid robotics startup as a major player in the global race to commercialize AI-powered robots.

Breakdown:

The company has secured $331 million toward a planned $500 million raise, following a separate $403 million funding round earlier this year, with additional investment expected before year's end.
Founded in 2016 as a spinoff from the University of Texas Human Centered Robotics Lab, Apptronik now competes directly with Tesla and other giants in developing commercially viable humanoid robots for manufacturing and logistics.
Major backers include Mercedes-Benz and Google's DeepMind division, with Mercedes actively testing Apptronik's Apollo humanoid on its production lines while the company prepares to scale manufacturing in a new 59,000-square-foot facility.

Takeaway: This valuation milestone reflects growing investor confidence that humanoid robots will soon transition from experimental prototypes to practical workforce solutions. Apptronik's combination of academic research roots, strategic automotive partnerships, and aggressive production scaling suggests the company is positioning itself to capture early market share as humanoid adoption accelerates.

News

China's Border Bots

Snapshot: UBTech Robotics secured a $37 million contract to deploy Walker S2 humanoid robots at China-Vietnam border crossings, where they'll guide travelers, conduct inspections, and handle logistics starting in December.

Breakdown:

The robots will manage personnel flow at border checkpoints while also conducting inspections at nearby steel, copper, and aluminum manufacturing sites, marking one of China's largest real-world deployments of humanoid systems in government operations.
Walker S2 stands 1.76 meters tall with 52 degrees of freedom and features an autonomous hot-swappable dual-battery system that lets it replace its own depleted battery in three minutes, enabling nearly continuous 24-hour operation without human intervention.
China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology recently formalized its national humanoid robotics committee, with UBTech reporting cumulative orders reaching $115 million and targeting production of 10,000 units annually by 2027.

Takeaway: This deployment represents a significant shift from prototype testing to practical government applications for humanoid robots. The contract validates UBTech's industrial-grade approach and signals that China's substantial policy backing for robotics is translating into large-scale commercial opportunities.

News

The AI Powering Humanoids

Snapshot: Flexion Robotics raised a $50 million Series A, with backing from NVIDIA's venture arm, to build its sim-to-real AI platform designed to power a wide range of humanoid robots across different tasks and hardware.

Breakdown:

The Zurich-based startup secured funding from DST Global Partners, NVentures (NVIDIA's venture capital arm), redalpine, Prosus Ventures, and Moonfire just months after closing a $7.35 million seed round earlier this year.
Flexion built a three-layer autonomy stack that combines language models for task reasoning, a vision-language-action model trained on synthetic data, and transformer-based whole-body control that lets robots adapt across different terrains and commands.
The company partners with major robotics manufacturers to deploy its AI systems and plans to use the fresh capital to expand its Zurich R&D team, scale compute infrastructure, and establish a U. S. presence.

Takeaway: Flexion's approach addresses one of humanoid robotics' biggest challenges: creating AI that works across different robot bodies and tasks without extensive reprogramming for each use case. The strong investor interest, particularly from NVIDIA's venture arm, signals growing confidence that sim-to-real AI platforms could accelerate humanoid deployment timelines.

News

The Basketball Bot

Snapshot: Researchers at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology have programmed a Unitree G1 humanoid robot to play basketball, demonstrating skills like dribbling, shooting jump shots, and pivoting to evade defenders.

Breakdown:

The four-foot-four-inch G1 performed what HKUST PhD student Yinhuai Wang called the "first-ever real-world basketball demo by a humanoid robot," showcasing how the Unitree platform has rapidly expanded its capabilities beyond kung fu moves and kickboxing.
The robot learns through SkillMimic , a data-driven system that mimics both human and ball motions from datasets, allowing a single policy to learn multiple basketball skills and switch between them smoothly even when those transitions weren't in the training data.
While the demo impressed viewers with the robot's ability to perform athletic moves, some observers joked about priorities in robotics development, though others imagined a future with proper robotics basketball leagues.

Takeaway: This demonstration shows how humanoid robots can master complex, dynamic physical tasks that require coordination, timing, and adaptive responses. The ability to learn diverse skills from human motion data and apply them in real-world scenarios represents meaningful progress toward versatile humanoid platforms.

Other Top Robot Stories

MarketsandMarkets projects the agricultural robot market will surge from $17.73 billion to $56.26 billion by 2030—a 217% expansion driven by labor shortages, precision farming demand, and automation adoption across major segments including robotic prostatectomy systems, partial nephrectomy platforms, and farm produce handling.

Distalmotion raised $150 million in Series G funding to accelerate U. S. commercialization of its DEXTER surgical robot, targeting the rapidly growing ambulatory surgery center market with a mobile platform that fits any operating room without modifications and keeps surgeons at the patient's bedside.

MindOn trained the Unitree G1 humanoid to perform household chores like watering plants, closing curtains, and tidying up with natural fluid movements—notably without any teleoperation, marking a shift toward fully autonomous home robots that can handle tasks requiring sensitivity and dexterity.

🤖 Your robotics thought for today:
What if we measured a robot's success not by how much it does, but by how much better it makes the humans around it?

P.S. What's your take on this?

Until tomorrow,
Uli

Apptronik soars to $5B valuation

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