How do you think about customer concentration risk for companies with one or two big pilots?

[dubois35]

@jonathan.rao1 I'd push back on this a bit. 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]

Ran into exactly this myself. 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.

[cynthia.muller]

@tariqlarsen To answer this directly: 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.

[erik_novi]

I see it a little differently. 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.

[giulia.roberts4]

Genuinely curious - 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.

[scott.novikova7]

@giulia.roberts4 I can speak to this a bit. 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. 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.

[yuki71]

Minor factual note: 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.

[ivan22]

@yuki71 Just to be precise about one thing: 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.

[karen_kim]

@ivan22 Minor factual note: 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.

[giulia.roberts4]

@karen_kim I'd frame this differently. 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.