Robotics funding hits $9.9 billion in Q3, up 185% year to date

The Q3 figures extend a run of quarters with nearly $10 billion or more in robotics funding, and the year-to-date total is up around 185% from a year earlier. That pace has produced a wave of new unicorns: around 75 robotics companies on the unicorn board have raised funding in the past three years, and 45 of them joined just this year.

Ulrik Stig Hansen, co-CEO of Encord, described the sector as still in its pre-training phase, with a move to post-training expected soon. He pointed to a structural difference from large language models: physical AI has no internet-scale data trove to train on, so data must be collected from sensors and converted into action tokens. Storing, curating, enriching, and validating that multimodal data — vision, tactile, force, and torque — is, in his words, a very expensive operation.

Hansen also said many of the companies raising capital are likely to win because there are so many different applications in the physical world, while noting the sector's direction remains uncertain as companies race toward breakthroughs over the next year.