Robotics Funding Rounds 2025–2026: Who Raised, At What Valuation, And What It Signals

In roughly a twelve-month stretch spanning late 2025 into early 2026, four robotics startups closed or announced funding rounds that individually would have been the largest robotics deal in any prior year. Figure AI raised more than $1 billion at a $39 billion post-money valuation. Skild AI raised $1.4 billion at a valuation above $14 billion, tripling in about seven months. Physical Intelligence raised $600 million at $5.6 billion, then reportedly went back to the market four months later in talks for roughly $1 billion at a valuation above $11 billion. Apptronik raised $520 million at a valuation reported between $5 billion and $5.5 billion, depending on the outlet. Combined, these four rounds alone represent well over $3.5 billion in new capital committed to companies building humanoid robots and the foundation models meant to control them — a scale of investment that, until very recently, was reserved almost exclusively for large-language-model labs. The signal is straightforward: institutional and strategic investors now treat “physical AI” — robots that perceive and act in the real world — as the next platform layer worth betting on at software-company multiples, even though most of these robots are not yet shipping at commercial volume.

What are the biggest robotics funding rounds of 2025–2026?

The table below lines up the four headline rounds side by side. Figures are as reported at announcement; where sources disagree, both figures are shown.

Company	Round / date	Amount raised	Valuation	Lead investors
Figure AI	Series C, Sept. 17, 2025	$1B+	$39B post-money	Parkway Venture Capital, with Brookfield, NVIDIA, Macquarie Capital, Intel Capital
Skild AI	Series C, Jan. 14, 2026	$1.4B	>$14B	SoftBank Group, with NVIDIA’s NVentures, Macquarie Capital, Jeff Bezos
Physical Intelligence	Round, Nov. 20, 2025	$600M	$5.6B	Alphabet’s CapitalG, with Lux Capital, Thrive Capital, Jeff Bezos, Index Ventures, T. Rowe Price
Apptronik	Series A extension, Feb. 11, 2026	$520M (≈$935M total Series A)	~$5–5.5B (reported range)	B Capital and Google, with Mercedes-Benz, PEAK6, AT&T Ventures, John Deere, Qatar Investment Authority

Two things stand out immediately. First, every one of these rounds closed within a nine-month window, which is unusually compressed even by AI-era venture standards. Second, three of the four companies — Figure AI, Apptronik, and to a lesser extent Skild AI — are building or training for humanoid hardware, while Physical Intelligence and Skild AI are explicitly positioning themselves as “brain” companies selling a general-purpose control model that could run on many different robot bodies, not just one manufacturer’s humanoid.

Why did Figure AI’s valuation jump roughly 15x in 18 months?

Figure AI’s Series C, announced September 17, 2025, closed at a $39 billion post-money valuation on more than $1 billion in committed capital, led by Parkway Venture Capital with participation from Brookfield Asset Management, NVIDIA, Macquarie Capital, and Intel Capital, among others. That compares with Figure’s prior Series B in February 2024, which raised $675 million at a $2.6 billion valuation — meaning the company’s valuation multiplied roughly 15-fold in about a year and a half under founder and CEO Brett Adcock. Valuation jumps of that magnitude are rare even in venture-backed AI, and they reflect two forces compounding each other: investors pricing in the long-run addressable market for general-purpose humanoid labor, and a scramble among growth-stage and strategic investors — including chipmakers and infrastructure players like NVIDIA and Brookfield — to secure allocation in a company perceived as a front-runner before the next round closes at an even higher price.

What does Skild AI’s $1.4 billion round say about robot “brains” versus bodies?

Skild AI’s January 14, 2026 Series C raised $1.4 billion at a valuation above $14 billion, led by SoftBank Group with NVIDIA’s venture arm NVentures, Macquarie Capital, and Jeff Bezos (through Bezos Expeditions) joining, alongside existing backers Lightspeed, Felicis, Coatue, and Sequoia Capital doubling down. Multiple outlets described the round as roughly tripling Skild’s valuation in about seven months, though the exact intermediate valuation figure varies somewhat between retrospective summaries. Skild AI, founded in May 2023 by Carnegie Mellon robotics professors and former Meta FAIR researchers Deepak Pathak (CEO) and Abhinav Gupta (President), does not build its own robot hardware. Instead it sells a general-purpose “robot foundation model” intended to be deployed across third-party robot bodies — industrial arms, quadrupeds, humanoids — much as a general-purpose language model can be fine-tuned for many different applications. That a software-layer company with no proprietary hardware line commanded a $14 billion valuation, in the same window that hardware-heavy humanoid makers were raising at similar or higher multiples, suggests investors are hedging across both layers of the stack rather than betting that any single humanoid form factor wins outright.

Is Physical Intelligence’s next round already closed?

Not confirmed as of this writing. Physical Intelligence — co-founded in 2024 by CEO Karol Hausman (a former Google DeepMind staff research scientist), UC Berkeley professor Sergey Levine, Stanford professor Chelsea Finn, and Brian Ichter, Lachy Groom, and Quan Vuong — raised $600 million around November 20, 2025 at a $5.6 billion valuation, led by Alphabet’s growth-investing arm CapitalG with Lux Capital, Thrive Capital, Jeff Bezos, Index Ventures, and T. Rowe Price participating. By late March 2026, Bloomberg and TechCrunch both reported the company was in early-stage talks to raise roughly $1 billion at a valuation exceeding $11 billion — nearly double its November figure just four months earlier — with Founders Fund and Lightspeed Venture Partners said to be in discussions to invest alongside returning backers Thrive Capital and Lux Capital. Both outlets were explicit, however, that the round was still in talks and not confirmed as closed, and no independent source has since confirmed that the deal actually closed. It is fair to describe this as a strong signal of continued investor demand, but not yet a completed transaction, and any figure attached to it should be treated as provisional rather than final.

Why is Apptronik’s valuation reported differently across outlets?

Apptronik’s February 11, 2026 raise of $520 million — bringing its cumulative Series A funding to roughly $935 million — is one of the clearer illustrations of how much variance exists even in well-covered rounds. CNBC reported the resulting valuation at approximately $5 billion; TechCrunch put it closer to $5.3 billion; Bloomberg described it as “more than $5.5 billion.” Rather than pick one figure as authoritative, it’s more honest to treat Apptronik’s valuation as a $5–5.5 billion range as of that announcement. The round was co-led by B Capital, chaired by Howard Morgan, and Google, with existing investors Mercedes-Benz and PEAK6 returning and a notably diverse set of new participants: AT&T Ventures, agricultural-equipment maker John Deere, and the Qatar Investment Authority, a sovereign wealth fund. Apptronik, led by CEO Jeff Cardenas and known for its Apollo humanoid, is a useful case study in how corporate strategics — an automaker, a telecom, an equipment manufacturer, a search giant — are now co-investing alongside traditional venture firms specifically to secure early access to a robot platform they may eventually deploy in their own operations.

Who are the investors placing the biggest bets, and what does that signal?

Across all four rounds, a recognizable set of investor types recurs: sovereign-scale capital (SoftBank leading Skild AI’s round, the Qatar Investment Authority backing Apptronik), chipmakers with a direct stake in robotics compute demand (NVIDIA appears in both Figure AI’s and Skild AI’s rounds via its venture arm), and individual mega-investors making personal bets across competing companies (Jeff Bezos participated in both Skild AI’s and Physical Intelligence’s rounds, backing two rival “brain” companies simultaneously). The fact that Alphabet’s CapitalG led Physical Intelligence’s round while Google co-led Apptronik’s shows one of the largest AI labs hedging across both a foundation-model robotics bet and a humanoid-hardware bet at the same time. Corporate strategics — Mercedes-Benz, John Deere, AT&T Ventures, Brookfield, Macquarie — appear repeatedly too, and their presence typically signals interest in eventual deployment rights or first-look commercial partnerships rather than pure financial return. Taken together, the investor rosters suggest the market has not converged on a single winning company, architecture, or even layer of the stack (hardware versus foundation model) — capital is being spread across multiple bets that could each capture a share of the eventual market.

What does this funding wave signal for the broader robotics market?

Four data points don’t constitute a full market, but the pattern they form is consistent with the broader acceleration covered in our outlook on where physical AI investment is heading: valuations for pre-revenue-at-scale robotics companies are being set less on current unit economics and more on the perceived size of the eventual labor-automation market, similar to how early foundation-model labs were valued before enterprise adoption caught up. For investors without access to these late-stage private rounds, the public-market vehicles for robotics exposure offer one way to track the same trend through listed companies rather than venture allocations. It’s also worth remembering that this capital is flowing into a sector that operates under an increasingly active regulatory backdrop — the EU’s evolving machinery and AI rulebook is one example of the compliance questions that humanoid makers will need to answer well before these valuations can be justified by revenue. And because three of the four companies here are explicitly building for the humanoid form factor, the funding wave is as much a bet on that specific design choice as it is a bet on robotics broadly — a bet that remains unproven at commercial scale.

None of this guarantees these valuations will hold. Private robotics valuations set in 2025–2026 have moved faster than any comparable metric — deployed robot units, revenue, or even public demonstrations — and the gap between valuation and proof points is, by historical venture standards, unusually wide. What is clear is that some of the largest pools of capital in the world — sovereign wealth funds, the largest chipmaker, one of the largest automakers, one of the largest search companies — are now positioned across nearly every major humanoid and robot-foundation-model startup at once, which on its own reshapes the sector’s competitive and capital dynamics going forward. For a fuller sense of how these terms fit together, our glossary of physical AI and robotics terms and our broader Market, Investment & Regulation coverage track how this funding picture continues to evolve.