Embodied AI

Skild AI Introduces S1 Robotics Foundation Model with In-Context Video Prompting

Robotics foundation model startup Skild AI has unveiled S1, a foundation model capable of learning physical manipulation tasks unseen during pretraining directly from a single video demonstration prompt without fine-tuning. Traditional robotic adaptation typically requires extensive task-specific teleoperation data, domain randomization, and model fine-tuning before a system can reliably execute novel actions. S1 employs in-context prompting to translate visual demonstrations directly into real

Robotics Foundation Model Startup Generalist Raises 98M Led by 8VC

Robotics foundation model startup Generalist AI Inc. has secured $198.2 million in a new equity offering, according to a Form D regulatory filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on August 24. The capital injection comes less than three months after the company closed a $400 million financing round in early June. The financing round was led by venture capital firm 8VC alongside participating existing investors, as reported by Axios. The new transaction elevates Generalist's valu

XPeng Robotics Raises Over 00M at .3B Valuation to Scale Humanoid Robot Production

Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer XPeng has announced that its robotics affiliate raised over $900 million in its first major institutional financing round. The investment values the robotics business at more than $6.3 billion post-money, representing one of the largest single private capital raises in the embodied AI sector to date. The round was led by IDG Capital and Gaorong Ventures, with participation from strategic tech conglomerates Tencent and Alibaba alongside parent firm XPeng Inc

Generalist AI Releases GEN-1.5: One-Shot In-Context Learning for Robotic Manipulation

Robotics research startup Generalist AI announced GEN-1.5, an embodied foundation model capable of learning closed-loop physical manipulation tasks from a single demonstration without gradient updates or fine-tuning. The model adapts through in-context physical prompting, mirroring the few-shot learning dynamics originally identified in autoregressive language models. GEN-1.5 processes multimodal inputs including multi-view video, proprioceptive signals, sensor feeds, and natural language instr

State Data Farms Account for 20% of China's Humanoid Robot Shipments

Government-backed data collection hubs and municipal training centers accounted for roughly 20 percent of China's more than 20,000 humanoid robot shipments last year, according to an analysis from Bernstein. The purchases reflect a national strategy to overcome the primary bottleneck in physical artificial intelligence: the scarcity of high-fidelity physical interaction data needed to train embodied foundation models. Unlike large language models that train on vast public text corpora scraped f

Chinese Humanoid Robot Maker Unitree Surges 629% in 04M Shanghai IPO Debut

Chinese humanoid and quadruped robotics manufacturer Unitree Robotics made its public debut on the Shanghai Stock Exchange STAR Market on Wednesday, August 19, 2026, with shares surging 629% in early morning trading. The listing marks the first pure-play embodied artificial intelligence and humanoid robotics IPO on China's mainland A-share exchange. Unitree priced its initial public offering at 150.80 yuan ($22.36) per share, issuing 40.4 million shares to raise approximately $904 million (4.2

Unitree says its new Superman robot outruns Usain Bolt