In 2026, global venture funding to robotics startups reached $9.9 billion in Q3, more than double the $4.3 billion invested in Q3 2025. China led with $13.2 billion and the U.S. followed with $12.1 billion, while Germany trailed at $1.7 billion. Notable rounds included Guangzhou-based Xpeng Robotics ($900 million) and Shenzhen's Ai² Robotics ($736 million).
In the U.S., Atoms (founded by Travis Kalanick) raised $1.4 billion, and Skild AI also secured $1.4 billion. Germany-based Neura Robotics raised $1.4 billion for its cognitive robots. Physical AI is experiencing rapid growth, with companies building data layers and foundation models. Ulrik Stig Hansen, co-CEO of San Francisco-based Encord, noted that "physical AI is very different" from large language models due to the need to collect and convert sensor tokens to action tokens.
Building data infrastructure for physical AI is expensive, requiring massive multimodal datasets. The sector is still in pre-training phase but moving toward post-training, with 75 robotics unicorns raising funding in the past three years.
Source: Crunchbase News · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing