Robotics was a buzzy area for startups last year, and so far this year, investors have been putting even more capital into the space.
Overall, startups developing robotics technologies have pulled in just over $6 billion in 2025, per Crunchbase data. With roughly five months left in the year, that puts the sector on track to eclipse last year’s funding levels, as charted below.
Biggest robotics startup rounds
While humanoid robotics startups generate the most attention, the largest funding recipients are a more diverse cohort, including surgical robotics, operating systems and manufacturing automation. They’re a geographically dispersed group as well, spanning the U.S., Europe and China.
To illustrate, we used Crunchbase data to put together a list of 10 of the most heavily funded robotics-related startups in 2025.
Humanoid robots
Not surprisingly, many of the top names on the list are developing humanoid robots.
The biggest round in this space this year went to Apptronik, a spinoff from The University of Texas at Austin known for its flagship Apollo robot. The company raised $403 million in Series A and extension funding this year, led by B Capital and Capital Factory.
Apptronik plans to use the money to hone Apollo for use in industries including automotive, electronics manufacturing, warehouses and beverage bottling. It cites form factor as a core advantage, observing that “humanoid robots have a similar body shape and size to humans, so they can use the same tools and equipment as humans and navigate the same spaces.”
Beijing-based Galaxy Bot was another big funding recipient, raising $154 million in a June financing. It’s marketing humanoid bots for household tasks, retail stocking and delivery, and sorting and packaging parts for manufacturing.
Investors also backed a generous round for The Bot Co., a San Francisco-based startup looking to fulfill everyone’s fantasy around a humanoid bot that does household chores. The company, founded last year by former Cruise CEO Kyle Vogt, raised $150 million in a round led by Greenoaks.
Medical applications
Startups developing medical and surgical applications of robotics also continue to score large investments.
This includes Neuralink, the developer of implantable brain-computer interfaces, which raised $650 million in a financing reported in May. While Neuralink isn’t a pure-play robotics company, it does have applications in the space. It uses surgical robots for implanting its devices and is developing technology to allow recipients of its implants to control robotic prosthetic limbs.
U.K.-based CMR Surgical, developer of a soft-tissue surgical robot, also landed high in the funding ranks, pulling in $200 million in equity and debt financing in April. And ForSight Robotics, an Israeli startup developing a platform for ophthalmic robot surgeries, secured $125 in a June Series B led by Eclipse Ventures.
Software and autonomy
Not every robotics startup is building a bot either. Several are developing software to power them.
In this camp is Skild AI, which is building AI tools geared for technologies that operate in the physical world. The Pittsburgh-based company raised $135 million toward this goal in a June Series B led by Nvidia, Samsung Electronics and SoftBank Group.
One of last year’s funding favorites, Physical Intelligence is another. The San Francisco startup, which describes its mission as “bringing general-purpose AI into the physical world,” raised $400 million in November led by Jeff Bezos, Lux Capital and Thrive Capital.
Too much, or not enough?
It’s far from shocking to see massive funding rounds for such a plethora of companies in the robotics space. After all, succeeding in most of these ambitions — particularly those around bringing a productive humanoid to market — will require a huge amount of capital.
At the same time, skepticism abounds that the combination of talent and deep pockets alone will be sufficient to bring visions to fruition in the typical startup time frame. Among the doubters is Rodney Brooks, a serial entrepreneur best known as the founder of robotic vacuum maker iRobot.
In his postings and predictions for 2025, Brooks forecasted that “we are a long way off from being able to for-real deploy humanoid robots which have even minimal performance to be usable.”
Brooks observed that for a range of sought-after applications, from autonomous driving to humanoid worker-bots, it tends to hold true that “deployment at scale takes so much longer than anyone ever imagines.”
Still, if even some of the prototypes funded recently can eventually function as envisioned and at scale, it should hopefully be worth the wait.
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
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