Apptronik raises $350 million to make humanoid robots

Catch up quick: Apptronik was founded in 2016, after the founding team had worked with NASA on the DARPA Robotics Challenge. It was bootstrapped for the next five years, before raising around $65 million in seed funding. Last year it signed a strategic partnership with Google DeepMind.

Zoom in: B Capital and Capital Factory co-led the round, with Google also participating.

• The company plans to spend most of 2025 proving commercial viability via a series of pilot programs.

What they're saying: "There are thousands of robots that do one thing, but we want to build one robot that can do thousands of different tasks," explains Apptronik CEO Jeff Cardenas. "The world is built around humans, so we believe that humanoid is the form factor that helps robots reach scale; the equivalent of PCs in the early 1980s."