Author: Rinat Mirzaitov

Apptronik has raised more than $935 million across an unusually large Series A, giving the Austin-based robotics company substantial resources to manufacture, train, and deploy its Apollo humanoid robot. The financing, supported by Google, Mercedes-Benz and several industrial investors, strengthens Apptronik’s competitive position, but it also raises the standard of evidence the company must now meet. The funding is confirmed. Apollo’s broader commercial readiness is not. Apptronik has named enterprise relationships with Mercedes-Benz, GXO Logistics and Jabil, and Mercedes-Benz has publicly confirmed that it is testing a small number of Apollo robots in production environments. However, there is still no…

Figure AI’s most interesting signal from Brett Adcock’s recent podcast appearance was not the package-sorting livestream, the Figure 4 teaser, or the company’s confidence about future home robots. It was a brief story about a fridge task, in which Adcock said a Figure robot’s success rate improved sharply after the model was trained on additional data from unrelated tasks, a claim that speaks directly to the central commercial question in humanoid robotics: whether Physical AI can generalize across the messy real world. The claim should be treated carefully. Adcock described an internal Figure evaluation, not an independently verified benchmark, customer…