What's the read on RaaS pricing actually undercutting outright purchase long-term?

[barbara.jones]

@mia.weber This is a great summary, thanks. Self-reported deployment and uptime numbers from humanoid companies are inherently hard to independently verify, since there's no standardized, third-party reporting requirement yet - a healthy dose of skepticism toward company press releases is reasonable until independent data catches up. The 'labor shortage' framing in a lot of humanoid robotics pitch decks is doing real narrative work - it's a genuinely true dynamic in some sectors like warehousing and logistics, but it's also a much more palatable framing than 'labor cost reduction,' and both are usually true simultaneously.

[barbara50]

@barbara.jones From what I've seen: Insurance and liability frameworks for humanoids working directly around people are still immature in most jurisdictions, which is a real, under-discussed constraint on deployment speed that gets far less attention than the flashier technology headlines. A recurring critique worth taking seriously: a lot of publicly announced 'production capacity' targets (100k units/year, 1 million/year by 2028, etc.) are aspirational manufacturing targets, not confirmed sales or deployment numbers, and the gap between the two has historically been large in hardware industries.

[dubois35]

+1 to this. Worth adding: Pilot-to-contract conversion rate is one of the most important and least publicly available numbers in this industry - a company running many flashy pilots isn't the same as a company converting those pilots into multi-year recurring revenue. Chinese humanoid startups reportedly accounted for around 65% of deal volume in 2025, while US companies still won the largest individual rounds, with at least three raises exceeding $400 million - deal count and deal size tell different stories depending on which region you're looking at.

[chloe_jack]

This raises a question for me - Global humanoid robotics funding reached roughly $8.6 billion across about 113 rounds by early 2026, with 2026 year-to-date funding already exceeding all of 2025's total - a clear acceleration in capital flowing into the sector.

[karen_kim]

This is a great summary, thanks. Q1 2026 alone saw about $2.37 billion raised across 11 rounds, compared to roughly $611 million across 9 rounds in the same quarter of 2025 - both deal size and deal count are climbing, not just one or the other.