Today's Highlights

· Trump has determined that imported robots and industrial machinery threaten US national security, but is holding off on tariffs for now, leaving 180 days for negotiations with trading partners

· Zhiyuan Robotics (AgiBot, Chinese humanoid maker) posted first-half revenue of nearly RMB 2 billion and has built 20,000 units in total, yet publicly listed deployments come to fewer than 500 robots

· GAC Lingcheng (Chinese heavy-truck maker) and Pony.ai (Chinese robotaxi company) rolled the first L4 heavy trucks off the line; deployment at the hundreds-of-units scale is slated for 2027

· Aurora's goal of 200 driverless trucks on the road by year-end has slipped to the end of next February

· Shanghai's draft taxi regulations include a clause on autonomous driving, covering both street-hail taxis and ride-hailing cars

Foundry Robotics (US) | Series A | $100 million | valuation undisclosedindustrial

Led by Marlinspike Partners, with existing investors including Khosla Ventures and Red Glass Ventures participating; SE Ventures, Wing VC and Axiom Ventures are new investors. The company was founded this year and owns and operates its own assembly factory, taking on complex electromechanical products such as drones, satellites, wire harnesses and underwater vehicles. The new Emeryville plant covers 130,000 square feet, expanding manufacturing space to 20 times the previous size. CEO Adarsh Kulkarni was employee number 4 at Ghost Robotics and later served as Scale AI's first head of robotics; co-founder Emmanuel Lamacchia led the Model Y program at Tesla. Source: Ventureburn source

Jingshuo Technology (WeRide subsidiary) | Pre-A | RMB 70 million | valuation undisclosedadjacent

Investors are Jiayu Capital, HKSTP (Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks) and Sirius Capital. There are two accounts of the amount. Zhidongxi, citing WeRide's (Chinese robotaxi company) Hong Kong Stock Exchange filing, reports that investors signed a capital increase agreement on October 28 and will subscribe for newly issued registered capital with RMB 70 million, holding about 3.38% in total once the capital increase and equity incentives are fully completed. Outlets including Investment Circle (Touzijie) report "tens of millions of US dollars". Jingshuo works on physical-AI training data and world models, with 2025 revenue of about RMB 187 million and a pre-tax loss of about RMB 31.16 million. CEO Huo Da is WeRide's employee number 001. Source: Zhidongxi source; Investment Circle (Touzijie) source

Juqiao Industrial (Weihai, China) | Series A | RMB 100 million-level | valuation undisclosedhardware

Led by Ant Group, with existing investors including Lingyi Venture, Weihai Gangrong and Qingdao Hexin adding to their stakes. The company weaves sensing fibers directly into electronic skin; its main product is a tactile glove for data collection, with nearly 10,000 units delivered cumulatively and more than 200 embodied-AI customers. Each full-palm glove has hundreds of sensing points per hand, with a minimum point spacing of 2 mm, and can respond to trigger forces as low as 0.01N. Source: Gasgoo source

Bleu Robotics (France) | Pre-seed | €5 million | valuation undisclosedembodied

Co-led by Contrarian Ventures and OVNI Capital. Founded in Paris in 2025 by two INRIA researchers and a former Renault manufacturing manager, the company builds models for industrial humanoid robots. It says a robot can learn a new task after a few operator demonstrations, and aims to bring a full deployment down to under 1 hour. Co-founder Benoît Berkoukchi said factory work has "not enough data, and robots won't have internet-scale data for a long time". Source: EU-Startups source

Huixi Intelligence (Chinese AI-chip maker) | IPO | tutoring filing | tutoring firm CITIC Securitieshardware

On October 22, Huixi announced that it had raised more than RMB 2.5 billion this year, and on October 28 it completed its IPO tutoring filing with the Beijing Securities Regulatory Bureau. The tutoring agreement was signed on October 22, the same day it announced its RMB 1.7 billion Series B. Controlling shareholder Hefei Yinxi Intelligence holds 18.428% and 68.7694% of the special voting rights. The RISE computing platform, based on the Guangzhi R1 chip, delivers 500 TOPS; the company says it has been mass-delivered to multiple embodied-AI customers, including AgiBot, Leju Robotics (Chinese humanoid maker) and Daxiao. Source: Sohu (Nandu N Video) source

UBTech (Chinese humanoid maker) | Completes acquisition of Fenglong Co. | amount undisclosedhumanoid

UBTech announced on October 29 that the acquisition is complete. In June, Fenglong set up a wholly owned subsidiary, Xin Fenglong, for embodied-AI hardware; its two-finger gripper and biomimetic humanoid face servo are already in mass production. Xin Fenglong will later also absorb UBTech businesses such as Youshijie and Youyiliao. Source: Guandian source

Kaola Youran (Chengdu, China) | Series B++ | amount undisclosed | valuation undisclosedworld-model

The investor is Mingwen Weiye. The company was founded under the leadership of academician Shen Hengtao and develops its own world models and multimodal large models; its embodied agent Geek Mind is used in scenarios such as workshop inspection and forest fire prevention. The company says it once ranked first on leaderboards including WorldArena and RoboTwin. Source: Sina News (Red Star News) source

AgiBot's first-half revenue nears RMB 2 billion, with about 500 robots publicly listed as deployedhumanoid

At AgiBot's Innovation Day on October 29, co-founder, president and CTO Peng Zhihui announced first-half shipments of 9,700 units, revenue of nearly RMB 2 billion, and 20,000 units built cumulatively as of September. The shipment figure matches Counterpoint's estimate from late August and is 1,300 units above Smart Analytics Global's 8,400. Over the same period, Unitree (Chinese robot maker) reported revenue of RMB 1.152 billion and UBTech RMB 1.269 billion. AgiBot did not disclose a revenue breakdown. A reporter from the Economic Observer added up the deployment cases made public at the event and arrived at nearly 500 units in total: 300 for entertainment performances at Chimelong Paradise, 100 for security-check guidance on the Guangzhou Metro, 90 for retail shopping guidance at Asda (ASKO), and the rest at hotels and scenic spots. Peng said: "The number of robots produced does not mean they have all been converted into real productivity." At the same event, AgiBot introduced a metric called Worken (effective intelligent work hours), calculated as the number of active robots multiplied by autonomous working hours, multiplied by an output-efficiency ratio. Peng said robot companies will also have to take responsibility for remote diagnostics and on-site maintenance, and that if scale cannot be reached, "we may need to assign a nanny to every machine we sell". By this list, robots on duty are about 2.5% of the total built, and 60% of them are in entertainment performances. Source: Caixin source; Sohu (Economic Observer) source; Kkj.cn source; Sina Finance (Global Times) source

GAC Lingcheng and Pony.ai roll first L4 heavy trucks off the production lineautonomy

The first production units of the T9 ROBOTRUCK came off the line on October 29 at GAC Lingcheng's Conghua plant in Guangzhou. The vehicle is built on Lingcheng's T9 battery-electric heavy-truck platform and carries Pony.ai's fourth-generation autonomous trucking system. Six systems (steering, braking, communications, power, computing and sensors) are all redundant, with 9 lidars, 3 millimeter-wave radars and 13 cameras. The two companies plan to reach deployment at the hundreds-of-units scale in 2027 and expand to the thousands-of-units scale in 2028–2029, with overseas pilots in the Middle East and Europe. When it was unveiled in Hannover in September, Pony.ai said it would reach "large-scale mass production within the year"; what has rolled off the line now is only the first batch, and hundreds-of-units deployment is still a year away. Source: Weidu source

Aurora's year-end target of 200 driverless trucks slips to next Februaryautonomy

In its Q3 shareholder letter on October 28, Aurora acknowledged that it will not reach its goal of having 200 driverless trucks on the road by year-end and has pushed it to the end of next February, which also means missing this year's revenue target. CFO David Maday said the cause is on the supply side: material shortages, component quality problems and end-of-line testing slowed the ramp by about 6 weeks versus plan. Maday said the issues have been resolved and the target of more than 1,000 trucks by the end of 2027 is unchanged. There are currently more than 20 driverless trucks built and entering service, and assembly partner Roush expects to reach 20 per week by early December. At its September investor day, Aurora had also said all 200 year-end trucks were already allocated to customers. On another front, partner automaker PACCAR requires its own models to keep a driver in the cab, which Maday described as PACCAR being "a company with a conservative risk appetite". Source: Truck News source; Stockstar (Zhitong Finance) source

Tesla Robotaxi offers free first rides in Dallas and Houston; detours in Houston's new service area draw complaintsautonomy

After Tesla expanded its Houston service area on October 26, the Robotaxi app began offering new users a free first ride in Dallas and Houston. A screenshot from third-party tracker Ethan McKanna shows a Houston fare of $0.00; Austin has no such offer, and Tesla has not officially confirmed it. RobotaxiTracker estimates the new Houston service area at about 229 square miles, versus about 50 square miles for Waymo locally. When McKanna dropped pins at random inside the area, the app often showed "location not available"; another ride took 40 minutes to go two blocks downtown. Blogger Hy Luu tested a 13-mile commute: the wait was about 25 minutes and the ride 83 minutes, whereas driving the route with FSD typically takes 45 minutes. "With the current wait times and detours, most people won't use this service," Luu told Business Insider. Source: TeslaNorth source; Business Insider source

Maximo solar-installation robots complete 300,000 construction tasksindustrial ⚠️ Vendor-reported

Maximo Robotics says its robots have completed 300,000 construction tasks under per-task RaaS contracts, mainly autonomously placing large solar modules with millimeter-level precision. The company says workers paired with the new-generation Max 4.0 install 2.5 times as much per person per shift-hour as with manual labor alone. The projects involve 6 large EPC contractors across 7 states, including California and Texas. Source: PR Newswire source

Sereact Cortex passes 1 billion picksembodied ⚠️ Single-source claim

Tech Times reports that Sereact's Cortex VLA model has completed more than 1 billion real-world picks at European sites, without training separately for individual items. Since October 7, Zalando has used it to process clothing returns autonomously at its fulfillment centers in Greven, Germany and Świebodzin, Poland. CEO Ralf Gulde said: "One brain serves all robots; what one learns, every one benefits from." Source: Tech Times source

US Section 232 finding: imported robots threaten national security, no tariffs for nowindustrial

The investigation ran for more than a year. On October 28, Trump determined that imports of robots and industrial machinery endanger national security, but did not impose tariffs immediately; instead he directed the Commerce Department and the Office of the US Trade Representative to negotiate import levels with trading partners and report back within 180 days, with tariffs still possible if talks fail. The investigation covers programmable computer-controlled mechanical systems, stamping presses, machine tools used to cut, weld and handle workpieces, as well as autoclaves, industrial furnaces, and laser and waterjet cutting equipment. The Commerce Department itself acknowledged that most types of robots and industrial machinery in the US rely on imports, so US manufacturers have avoided new tariffs for now. Humanoid and quadruped robots fall under a separate set of rules: in July the FCC banned imports of new models of Chinese robots, while existing models can still be imported. Source: The Straits Times (Reuters) source

AgiBot releases GO-3 Preview and Lingqu OS 1.0, both due to be open-sourced by year-endworld-model

Co-founder Yao Maoqing unveiled the full embodied foundation model GO-3 Preview, which uses a WRAM architecture that puts task understanding, future prediction and action generation into a single model. The operating system released at the same event, Lingqu OS 1.0, targets peripherals and real-time task scheduling. Both are planned to be open-sourced by the end of 2026. All of the above is AgiBot's self-reported information. ⚠️ Vendor-reportedSource: 36Kr source; Sina Finance (Global Times) source; Sina Finance (Caiwen) source; Sina Finance source

Alphabet's Other Bets posts $2.05 billion Q3 lossautonomy

The Other Bets segment, which includes Waymo, had Q3 revenue of $372 million, only 0.3% of Alphabet's total revenue, and an operating loss of $2.05 billion. Guandian relays CEO Sundar Pichai's remark on the earnings call that Waymo's autonomous driving mileage has surpassed 300 million miles. Alphabet's EPS for the quarter was $2.12, against market expectations of $3.02. Source: Pluang source; Guandian source

Unitree responds to profit decline; training base on the Qiantang River under constructionhumanoid

Unitree's Q3 net profit attributable to shareholders fell 17.37% year on year and by nearly half quarter on quarter. A person from the board secretary's office told BlueWhale News that the main reason is increased R&D spending on computing power and large-model work, and that "over a longer horizon the impact is manageable"; R&D spending follows the plan for the funds raised for investment projects and "will not be blindly increased". Separately, the Qiantang District experimental base that Unitree is helping build is located in the Hangzhou Gaochuang World industrial park, with a floor area of about 4,200 square meters. Unitree supplies the robot bodies, Suochen Technology supplies the simulation platform, and China Jiliang University handles standards and metrology. The base will replicate automotive manufacturing, biopharma, 3C electronics, and warehousing and logistics scenarios to train robots. Source: EE Times China (BlueWhale News) source; Hangzhou.cn source

South Korean court dismisses FSD refund suit by 88 car ownersautonomy

The Seoul Central District Court dismissed a suit by 88 Tesla owners seeking a full refund of what they paid for FSD software. The court held that Tesla never promised that the vehicles could drive with no human intervention at all, and that it had already delivered some of the features; the remaining features depend on technical progress and regulatory approval, and the owners knew at the time of purchase that they might have to wait a long time. Source: 8world (Reuters) source

Xinyan Robotics' Bubbo home companion robot goes on saleadjacent

Priced at RMB 9,499, with a RMB 7,999 price for the first 1,000 orders: Xinyan Robotics' Bubbo (Bubbo 1) went on sale on October 29 through channels including JD.com. The body has 26 sensors of 13 types, 6 degrees of freedom and two expression screens; the first mass-produced unit came off the line in mid-August. Founder Ren Yongliang compared it with a bilingual companion tutor earning a monthly salary in the RMB 10,000 range, saying Bubbo works out to "probably under RMB 1,000" per month. Source: Sohu source

Doosan Robotics' Q3 revenue up 59%, losses continueindustrial

Doosan Robotics' Q3 revenue was KRW 16.2 billion, up 59.1% year on year. Its operating loss narrowed from KRW 15.2 billion to KRW 13.4 billion, but its net loss widened from KRW 12.8 billion to KRW 18.3 billion. Growth came mainly from end-of-line (EOL) palletizing and packaging solutions in North America. The company says its next focus is industrial humanoid robots. Source: Chosunbiz source

Shanghai's draft taxi regulations include an autonomous driving clauseautonomy

The draft Shanghai Taxi Regulations are now out for public comment, stating that the city will "promote, in an orderly and lawful manner, the safe application of autonomous driving technology in the taxi industry", with transport, public security and other departments to strengthen guidance and services in accordance with the law. The regulations' scope covers both street-hail taxis and ride-hailing cars. This is a statement of principle at the level of local regulation, with no deployment scale or timetable given. Market-access moves in the same week were still mainly single companies obtaining permits: XPeng's Robotaxi was approved for L4 demonstration operations across Guangzhou, and Volkswagen China obtained an L3 road-test permit in Hefei. Source: Cailian Press source; Autohome source

Yole: global robotaxi fleet to reach 331,000 vehicles by 2031autonomy

Yole Group's "Robotaxi 2026" report forecasts that the global robotaxi fleet will grow from about 10,000 vehicles in 2025 to 331,000 in 2031. The report ranks Hesai (Chinese lidar maker) first in robotaxi lidar for 2025 with a 62% share, versus 61% in the previous edition; its customers include Apollo Go, Pony.ai, WeRide, DiDi, Motional, Aurora and KargoBot. All of the above figures are cited from Hesai's October 29 press release. ⚠️ Vendor-reportedSource: Yahoo Finance (PR Newswire) source

Supply chain this week: capital and products concentrate on onboard compute and memory for humanoidshardware

A Counterpoint report from early this month estimates that average DRAM capacity per humanoid robot will rise from 19GB this year to 39GB in 2030, with total DRAM demand from humanoids growing about 20-fold over five years. The main types are LPDDR and high-capacity NAND, with little use of HBM. According to 36Kr, Musk replied with "a foolish analysis", saying the figure is too small. Counterpoint's figures are a demand projection with no corresponding order data. On the compute side, Huixi Intelligence entered IPO tutoring this week; its RISE platform based on the Guangzhi R1 delivers 500 TOPS, with partners including AgiBot, Leju Robotics and Daxiao. Altera has also positioned its new-generation FPGAs for physical AI, and its claimed 1.8x efficiency gain is a self-tested result. Source: 36Kr source; Korea JoongAng Daily; Sohu (Nandu N Video) source; Tech Times source