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 (source).
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 (source). - AgiBot: new round at about RMB 50 billion. Its Hong Kong IPO filing is reportedly on hold (source). - Fair Innovation (法奥机器人): nearly RMB 1 billion, with Meituan investing for the second time (source). - Huawei's Hubble fund joined the angel round of startup 视塔机器人 (source).
Markets - Unitree (宇树科技): shares lost about RMB 281 billion in market value in the two months after its STAR Market IPO (source). 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 (source).
Shipments and deployments - AgiBot delivered the Yuanzheng A3 to its first customers (source). Its robots are also working as reception guides at Peking University People's Hospital (source). - UBTECH: the U1 ships in small batches, and a cheaper "youth" version is due in Q4 (source). Walker S is in a pilot at FAW-Volkswagen, from inspection to factory logistics (source). UBTECH tops an industry ranking of humanoid revenue (source). - XPeng promises IRON mass production by the end of 2026 and deliveries from H1 2027 (source). - AiMOGA (Chery) opens pre-orders for its Mobo home robot on October 21 (source).
Policy and clusters - Shanghai wants 8,000 humanoids working in factories by 2028 (source). - Hong Kong opened a testing hub for embodied AI. Unitree and Galbot are among the first partners (source). - Talent: former UBTECH co-CTO Liao Hongtao joined Tencent to lead embodied AI (source). - DexForce cuts robot training costs with synthetic data (Reuters, source).
Money and markets: rest of world
- Agility Robotics: S-4 effective, Nasdaq listing expected in November (source, source).
- Figure AI: NVIDIA is reportedly weighing an investment of about $1 billion (source).
- Hyundai is moving toward full ownership of Boston Dynamics (source).
Products and technology
- Agility Digit 5 gets fast charging from Nyobolt: about 9 minutes of charging for 90 minutes of work (source).
- NEURA Robotics unveiled Neuron AI, a multimodal foundation model for physical AI (source).
- Google DeepMind used Gemini to teach Apptronik Apollo to play cornhole, via a video-to-sim-to-real pipeline (source).
- Physical Intelligence opened the Pi API beta (source). Skild AI trains robots through self-play (source).
- Boston Dynamics builds an Atlas from its own parts in one day and is aiming for one hour (source).
- Faraday Future launched FF Nova at $2,490 for schools and developers (source).
Risks and skepticism
- A former Figure safety engineer claims the company's home robot can fracture a human skull (source).
- Optimus development is reportedly slowed by China's magnet export restrictions (source).
- A former NVIDIA robotics executive says the industry is still in its "Lego era" and has not had its ChatGPT moment (source).
Video of the week
- Apptronik Apollo and Gemini play cornhole (Google DeepMind, YouTube) (source).
- IEEE Spectrum's Video Friday (source).
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.
Compiled automatically (scripts/collect.py → scripts/digest.py) and edited. Funding and valuation figures come from media reports; check the primary source before republishing.