Robotics Startups Hope The AI Era Means Their Time Has Come

Robots have become increasingly powerful and common in recent years, but the most successful examples don’t quite evoke the droids from . IRobot Corp.’s Roomba vacuums and the Kiva robots that help run Amazon.com Inc. warehouses represent significant technical achievements, but they’re more like automated appliances than AI-powered companions.

Attempts to satisfy the public’s hunger for more personable robots have sometimes disappointed. In 2021, when Elon Musk unveiled Tesla Inc.’s plans for a humanoid robot, there was no demonstration of any kind of technology. Instead, a human dressed in a white skintight robot suit and a black helmet danced across the stage, earning Musk a round of mockery. But people who work in the field say recent advances in AI models and computer vision software mean robots that physically resemble humans could soon be a reality. Humanoid robots that can carry out a wide range of tasks—in contrast to a robotic arm that deftly repeats a single function in a factory—could be particularly useful.

The funding landscape remains brutal: Venture capital firms invested less in startups in 2023 than in any year since 2019, and humanoid robotics companies raised only a quarter of the capital they attracted in 2018. But the number of deals increased sharply, suggesting investors are getting excited about early-stage companies.

Earlier this month, the incubator and early-stage investor Y Combinator included robotics and machine learning in a list of areas it was interested in. Diana Hu, a partner at Y Combinator, says she believes it’s becoming cheaper and easier for startups to build advanced robots. “It’s finally possible to make robots with human-level perception,” Hu says.

On Feb. 23, Bloomberg News reported that humanoid robot startup Figure AI raised about $675 million in a funding round, with Jeff Bezos, Nvidia Corp. and other investors valuing it at about $2 billion. The company has said it hopes its product will be able to perform tasks that are dangerous to humans or hard to hire for, including warehouse jobs. The Norwegian robotics startup 1X Technologies AS raised  $100 million earlier this year. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, is an investor in both companies.

Amazon, which reshaped the way robotics are used in logistics with its 2012 purchase of Kiva Systems, has begun to test bipedal robots made by Agility Robotics Inc., a startup it backed in 2022. The humanoid machine, which has glowing white eyes and paddles instead of hands, is configured to grab bins from a shelf and carry them to a conveyor. Agility is planning a new factory to ramp up production; it’s working to develop robots that can eventually graduate to complicated tasks such as unloading trucks and taking apart pallets of merchandise.

Lux Capital’s Farshchi says the fundraising statistics don’t capture the full extent of the surge in robotics. More entrepreneurs are focused on it, he says, but they haven’t yet announced their ambitions or how much cash they’ve collected from investors. “Those companies that are going to go out and raise many, many billions of dollars have been getting off the ground over the past year,” Farshchi says. “They’re bubbling up under the surface.”

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