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

[deborah59]

@giulia.roberts4 I'd take that specific number with a grain of salt, honestly. 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. 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.

[chenperez]

Small correction on one detail: 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.

[cynthia.muller]

+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.

[dubois35]

@cynthia.muller Small correction on one detail: 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.

[sharonschmidt]

@dubois35 Small correction on one detail: 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. 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.

[diego.moore6]

@sharonschmidt Short answer: 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. 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.