What's the most reasonable multi-year forecast you've seen that isn't obviously hype?

[mohammed64]

@thomas65 I don't think that's quite right, for what it's worth. 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.

[byang]

@mohammed64 I see it a little differently. 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. Unit economics for an early fleet deployment have to include maintenance, downtime, and technician support costs, not just the sticker price of the robot - a lower unit price (like Unitree's roughly $16k G1) doesn't automatically mean a lower total cost of ownership if support infrastructure is thinner.

[green28]

I'll believe the stronger version of that claim when it's independently verified. 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. Makes me wonder how this looks in another five years.

[mia.weber]

This matches something I went through recently. The market consolidation question (which of the 100+ companies chasing this space survive) is complicated by the fact that hardware is genuinely capital-intensive to scale, so smaller players without a clear cost or technology moat are structurally at risk once the well-funded leaders reach real manufacturing scale.

[matthew.yamamoto0]

Side note that might be relevant: 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.

[dubois35]

@matthew.yamamoto0 Here's what I know on this: 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.

[freya.smith]

@dubois35 This lines up with my experience. 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.