Automotive OEMs (BMW, Mercedes, BYD, Geely, Toyota) as early adopters - why them first?

[mia.weber]

Pretty much this. One thing to add: 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.

[dchen]

@mia.weber I'd take that specific number with a grain of salt, honestly. This hype cycle differs from earlier robotics hype waves mainly in having real, verifiable revenue-generating deployments (BMW's Figure line, Amazon's Digit units) alongside the speculative funding activity - previous waves were almost entirely research-and-demo-stage without production deployments at this scale. 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.

[erik_novi]

@dchen This matches something I went through recently. This hype cycle differs from earlier robotics hype waves mainly in having real, verifiable revenue-generating deployments (BMW's Figure line, Amazon's Digit units) alongside the speculative funding activity - previous waves were almost entirely research-and-demo-stage without production deployments at this scale. Reminds me a bit of the early drone hobbyist scene, honestly.

[sharonschmidt]

@erik_novi Respectfully, I think this undersells it a bit. 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. Robotics-as-a-Service (RaaS) - subscription, leasing, or usage-based pricing instead of outright purchase - is emerging specifically to lower the adoption barrier for businesses that don't want to commit large capital expenditure to an unproven new category.

[mia.weber]

I'd push back on this a bit. 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.

[jhansen]

@mia.weber Here's the relevant bit as far as I understand it: 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.

[erik_novi]

@jhansen +1 to this. Worth adding: 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. 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.

[dubois35]

@erik_novi Same conclusion I've come to. Also worth noting: 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. 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]

@dubois35 Related question - 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. This whole thread is a good reminder how young this field still is.

[dubois35]

@barbara50 Worth being a little skeptical of the marketing angle here. 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. 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.