Zipline raises $1.5 billion, Axon invests $1.2 billion in Skydio, and more - Robotics Brief #94

In this edition, covering 5 to 11 November:

• Zipline raised $1.5 billion at a $21.5 billion valuation, and Walmart will add 300 Zipline drone delivery sites under a multiyear agreement.
• Axon will invest about $1.2 billion in Skydio at a $5.2 billion pre money valuation and become its exclusive public safety distributor in the United States and Canada.
• UFORCE raised $700 million in a Series A at a $6 billion valuation for autonomous air, land and sea systems, and Agile Robots raised $500 million led by SoftBank, with Nvidia, at an $8.5 billion valuation.

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Humanoid robots

Agility Robotics began trading on Nasdaq after its merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI and the related $465 million financing. Its shares fell to $8.40 before recovering to $10.68. Agility reported $1.8 million in revenue and a $168 million loss last year and wants to expand sales of its Digit humanoid. Agility Robotics

Unitree founder Wang Xingxing said at the China International Import Expo in Shanghai that the company's humanoids use OpenAI's GPT-6 to paint and play chess without prior training; Unitree showed videos but no live demonstration. Unitree is also forming a joint venture with Kunlun Manufacturing, an energy equipment unit of China National Petroleum Corporation, and Beijing Fanjie Intelligent Technology to build inspection and emergency response robots for oil and gas sites. Kunlun will hold 60 percent, Unitree and Fanjie 20 percent each. Unitree and GPT-6 · Unitree and CNPC

EPFL spin off Embodied AI presented AIR, a wheeled dual arm humanoid that learns tasks from teleoperation, at Humanoid Europe 2026 and reports a 95% task success rate in paid industrial pilots. DEEP Robotics deployed humanoid robots for traffic control, patrols and crowd guidance at the 2026 Hangzhou Marathon. Figure AI is hiring an overnight coordinator in Santa Clara to keep its humanoid robots working, paying $40 to $45 an hour. Embodied AI · DEEP Robotics · Figure AI

Hanwha Systems is expected to lead a 70 billion won commitment in robot dog maker LionRobotics' 100 billion won Series B at a 600 billion won pre money valuation, ChosunBiz reports. Aptiv says its computing platform for embodied intelligence has design wins with several Chinese robotics companies and will enter mass production, and it disclosed a Chinese humanoid robot project. LionRobotics · Aptiv

SteelReel AI keeps an atlas of bipedal humanoid robots, searchable by model, manufacturer, country and debut, with every field tied to a cited source. Humanoid robotics atlas

Nvidia

At the Conference on Robot Learning in Austin, Nvidia introduced the GR00T 2 world action model, Isaac Lab 3.0, Newton simulation updates and new benchmarks for precise industrial tasks. Tianji Intelligence's GENTO brand showed a 21 degree of freedom dexterous hand at the same conference, where Nvidia ran GR00T 2 on a Tianji Marvin Pro dual arm robot. Skild and Nvidia introduced Steel, a GPU accelerated physics solver for Newton and Isaac Lab; in Skild's tests it had 3.8 times the throughput of PhysX across 20 robot learning tasks. GR00T 2 · GENTO · Steel

Nvidia released four open weight Cosmos 3 Nano world models for interactive simulation of driving and two arm robot work, each with 16 billion trainable parameters. Cosmos 3 Nano

At AI Day Seoul, Nvidia robotics chief Deepu Talla presented production line simulation with Hyundai, door polishing robots with Doosan and digital twins with SK. At a forum in Seoul, Nvidia announced an investment in AI interconnect startup Point2 and planned investments in Motif Technologies, robotics company RLWRLD and Upstage. AI Day Seoul · Korean startups

Physical AI models and data

Google DeepMind introduced Gemini Robotics 2.5, a vision language action model tested on more than 200 tasks, with 30% to 100% higher task success rates and 20% to 30% faster completion than earlier models, the company reports. Apptronik's Apollo 2 reached a 96% success rate sorting automotive parts at Mercedes Benz sites in Hungary and Germany. DeepMind also released ASIMOV Jailbreak, an open source safety benchmark. Hugging Face released LeRobot v0.7.0, which adds robot control through language commands, streaming training from large datasets and support for large world action models. Gemini Robotics 2.5 · LeRobot v0.7.0

Robbyant, the embodied AI company within Ant Group, open sourced LingBot-Touch, a tactile foundation model trained on nearly 5,000 hours of real world data. RoboColosseum, developed with Hugging Face, the BitRobot Foundation, the Singapore Embodied AI Centre and NUS, tests physical AI models on more than 100 real robots and has run over 20,000 trials. LingBot-Touch · RoboColosseum

Runway released Praxis-1, a 27 billion parameter world action model, under the Apache 2.0 license on 11 November, with model weights, inference and fine tuning code and support for Hugging Face, LeRobot, vLLM Omni and NVIDIA hardware. The Institute of Foundation Models at MBZUAI released PAN 2, a 29B parameter world model that simulates the results of text based actions as video for physical AI, robotics and agent research; its weights, training code and inference code are also under Apache 2.0. Runway Praxis-1 · PAN 2

Physicl, founded by former nfinite CEO Alex de Vigan, raised a $10 million seed round from Inovia Capital for simulations and synthetic training data; its Studio product has 10,000 3D environments. Serve Robotics launched Physical AI Services to sell its robot connectivity and data tools to other robot makers, with Bedrock Robotics as a customer. Cainiao is opening dozens of warehouse and delivery scenarios to AI and robotics companies for training and testing. Physicl · Serve Robotics · Cainiao

YYForce showed on Mediacorp's Meeting AI programme that teaching a Unitree G1 to pick up and move a cup took 40 human demonstrations and about eight hours of training. Workforce provider 1840 & Company says AI training work now includes first person video and physical demonstrations for robotics. San Francisco based Memories.ai is building a standard pipeline that collects, processes and annotates first person video for robotics and physical AI training, and uses NVIDIA Cosmos to interpret video and tailor datasets. Atos and French research institute Inria will work together on physical AI, robotics and digital twins. YYForce · 1840 & Company · Memories.ai · Atos and Inria

Autonomous driving and delivery

Tesla launched its robotaxi service in San Antonio on 9 November, adding to limited areas of Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Miami and Orlando; Waymo already runs driverless rides in the city. Elon Musk says Tesla will reduce or end Cybertruck production at Gigafactory Texas around mid 2027 to make room for more Cybercab production. San Antonio · Cybertruck and Cybercab

TIER IV released five open source end to end driving models through Autoware, including NVIDIA Alpamayo 2 Edge. With Shunan Bulk Terminal, it plans driverless dump truck transport at Japan's Port of Tokuyama Kudamatsu by the end of 2028. Humble Robotics raised $51 million led by Obvious Ventures for self driving trucks without cabs and plans customer pilots in the first quarter of 2027. TIER IV models · TIER IV at Tokuyama · Humble Robotics

UK delivery company PORT raised €14.5 million from the EBRD, Balnord and others and is developing a robotic delivery system with Royal Mail. South Korean company URobotics raised about $30 million in a Series A co led by Kiwoom Investment and K2 Investment Partners for autonomous mobility and whole body control. PORT · URobotics

Drones

Zipline raised $1.5 billion at a $21.5 billion valuation from investors led by Paradigm, WCM Investment Management and Layer Global, and Walmart will add 300 Zipline delivery sites. Alphabet's Wing will invest up to $125 million over two years in drone manufacturing in Fort Worth, Texas, with up to 100 jobs. Zipline · Wing

Axon will invest about $1.2 billion in Skydio at a $5.2 billion pre money valuation and become its exclusive public safety distributor in the US and Canada; the deals are expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2026 and the first quarter of 2027. Axon and Skydio

Skyways launched Skyreach, a long range autonomous VTOL cargo aircraft that can fly more than 1,300 miles, with customer flights from December. The FAA authorized Skyways to fly beyond visual line of sight from the Louisiana coast to offshore sites, for a mission with Shell Pipeline Company. DJI introduced the Matrice 5T enterprise drone with LiDAR, mmWave radar and thermal imaging. Skyreach · Skyways and the FAA · DJI

Defense

Ukraine founded, London headquartered UFORCE raised $700 million in a Series A at a $6 billion valuation, co led by Valor Equity Partners and the UK National Wealth Fund with the US Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund. The money goes to manufacturing in Ukraine and allied countries, research and development, and production of autonomous air, land and sea systems. Munich based SE3 raised $30 million in a Series A led by Accel for software that combines data from drones and ground vehicles into 3D battlefield maps and supports autonomous navigation and fleet coordination; it works under contracts with the Bundeswehr and customers in Ukraine. UFORCE · SE3

TEKEVER will open its first Nordic site in Odense, Denmark, and Denmark's EIFO joins its $580 million Series D, announced at a $6.4 billion valuation. TYTAN Technologies opened an interceptor drone plant in Munich that it says can build up to 3,000 interceptors a month; it did not publish current output or orders. Valkyrie Dynamics raised €1 million in pre seed funding from Hexa for Heimdall, a radar seeker for drone interceptors. TEKEVER · TYTAN · Valkyrie Dynamics

The Pentagon gave Machina Labs a $9 million, 18 month trial to build metal airframes for LUCAS attack drones with AI powered robotic arms. Nidus Technologies raised $30 million across pre seed and seed rounds led by Costanoa and Kleiner Perkins to automate wire harness production for defense customers. XTEND AI Robotics says its subsidiary Performance Rotors received an $8.3 million order from an Asia Pacific defense customer. Machina Labs · Nidus · XTEND

The UK Ministry of Defence announced a £90 million framework with Ocean Infinity Solutions for Royal Navy drones, sensors and AI systems to monitor the North Atlantic, detect Russian submarines and protect undersea cables, as part of the Atlantic Bastion plan. A Center for Security and Emerging Technology report on more than 2,000 Chinese PLA robotics procurement requests from October 2022 to December 2025 finds ground, maritime and space systems, with most platforms still human controlled and focused on research and development. Atlantic Net · PLA robotics

Homes and lawns

Amazon formed a Personal Robotics Group to develop a new home robot, with staff from its Astro project, after buying Fauna Robotics in March. Amazon's Ring unveiled the $249.99 Ring Drone Cam for indoor security and the $999.99 Ring Rover Cam for business patrols; the Rover ships on 16 December and the Drone Cam is planned for 27 January 2027, pending FCC authorization. Amazon home robot · Ring Drone Cam

PrimeBOT says it has produced its 10,000th personal robot, 14 days after reaching 5,000. Realbotix launched Echo tabletop humanoids from $11,950, with US deliveries planned for late 2027. Greenzie says mowers using its autonomy software have covered more than 255,000 miles for over 200 commercial customers. Fibocom is showing robotic mower architectures and AI companion device designs at electronica 2026 in Munich, and says Suntek, which uses its technology, sells a monocular vision mower in Europe and has its stereo vision and RTK model in mass production, with sales expanding into North America. PrimeBOT · Realbotix · Greenzie · Fibocom · Suntek mowers

Factories, construction and deals

Munich based Agile Robots raised $500 million in a round led by SoftBank, with participation from Nvidia, at a valuation of $8.5 billion. The money goes to US expansion, new industrial applications and manufacturing in Bavaria. Agile Robots

Path Robotics raised $300 million in a Series E led by Georgian at a $2.45 billion valuation to expand robotic welding, after annual recurring revenue grew 17 fold in 18 months. Construction robotics companies raised about $1.6 billion in 2026 through 29 October, more than three times the previous peak, with Bedrock Robotics at $870 million across two rounds. Path Robotics · Construction robotics

ABB Robotics is supplying more than 1,700 robots for BMW Group's Neue Klasse electric vehicle production in Munich and Tiexi, China, for welding, gluing, riveting and assembly. MasTec will deploy Gritt's AI robotic arms, which attach to skid steers and forklifts, on utility scale solar projects in several US states after tests on live sites. HANGCHA unveiled five LINGTRA AI forklift robots powered by its LogiMind industrial AI model. ABB and BMW · MasTec and Gritt · HANGCHA

SoftBank and ABB are considering a separate ownership structure for the China business after Beijing blocked their $5.4 billion robotics deal; ABB is also weighing another buyer for it. Ati Robotics says the US Department of War conditionally approved five of its platforms, including the Sherpa Mecha humanoid, for continued US sale after a national security review. SoftBank and ABB · Ati Robotics

Seattle venture firm Ascend closed its $17 million third fund for early stage physical AI, robotics, energy, defense and hardware startups, with FirstLook Partners as its first institutional investor. Innovatrics' venture arm Biometric Ventures and Zero One Hundred will invest together in biometric systems that verify people who operate robots and automated equipment, and say they have made a first joint investment. Chinese robot startup Wujingdongli shut down eight months after its founding, leaving 30 to 40 employees owed about 8 million yuan, as investment in China's physical AI sector declines. Ascend · Innovatrics · Wujingdongli

Medical robots

Mosaic Intelligence Labs, founded by Stanford researchers, came out of stealth with $47 million in seed funding for sensing, AI and robotic tools that help surgeons navigate blood vessels. Zimmer Biomet introduced Surgeon-Guided Autonomy, a framework for orthopedic surgery that is not a product on sale. Tokyo based BionicM raised about $4.5 million in a first Series B close ahead of the 2027 US launch of its ASISTA powered prosthetic knee. Mosaic · Zimmer Biomet · BionicM

Also

Viam will host a two day robotics hackathon in New York on 13 and 14 November with Intel. Viam