Robotics

Nevada Approves Commercial Robotaxi Permits for Up to 8,000 Vehicles Across Tesla, Waymo, and Uber

The Nevada Transportation Authority (NTA) has unanimously approved commercial robotaxi operating permits for Tesla, Waymo, and Uber across Clark County, establishing the regulatory foundation for up to 8,000 autonomous passenger vehicles in the Las Vegas metropolitan area over the next 12 months. The regulatory decision marks one of the largest single-county autonomous vehicle authorizations in the United States, distributing operating rights across three primary commercial applicants: * Tesl

Robot.com Signs Seven-Year Enterprise Deployment Agreement with Sodexo

Autonomous robotics developer Robot.com has signed a seven-year commercial agreement with food services and facilities management corporation Sodexo to scale autonomous delivery operations across college campuses throughout North America. The contract represents Robot.com's largest enterprise deployment to date. The agreement expands a partnership established in 2021, when Sodexo participated in Robot.com's (then Kiwibot) $7.5 million pre-Series A financing round and deployed initial fleets acr

Generalist AI Releases GEN-1.5: One-Shot In-Context Learning for Robotic Manipulation

Robotics research startup Generalist AI announced GEN-1.5, an embodied foundation model capable of learning closed-loop physical manipulation tasks from a single demonstration without gradient updates or fine-tuning. The model adapts through in-context physical prompting, mirroring the few-shot learning dynamics originally identified in autoregressive language models. GEN-1.5 processes multimodal inputs including multi-view video, proprioceptive signals, sensor feeds, and natural language instr

State Data Farms Account for 20% of China's Humanoid Robot Shipments

Government-backed data collection hubs and municipal training centers accounted for roughly 20 percent of China's more than 20,000 humanoid robot shipments last year, according to an analysis from Bernstein. The purchases reflect a national strategy to overcome the primary bottleneck in physical artificial intelligence: the scarcity of high-fidelity physical interaction data needed to train embodied foundation models. Unlike large language models that train on vast public text corpora scraped f

Veeda AI Raises 0M+ Seed Backed by Khosla and Radical for Physical AI World Models

Veeda AI, a Toronto-based foundation model startup established by former Nvidia AI research executive Sanja Fidler, has raised more than $90 million in seed funding. The round was backed by Khosla Ventures and Radical Ventures, marking one of the largest seed financings recorded in Canada. Corporate filings reveal that the company, incorporated in June 2026 as Veeda Innovation, issued 60.6 million seed shares priced at $1 each in late July. Concurrent with the share issuance, Veeda added Radica

Chinese Humanoid Robot Maker Unitree Surges 629% in 04M Shanghai IPO Debut

Chinese humanoid and quadruped robotics manufacturer Unitree Robotics made its public debut on the Shanghai Stock Exchange STAR Market on Wednesday, August 19, 2026, with shares surging 629% in early morning trading. The listing marks the first pure-play embodied artificial intelligence and humanoid robotics IPO on China's mainland A-share exchange. Unitree priced its initial public offering at 150.80 yuan ($22.36) per share, issuing 40.4 million shares to raise approximately $904 million (4.2

LG Partners with Nvidia on 10,000-Square-Meter Robot Data Factory Targeting 100,000 Training Hours

LG Electronics hosted senior Nvidia leadership at its Yangjae R&D Campus in Seoul on August 18, 2026, advancing a joint initiative to build physical AI training pipelines and target 100,000 hours of embodied robotics data by the end of the year. The site review took place five days after LG Group and Nvidia signed a strategic memorandum of understanding at Nvidia headquarters in Santa Clara on August 13. The accelerated timeline reflects LG's effort to convert its industrial manufacturing infra

Unitree says its new Superman robot outruns Usain Bolt

Gravis Robotics raises $200M to put autonomous control on existing excavators