What's actually happening

Realbotix opened $199 reservations for Echo: a silicone-faced Tabletop bust at $11,950 and a stationary Full Body at $59,950, plus AI plans from $19.99 a month. Only 250 units are planned, for delivery in the second half of 2027.

On Tesla's Q3 call, Elon Musk said the company has started 'early production on a high-volume line in Fremont' for Optimus. Deliveries to companies outside Tesla are expected around the end of 2027, with industrial buyers first and homes later.

At its October 12 Paris event, XPeng said it has commissioned a dedicated IRON production line, with mass production by the end of 2026, deliveries from the first half of 2027 and a European rollout in the second half. Stores and malls come first; homes later.

Boston Dynamics named Rohit Prasad, Amazon's former head scientist for Alexa and AGI, as CEO effective October 7. He succeeds interim CEO Amanda McMaster, in place since Robert Playter stepped down in February, as the Hyundai-owned company rolls out commercial Atlas robots.

UBTech says U1 deliveries have started but gives no unit count, and called reports of a store listing showing first deliveries on November 30 'inaccurate'. At its August results it cut the 2026 delivery target to 1,500-2,000 units, against 13,361 orders claimed at launch.

Figure says Helix 2.5 tidied toys, folded towels and made beds in 30 Bay Area homes it had never seen, succeeding 56% of the time zero-shot, up from 9% without its Index pretraining. Figure didn't name the homes or the robot, so this is an evaluation, not a customer pilot.

Digit 5 lifts 50 lb, reaches 7.2 ft and charges in 9 minutes for a 10:1 run-to-charge ratio, with person detection that can make it stop, steer around someone or sit down. Early access is planned for the first half of 2027 and general availability by the end of 2027.

Unitree listed on Shanghai's STAR Market at ¥150.80 a share and closed its first day up about 460%, after rising more than 620% at the peak. The IPO price valued it at about ¥61 billion ($9 billion); intraday, its market value touched ¥445 billion ($66 billion).

The FCC put foreign-produced 'advanced robotic devices', humanoids included, on its Covered List, so new models can't get the equipment authorization needed to sell in the US. Models authorized earlier aren't pulled, and the Department of War can grant exemptions.

In Shenzhen, UBTech unveiled the UWORLD U1 — a silicone-skinned, full-size humanoid built for companionship, not the factory floor. Male (183 cm) and female (168 cm) bodies, 88 degrees of freedom, on-device emotion-aware AI, and encrypted local memory. It is the first lifelike companion sold at scale: three trims from ¥119,800 (~$17,650) to ¥990,000, adults only, with 13,000-plus preorders on JD.com before a price was even announced. The milestone isn't the tech — it's that you can order one.

BMW is moving Figure 03 into live logistics work at its Spartanburg plant — picking unsorted parts and sequencing them into delivery trolleys — after an 11-month Figure 02 pilot that fed sheet metal for more than 30,000 X3s. It's one of the more concrete humanoid deployments going — a named automaker, a named task, on a real production line. The caveat BMW itself implies is the honest one — this is just-in-sequence logistics, not yet the dexterous assembly humanoids are sold on.

Agility Robotics will go public by merging with Churchill Capital Corp XI at a $2.5B valuation, raising about $620M with a Foxconn-led PIPE and listing as "AGLT." It would be the first US-listed pure-play humanoid with real deployments — Digit already logs hours at GXO, Schaeffler, Toyota and Mercado Libre. The SPAC route, and the $2.5B tag against Figure's private $39B, is a tell — this is the grown-up, warehouse end of the field, priced on contracts rather than dreams.

Germany's Neura Robotics closed a Series C of up to $1.4B at a roughly $7B valuation, with Nvidia, Amazon, Qualcomm, Tether and the European Investment Bank on the cap table — Europe's biggest humanoid bet yet. Read the "up to," though — much of the headline is tied to performance milestones, so it's a ceiling, not a wire transfer. Even discounted, it confirms the capital flooding humanoids is now a global, multi-pole race.

Figure's BotQ line now turns out one Figure 03 per hour — up from one a day in under 120 days — and has produced more than 350 units. Throughput, not choreography, is the battleground now, and a claimed 24x ramp is the sector's most credible manufacturing story if it holds. The figure to watch next is how many of those robots are doing paid work versus sitting in inventory.

New York's rollout of the ElliQ companion robot from Intuition Robotics reports a 95% drop in self-reported loneliness — the strongest real-world evidence yet that a talking machine can move the needle on isolation. But clinicians in the same report warn the device can become an excuse to withdraw further, and that a companion AI tuned to agree with you may reinforce exactly the thinking a vulnerable user needs challenged.

1X opened a Hayward, California plant it calls America's first vertically integrated humanoid factory, with capacity for 10,000 NEOs a year. The number that matters sits in the fine print — the entire first-year run sold out within five days of October's preorder launch. Demand for a $20,000 home humanoid is plainly real — even though early NEOs still lean on remote human operators for anything unscripted.

On its Q1 call Tesla pushed the Optimus V3 reveal to mid-2026 and confirmed it's tearing out the Fremont Model S/X line to build robots, with production not starting until late July or August. Musk's own framing — output will move "as fast as the least lucky, slowest, dumbest part" of 10,000 — is the most honest thing said about humanoid timelines all year.

Realbotix says it will deliver 19 robots across March through May, including units to a large telecom client — modest numbers for a public company chasing a Nasdaq uplisting. For the companion segment it's a useful reality check — the most expressive androids on the market still ship in the low double digits, and mostly into hospitality and reception roles, not homes.

Unitree filed for a roughly $610M listing on Shanghai's STAR Market, a landmark first for China's humanoid sector. The numbers are the headline, not the valuation. Unitree shipped 5,500 humanoids in 2025 at about $25,000 each, on $250M of revenue — more units than anyone in the West. China's price-led volume play is the mirror image of Silicon Valley's valuation-led one.

A startup not yet a year old, founded by two ex-Stanford roboticists, hit a $1.15B valuation on "Memo" — a household robot it plans to ship by Thanksgiving but hasn't yet built. Coatue led, with Benchmark and Tiger Global along for the ride. The bet is on manipulation data, not a finished product, and it's one more sign that "home robot" valuations now run years ahead of any home robot.

A female-presenting prototype with claimed body-temperature skin and a "92% human" gait lit up social media — but every figure traces to a single in-house demo.

The Austin maker extended its Series A to nearly $1B total, funding Apollo's push from warehouse pilots toward commercial scale.

The all-electric Atlas began limited commercial production in early 2026, with the first units committed to Hyundai and Google DeepMind.

The first true home humanoid you can reserve — $20,000 outright or $499/month — with US deliveries targeted for late 2026.

The field's richest startup closed a billion-dollar round — then unveiled the home-focused Figure 03, signaling that the living room, not the warehouse, is the real prize.