humanoid-robotics
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Deng Taihua Wants the Robot to Show Up for Work
After two decades at Huawei, AgiBot’s co-founder has a plain test for humanoid robotics: can the machine do useful work again tomorrow?
Peng Zhihui Built a Bicycle That Could Steer Itself. Then He Built a Robot Company.
The online maker known as Zhihui Jun turned a self-driving bicycle and a robotic arm into an audience. At AgiBot, his work faces a harder test: making useful robots again and again.
Grace Brown Is Teaching Robots to Read the Room
The Andromeda founder started with a student-built robot that could ask about her day. Now she is scaling a company around a harder engineering problem: creating machines people actually want in the room.
The New York Fund That Bet on Robots Before the Robots Could Walk
Parkway keeps a short list of bets and a long memory of building companies. That combination led a New York firm of about 15 people to the front of the humanoid-robot and quantum-computing races.
Apptronik
Apptronik is an Austin-based robotics company building Apollo, a general-purpose humanoid robot designed to work alongside people in manufacturing, logistics and other physically demanding settings. Spun out of the University of Texas at Austin's Human Centered Robotics Lab in 2016, the company grew from custom actuator work for NASA into one of the most heavily funded humanoid robot developers, with commercial pilots at Mercedes-Benz and GXO and an AI partnership with Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics team.
Brett Adcock
Brett Adcock is a serial entrepreneur and founder of Figure AI, the humanoid robotics company valued at $39 billion after a $1B+ Series C in September 2025. Raised on a third-generation farm in central Illinois, Adcock built his first web companies at 16, co-founded and sold talent marketplace Vettery to Adecco for ~$100M in 2018, took eVTOL company Archer Aviation public on the NYSE at a $2.7B valuation, then pivoted to what he calls the hardest problem: building general-purpose humanoid robots. Figure's robots now work autonomously on BMW's production floor and have logged over 30,000 vehicles built. In 2025-2026, Adcock simultaneously launched Hark (personal AI hardware, $700M Series A at $6B valuation) and Cover (school weapon-detection tech). He is currently running three companies at once while publicly estimating his net worth at ~$19 billion.