US and European robots

The West raises the money and China ships the robots. Figure, Agility and Tesla shipped about 150 humanoids each in 2025 Omdia estimate, about 450 between them, while Unitree alone shipped more than 5,500. Yet Figure is valued at US$39 billion, more than anyone in China was worth until Unitree listed. What the Western companies are selling today is a bet on robot brains, on factories that are mostly still empty, and on a handful of paying pilots. This chapter shows you which bets have evidence behind them.

The field on one screen

Three facts frame everything below. First, the money is enormous and concentrated: a few strategic investors (NVIDIA through NVentures, Jeff Bezos, SoftBank, Amazon) appear on almost every cap table, and the robot brain labs re-rate about three times per round verified. Second, the shipments are tiny: every Western maker's stated factory capacity (Tesla 1 million a year, Figure 12,000, Agility 10,000, Hyundai 30,000) runs one to three orders of magnitude ahead of what it shipped verified capacities. Third, the paying work is narrow: totes at GXO, sheet metal and parts sequencing at BMW, napkins at Din Tai Fung. Hold those three together whenever a valuation headline tempts you to think the market has decided.

Nine robots to know

Seven humanoids, one dog and one pair of arms on a table. Each card links to a rigged drawing and a spec sheet. Every drawing uses one scale, 352 units per metre, so you can compare them in the line-up near the end. Heights are from maker pages unless chipped otherwise.

• Humanoid · factory and homeFigure 03Figure AI · San Jose1.73 m61 kgprice not listed
• Humanoid · industrialApollo 2Apptronik · Austin1.73 mlegs or wheelsprice not public
• Humanoid · homeNEO1X Technologies · Palo Alto1.68 m30 kgUS$20,000
• Humanoid · general purposeOptimusTesla · Austin, Fremont1.73 mGen 3 unrevealedUS$20k to US$30k target
• Humanoid · logisticsDigitAgility Robotics · Salem, Oregon1.75 m (D4), 1.81 m (D5)~US$8,500/month
• Humanoid · factoryAtlasBoston Dynamics · Waltham1.90 m56 DoFbelow ~US$320k est.
• Quadruped · inspectionSpotBoston Dynamics · Waltham0.84 m tall2,000+ units
• Humanoid · industrial4NE1Neura Robotics · Metzingen1.80 m80 kgprice not public
• Bimanual stationDyna stationDyna Robotics · Redwood Citytwo 6-axis armsunder US$50k TCO target

Figure AI: build every part yourself

Figure AI of San Jose was founded in 2022 by Brett Adcock, who had earlier founded the jobs marketplace Vettery and the air-taxi maker Archer Aviation. It raised more than US$1 billion at a US$39 billion post-money valuation on 16 Sep 2025 verified, led by Parkway with Brookfield, NVIDIA, Macquarie, Intel Capital, LG, Salesforce, T-Mobile Ventures and Qualcomm. Total money raised is about US$1.9 billion by one count and about US$2.34 billion by another contested. No new priced round appeared in 2026; on 3 Sep 2026 the cloud firm Nscale made an undisclosed strategic investment alongside a compute deal for up to 100,000 NVIDIA Vera Rubin GPUs in Texas from the second half of 2027, with an initial US$3.5 billion commitment verified.

Adcock's one-line strategy is "we can't outsource AI for the same reason we don't outsource actuators." Figure designs its own motors and actuators, battery, sensors, firmware, robot brain and factory. The reason is coupling: the brain's control rate, the camera latency and the hand's sense of touch all depend on each other, and Figure wants to tune them together rather than negotiate with three suppliers.

The brain: Helix

Helix is Figure's vision-language-action model, and its three versions trace the whole field's direction in eighteen months. Helix v1 (20 Feb 2025) was a dual-system design: a 7-billion-parameter vision-language model thinking at 7 to 9 Hz, feeding an 80-million-parameter motor policy at 200 Hz, trained on about 500 hours of teleoperation and controlling only the upper body verified. Helix 02 (27 Jan 2026) added a third layer, a 10-million-parameter whole-body controller running at 1 kHz, trained entirely in simulation across 200,000+ parallel environments, so the robot could walk and manipulate at once verified. Helix 2.5 (17 Sep 2026) threw out the pretrained language model and pretrained from scratch on human video instead.

The factory and the customers

BotQ, unveiled 15 Mar 2025, is Figure's own plant: a first line rated at 12,000 robots a year, 150+ networked workstations on custom software, 50+ in-process inspection points, and a goal of 100,000 robots over four years verified. By 29 Apr 2026 Figure said it had delivered 350+ Figure 03s and moved from building one a day to one an hour in under 120 days verified. That is the fastest mass production ramp any Western maker has published, and it still means a few hundred robots in 2026 against a 12,000 line.

The flagship customer is BMW Spartanburg. Figure 02 loaded sheet metal in the body shop on 10-hour shifts for about 11 months, supporting 30,000+ BMW X3s and 90,000+ parts over about 1,250 operating hours, before retiring in Nov 2025 verified. Figure 03 moved to Hall 52 logistics in Jun 2026, picking parts from unsorted bins into sequencing trolleys verified. Catalyst Brands (JCPenney, Aéropostale, Brooks Brothers) signed a commercial agreement on 26 May 2026, starting at a Reno distribution centre, units and price undisclosed verified. BMW reportedly pays about US$25 per robot operating hour unverified.

Apptronik: own the body, rent the brain

Apptronik of Austin spun out of the University of Texas Human Centered Robotics Lab in 2016 and worked on NASA's Valkyrie before building Apollo. Chief executive Jeff Cardenas runs 350+ people verified. Its Series A grew in three steps, US$350 million (Feb 2025), about US$403 million more (Mar 2025, adding Mercedes-Benz) and US$520 million (11 Feb 2026, adding AT&T Ventures, John Deere and Qatar Investment Authority), to more than US$935 million and about US$1 billion raised overall verified. The last step valued it at US$5 billion (CNBC), about US$5.3 billion (TechCrunch) or more than US$5.5 billion (Bloomberg) contested.

Apptronik's strategy is the opposite of Figure's. It builds the body and the force-controlled actuators (35 electric actuator designs iterated, a "patented" design claimed at 90%+ energy efficiency company claim) and owns the customer. It partners out the brain to Google DeepMind and the factory to the contract manufacturer Jabil. The bet is that robot brains become a commodity, so capital spent on your own brain is capital wasted.

The brain is Gemini Robotics. Apptronik partnered with Google DeepMind on 19 Dec 2024, and Apollo is the body DeepMind trains on. Apollo 2 fleets gather data in a roughly 90,000 sq ft Robot Park in Austin and in Robot Parks inside DeepMind, Mercedes-Benz and GXO verified. DeepMind's own numbers for Gemini Robotics 2 whole-body picking on Apollo (Jul 2026) show where the ceiling is today: 68.4% from a table, 76.3% from a shelf, 45.7% from the floor company numbers. Apptronik keeps its own lower layers: Artemis for perception, planning, controls and safety, and Fleet Connect for fleet monitoring. Commercial volumes at Mercedes are targeted for 2027 unverified, and capacity is under 1,000 units unverified.

1X NEO: the home robot with a human inside

1X began as Halodi Robotics in Norway in 2014 and renamed itself in 2022 unverified. Chief executive Bernt Børnich is an actuator engineer. Confirmed funding is about US$136.5 million, including a US$100 million Series B at US$820 million post-money in Jan 2024 led by EQT Ventures verified. What happened next is disputed. One dossier says a raise of up to US$1 billion at about US$10 billion has been "in talks" since Sep 2025 without closing; another says the raise failed, bringing in less than half the target, and that SoftBank was negotiating a majority stake at about US$6 billion in Aug 2026 contested.

NEO's brain is Redwood, a vision-language-action model of about 160 million parameters that runs near 5 Hz on the robot and works offline parameter count unverified. When Redwood fails, Expert Mode takes over: a 1X employee in the US drives the robot through a VR headset, with the owner approving each session, a light on the robot's head showing it is live, and every session becoming training data. Since 12 Jan 2026 a world model predicts the visual result of an action before NEO takes it, and a World Model Lab opened on 4 Jun 2026 verified.

That is the business model and the data strategy at once, and it is the most honest design in the field. The Wall Street Journal's Joanna Stern found every household task in her Oct 2025 demo was teleoperated secondary report, and the "60 to 70% autonomy at launch" figure has no primary source contested. 1X also builds its own motors, batteries, structures and transmissions in a 58,000 sq ft Hayward factory opened on 30 Apr 2026, rated at 10,000 units a year with a target of 100,000+ a year by the end of 2027 verified.

Tesla Optimus: the loudest promise

Optimus has been a Tesla programme since 2021. Milan Kovac, its first public face, left in Jun 2025 and Ashok Elluswamy from the self-driving team took over verified. The record is a gap between words and units. Tesla targeted 5,000 robots in 2025 and built "several hundred"; Omdia counted about 150 shipped Omdia. Musk guided 50,000 to 100,000 for 2026 said, widely doubted. Tesla claims "over 1,000 units for Tesla facilities" while a blog tally puts 1,000 to 1,200 inside Fremont and Giga Texas with zero external sales contested. The third-generation robot was still unrevealed on 24 Sep 2026.

The engineering lesson is in the actuators and the bill of materials. Tesla chose linear roller-screw actuators for the big leg joints because a screw survives the shock of footfalls better than a small gearbox, and those screws are the hardest part to make at volume. Tesla has reportedly ordered about US$685 million of linear actuators from the Chinese supplier Sanhua, roughly enough for 180,000 robots, and Gen 3 is said to be about 70% Chinese content unverified. China's magnet export licences of 4 Apr 2025 slowed Optimus motor output, by Musk's own account verified. The brain is the self-driving recipe: video in, actions out, one end-to-end network.

Agility Digit: the one with a paying contract

Agility Robotics of Salem, Oregon, founded in 2015, is led by Peggy Johnson with co-founder Jonathan Hurst as Chief Robot Officer, about 450 staff verified. It raised more than US$390 million from Amazon, DCVC, SoftBank, Schaeffler, Foxconn, NVIDIA and others, then agreed on 24 Jun 2026 to go public by SPAC merger with Churchill Capital Corp XI at about US$2.5 billion pre-money, raising more than US$620 million under the ticker AGLT, with close expected by the end of 2026 verified. The filing is the only public window into a Western humanoid maker's finances: about US$100 million of 2025 cash burn, no disclosed revenue, more than US$300 million of multi-year Digit 5 orders covering 1,000 robots on three-year contracts, and 30 customers in the pipeline verified. The 1,000-robot customer is unnamed.

Agility's customers are the most concrete in the West. GXO signed the first formal humanoid RaaS contract in 2024 at a Spanx facility in Flowery Branch, Georgia, where Digits moved 100,000+ totes at about 98% accuracy by Nov 2025 verified. Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada runs 7 Digits on RaaS unloading parts totes at its RAV4 plant (Feb 2026) verified; Schaeffler is a customer and investor; Amazon has run pilots. The fleet has logged 65,000+ operating hours verified.

Boston Dynamics: Atlas, Spot and a captive buyer

Boston Dynamics of Waltham, Massachusetts, founded in 1992, is now 100% owned by Hyundai Motor Group, which bought 80% from SoftBank in 2021 for about US$880 million and the last ~9.65% for US$325 million in Jun 2026, implying about US$3.4 billion verified. Revenue was about US$130 million in 2025, almost all from the Spot dog and the Stretch box-unloader verified. Robert Playter was chief executive as of Jan 2026 current role unverified. Its chief technology officer, Aaron Saunders, left in Nov 2025 to run hardware at Google DeepMind.

Hyundai is owner, factory builder, actuator supplier (through Hyundai Mobis, framework signed 7 Jan 2026) and buyer at once, which makes it the clearest captive customer in robotics. The Mobis release says actuators are "more than 60%" of a humanoid's material cost verified. All 2026 Atlas output goes to Hyundai and Google DeepMind; outside customers wait until 2027 verified.

Atlas (electric)

Spot

Spot is the Western legged robot that already earns money: 2,000+ units in 40+ countries verified, used for gauge reading, thermal checks and site patrols. Spot 5.2 software adds "embodied AI" for factories, and its visual inspection feature (AIVI) now runs on Gemini Robotics verified. Stretch, the wheeled box-unloader with a suction gripper, moves about 500 parcels an hour in 20+ facilities including DHL, Maersk, Gap, H&M and Otto verified. Neither is a humanoid, and together they pay for the Atlas programme. The price list for Spot is not in this chapter's sources.

Neura Robotics: Europe's full-stack bet, with Tether money

Neura Robotics of Metzingen, near Stuttgart, was founded on 26 Mar 2019 by David Reger, who still runs it. It already sells cobots (MAiRA, LARA) and a household robot (MiPA), and 4NE1 sits on top of that family. On 10 Jun 2026 it announced a Series C of up to US$1.4 billion, in milestone-gated tranches, from Tether, Qualcomm, Amazon, NVIDIA, Bosch, Schaeffler, the European Investment Bank and others verified. Whether Tether led is disputed, and so is the valuation: about US$7 billion by CNBC's figure and about €4 billion by Wikipedia's contested. The order book "exceeds $1 billion" and the 2026 plan was 6,000 humanoids company claims.

Neura is buying its supply chain inside Germany: ACTIVE Shuttle from Bosch Rexroth (13 Aug 2026), ADLATUS Robotics (24 Aug 2026), and earlier B.A.H., ek robotics and Huber Automotive's development arm verified. That sells well to European buyers wary of Chinese parts. The crypto link matters to you: Tether's chief executive Paolo Ardoino described the investment in terms of edge intelligence and "machine native economic systems" that run "without centralized intermediaries" verified. It is the clearest case so far of a stablecoin treasury funding a humanoid maker. It is also a statement of intent, and no product in this chapter yet pays or gets paid on a blockchain.

Dyna Robotics: two arms, one boring job, a paying customer

Dyna Robotics of Redwood City, founded in 2024, is the counter-example to everything above. Lindon Gao and York Yang co-founded Caper AI, whose smart carts sold to Instacart for US$350 million in 2021; Jason Ma came from Google DeepMind verified. It raised a US$23.5 million seed at about US$100 million (Mar 2025) and a US$120 million Series A (15 Sep 2025), US$143.5 million in total verified; one source puts the Series A valuation above US$600 million while the company did not disclose it contested.

Dyna-2 is the other big human-to-robot transfer claim of 2026. It was pretrained on 1 million+ hours of egocentric video, with 3D hand-pose tracking used as the action labels. Mean normalised performance across 14 tasks rose from 20% to 28% to 45% to 53% as pretraining grew from 1,000 to 10,000 to 100,000 to 1 million hours, and on zero-shot customer sites it passed 87% against DYNA-1's 46% company claims.

Who owns the brain

Every company above has made one decision: build the robot brain, rent it, or buy it from a robot brain company. Figure, Tesla, 1X, Agility and Dyna build their own. Apptronik and Boston Dynamics rent Google DeepMind's. Physical Intelligence, Skild AI and NVIDIA sell to anyone and own no robot. Figure 15.11 draws the three routes and the one thing that decides who wins: where the data goes.

Four ways to stay powered

A robot that works one shift is worth a third of one that works three. The Western makers chose four different answers to the same battery problem, and the choice shows up directly in paid hours per day. Figure 15.12 runs all six robots through one 24-hour day from a full battery.

The rest of the field

Short cards for the other names in the field. Three of them (Persona, Foundation and Engineered Arts) are outside this primer's research files, so their lines carry no numbers; check them before you quote anything.

To scale

Side by side

Read the table by its empty cells. The Western makers publish heights and weights and hide prices, degrees of freedom and battery sizes. The only prices a buyer can act on today are NEO's US$20,000 and US$499 a month, Agility's reported RaaS rate, and Figure's stated home lease plan. For any pilot deployment you broker, the missing cells are your first questions.

What the Western robots teach

Five patterns repeat across the nine robots.

1. Maintenance is priced inside the rental. Agility charges about US$36,000 a year for software and maintenance on a purchased Digit, and Dyna says every new site needs weeks to months of engineers. Those are the best public anchors for what an independent after-sales or third-party repair service would compete with.
2. Real paid work is narrow and boring. Totes, parts sequencing, napkins. The robot with the clearest return on investment in this chapter has no legs.
3. Capacity is a press release. A 12,000-robot line that built a few hundred, a 10,000-robot RoboFab building under 100. Judge a maker by delivered units and operating hours per robot per day.
4. Humans are still in the loop. NEO ships with Expert Mode, Apollo trains in Robot Parks with teleoperators, Tesla's party robots were teleoperated. Every autonomy claim needs its intervention rate next to it.
5. Everyone buys Chinese parts or fears the magnet licence. Optimus is reportedly about 70% Chinese content, Tesla's motors stalled on China's magnet rules, and 1X and Figure build motors in-house partly to reduce that exposure.

Terms in this chapter