How do you model demand elasticity as unit prices keep dropping?

[sarah.santos3]

@rtorres This matches what I've seen too. 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. 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.

[joseph_sing]

This is exactly the kind of context I was looking for. 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.

[scott21]

One nitpick - The humanoid robot market is estimated at roughly $5.41 billion in 2026, with projections reaching around $50 billion by 2035 (about 28% CAGR) - a genuinely huge projected growth curve, and also exactly the kind of number worth treating with healthy skepticism given how young and unproven the underlying revenue base still is.

[yuki71]

Genuine beginner question - 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. Kind of makes me think about how different this all looked even three years ago.

[giulia.roberts4]

@yuki71 This matches something I went through recently. The humanoid robot market is estimated at roughly $5.41 billion in 2026, with projections reaching around $50 billion by 2035 (about 28% CAGR) - a genuinely huge projected growth curve, and also exactly the kind of number worth treating with healthy skepticism given how young and unproven the underlying revenue base still is.

[ashley_flor]

@giulia.roberts4 Worth being a little skeptical of the marketing angle here. 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.

[dchen]

@ashley_flor I see it a little differently. Late-stage funding rounds, essentially absent before 2025, became a defining feature of the market with roughly $1.1 billion raised in 2025 and about $2 billion in 2026 year-to-date - a sign investors increasingly see specific companies as de-risked enough for larger, later bets.

[shill]

I see it a little differently. Automotive OEMs becoming the leading early-adopter vertical isn't really about cars specifically - it's about those companies already having structured facilities, existing automation budgets, and risk tolerance for piloting new equipment at scale. 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.

[tariqlarsen]

@shill I'll believe the stronger version of that claim when it's independently verified. 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. Anyway, good thread - following for more.