What we know about how Physical AI gets to market: market intelligence, GTM playbooks, field notes and business case analysis
We cover the robots that sell to businesses and developers, and the models and parts underneath them. Filter by robot type
Industry structure, market opportunities, business models, competition and the supply chain
Forty verified robotics rounds of $50M or more raised $24.6B between September 2025 and September 2026, eight defense companies took $10.4B of it, and the funded companies are hiring partnership leads ahead of marketers
The model layer is consolidating fast, while data, evaluation, fleet operations and safety, the work that makes a robot pay back on a real shift, remain largely unclaimed
The sensing stack decides whether a learned policy holds up on a real floor, and the battery decides how many hours it gets to try, which makes both part of the sales conversation.
Boston Dynamics' move to an all-electric Atlas settled the actuation question for most humanoids, which moved supply risk upstream to rare-earth magnets that China dominates and controls by licence.
American labor costs already justify robots, but buyers hold out for machines that work without a human fallback; in China, cheaper labor weakens the payback case, so state buyers, televised showcases and policy targets create the early demand.
On both sides of the Pacific the robot maker is not automatically the one that keeps the margin; in the US it tends to go to whoever owns the site and the integration, while Chinese makers are chasing price and volume overseas.
By Morgan Stanley's count most of the humanoid supply base already sits in China, and the Japanese and German precision-part makers are now moving their humanoid work closer to Chinese buyers instead of waiting for orders to reach them.
Actuators, and the reducers and screws inside them, are most of what a humanoid costs to build, so the joint supply chain now decides list price, contract structure and margin.
Robots scale first where the environment is controlled, the task is narrow and the buyer can do the math, which is why warehouses, operating rooms and factory lines carry the revenue while farms and homes lag
The buyer, builder and operator map behind every deal
How Physical AI companies enter markets, launch products, build channels, grow developers and sign partners
From Genie 3 to Praxis-1, the world model launches that reached robotics buyers followed one script: a gated preview, named robot partners on day one, open weights for builders, and evidence a robotics engineer can check.
The FCC's rule on foreign-made robots lets authorized models keep selling, but every new model now runs through a Pentagon review tied to U.S. manufacturing, and the first seven robotics exemptions went elsewhere
Every robotics price answers two questions, whose balance sheet holds the robot and what unit the customer pays for, and the contracts that close are the ones that put each risk with the party able to carry it
From hackathons to app stores: community as a sales channel
The sales funnel after the first pilot is signed
Which partners to sign first, and what each one is for
What we hear from founders, operators and investors in the rooms we run, turned into a business point of view
How specific companies price, launch, build channels, partner and commercialize. These companies are not our clients
Unitree shipped more than 5,500 humanoids in 2025, but in the U.S. the trust layer of community, training, repair and security review is built and owned by its distributor RoboStore.
1X used a tier-1 media exclusive to turn a $20,000 home humanoid into a viral launch and a deposit list, but the same coverage made teleoperation the story and left the company defending autonomy for a year.
Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics priced a desktop robot like a gadget, let the community write its software, and reached about 10,000 units in ten months without a sales team or a chore to sell.
Figure used one named plant, a famous cap table and an in-house model and factory to build demand before it had a price list, and its second customer shows the next test is commercial terms.
Agility picked one warehouse workflow, sold it as a monthly service through a logistics operator, and its SEC filing now shows both how far that motion has gone and how much of it is still ahead.
NVIDIA has turned free models, a $3,499 developer kit and a crowded keynote stage into the default starting point for robot companies, while robotics remains a rounding error in its revenue.
Boston Dynamics turned the most famous brand in robotics into three products by standardizing Spot for a channel, tying Stretch to one workflow and making its parent Hyundai the first big Atlas customer.
Integrators, distributors and a certified ecosystem
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Public filings and reporting, our own database of companies and funding rounds, and interviews and panels with founders, operators and investors. Every fact is tied to one of them. If we cannot source it, we do not publish it
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Companies we analyze are not our clients. Client work is published only after the client agrees
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