Servoservobrief.com, Thursday, August 13, 2026
Fresh capital and a hidden Samsung program dominate today, alongside China moving to certify robots as trained workers.
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AI² Robotics raises $735M betting wheels beat legs
AI² Robotics, a YC-backed startup, raised $735M for wheeled humanoids instead of bipedal ones, arguing they deploy faster and cost less. The figure is vendor-reported and unaudited. If it holds, this is one of the largest embodied-AI rounds of the year and signals investors favoring cheaper wheeled bases over legs for near-term warehouse work.
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Samsung ran a secret in-house humanoid program for years
Korean press reports Samsung quietly built a humanoid separate from its RX division and Rainbow Robotics subsidiary, using actuator tech adapted from home-appliance motors. Actuators (the motorized joints) are over 30% of a humanoid's cost, so making them in-house could give Samsung a structural price edge. Capability is undisclosed, sources are anonymous and unverified.
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Westlake Robotics pulls $74M across four rounds in six months
Westlake Robotics, spun out of Westlake University, closed a Series A capping 500M yuan (about $74M) raised since January. It sells a full-body humanoid model plus its own hardware and reports roughly 100M yuan in orders from Alibaba, Intel, and JD.com. The pace shows Chinese capital still flooding foundation-model humanoid plays; orders are vendor-reported.
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China opens a vocational school that certifies robots for jobs
Hangzhou opened a school where 30 humanoids train and must pass certification exams before factory or service deployment, part of a national pilot base training 140+ robots across 40 work settings. It aims to sell robots pre-trained for specific tasks rather than raw machines. Reality check: many factory humanoids still move boxes at 30 to 40% of human speed.
Read more on Deployment news -
China's dexterous-hand startups raised 28.5B yuan in seven months
Robot-hand funding hit 28.51B yuan (about $4B) across 74 rounds and 47 companies by early August, already topping all of 2025. Humanoid makers are increasingly building hands in-house rather than buying them. Dexterous hands are becoming the contested layer of the humanoid supply chain, though tactile sensors and micro-motors still depend on outside suppliers.
Read more on Funding wire