Boston Dynamics

Apptronik

Humanoid Robots

Apptronik builds Apollo, a 5 foot 8 inch, 160 pound humanoid that lifts boxes up to 55 pounds, and it is the humanoid company Google DeepMind chose as its hardware partner. Spun out of the University of Texas at Austin's Human Centered Robotics Lab in 2016 on the back of roughly 15 earlier robots including NASA's Valkyrie, it unveiled Apollo in 2023 and now has units working in designated areas inside factories and warehouses run by Mercedes-Benz, GXO Logistics, and contract manufacturer Jabil. Funding came in two waves: a $350 million Series A in February 2025 co-led by B Capital and Capital Factory with Google participating, later extended, and then a $520 million Series A-X extension on February 11, 2026 that took the Series A past $935 million and total capital to nearly $1 billion at a valuation around $5 billion. In June 2026 it unveiled Apollo 2, available in both bipedal and wheeled-base configurations, and opened Robot Park, a roughly 90,000 square foot data-collection and training facility in Austin. When Google DeepMind launched Gemini Robotics 2 on July 30, 2026, the whole-body-control demonstration ran on Apollo 2 rather than on Boston Dynamics' Atlas. The honest state of the business is that Apollo is still in pilots: Apptronik has never published a price, and CEO Jeff Cardenas has pointed at 2027, with the commercial Apollo 3, as the year volume orders are supposed to arrive.

BYD

Humanoid Robots

BYD (Build Your Dreams) is a Chinese high-tech manufacturer spanning automobiles, batteries, electronics, renewable energy, and rail transit. Its auto business is unusually vertically integrated, with in-house batteries, motors, power electronics, and automotive semiconductors underpinning a lineup that now ranges from low-cost EVs and plug-in hybrids to premium Denza and Yangwang vehicles. First-half 2026 revenue fell 7.13% YoY to ¥344.82B (~$50.9B) and net profit dropped 20.54% to ¥12.33B as China NEV weakness and foreign-exchange losses outweighed overseas growth; auto-related revenue was ¥275.34B (-8.98%) while gross margin rose to 18.85% from 18.01%. H1 NEV sales were 1,808,511 (-15.72%), with the Q2 decline narrowing to 3.24% after a 30% Q1 drop, and overseas shipments of about 792,000 (+67.8%) making up roughly 44% of H1 volume. August 2026 NEV wholesales reached 440,293 (+17.84% YoY), the highest month of 2026, with a record 189,466 overseas units (43.03% of volume) offsetting still-soft domestic sales. On August 28, 2026 BYD opened its 10,000th FLASH Charging station in Shenzhen, doubling the network in under five months across 325 cities and reaching halfway to its 20,000 year-end target, with 1.83 million users (nearly one-third non-BYD). BYD's Szeged plant in Hungary began trial production in January 2026, but EVP Stella Li said in June 2026 that full-scale series production has slipped to Q4 2026 as equipment is still being installed; the same month BYD put its planned €1B Turkey (Manisa) plant on hold after Ankara withdrew tax incentives, making Hungary its top European manufacturing priority.

Figure AI

Humanoid Robots

Figure AI is a San Jose robotics company building general-purpose humanoid robots and the Helix AI stack that powers them, and - following its $39B Series C in September 2025 - the best-capitalized pure-play humanoid company in the world. Its current platform, Figure 03, is in early commercial deployment: after an 11-month Figure 02 program at BMW's Spartanburg plant, BMW brought Figure 03 back on June 25, 2026 for logistics sequencing, and Catalyst Brands (JCPenney's parent) signed in May 2026 to deploy Figure 03 fleets at its Reno logistics center. The Helix 02 vision-language-action stack has demonstrated full 8-hour (and extended 40-hour) autonomous package-sorting shifts, while BotQ has scaled to one Figure 03 per hour and crossed 1,000 robots produced by July 23, 2026 - enough that CEO Brett Adcock said in June 2026 that deployed Figure robots now outnumber the company's human staff. On August 25, 2026 Figure launched Index, a crowdsourced physical-video app that while in stealth crossed 264,000 downloads, 16 million videos and $15 million paid to Creators, with more than $1 billion committed to data and compute over the next 12 months. Figure is separately contesting a wrongful-termination lawsuit from a former safety engineer, filed in November 2025, alleging its robots pose a skull-fracture risk; the case is in early discovery.

Li Auto

Humanoid Robots

Li Auto is a Beijing-based premium new-energy vehicle maker founded in 2015 by Li Xiang, best known for pioneering extended-range EVs (EREVs) - a battery pack paired with a gasoline range-extender generator - which powered its rapid rise. It was the first Chinese EV startup to post a full-year profit (2023) and remains among the most financially solid, ending 2025 with ~RMB101.2B (~$14B) cash. Its L-series EREV SUVs (L6/L7/L8/L9) are the volume backbone, and the company has surpassed 1,801,834 cumulative deliveries as of August 31, 2026. But 2025 was a down year - 406,343 deliveries, off ~18.8% YoY - as EREV competition intensified and the BEV transition dragged; its first BEV, the MEGA MPV (launched March 2024), flopped relative to targets. Li Auto has since expanded its BEV line with the i8 six-seat SUV (July 2025) and the i6 five-seat SUV (September 2025), the latter becoming its sales backbone. Q1 2026 turned to a RMB2.3B net loss with gross margin collapsing to 7.9% amid the i6 ramp and price competition, and management cut its full-year 2026 delivery growth target from ~40% (~550,000 units) to ~20% (~490,000 units); deliveries then fell year-over-year for three straight months before August's 37,679 units, up 32% YoY, snapped the decline. The company has since relaunched an all-new L9 (May 2026, with its MindVLA autonomous-driving model and in-house M100 chip), an all-new L8 (June 2026) and a revamped L6 (July 2026) to revive EREV volume, begun its first overseas manufacturing in Kazakhstan (July 2026, via partner Allur) alongside new dealer partnerships in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, and is teasing a flagship pure-electric i9 SUV for a September 2026 launch.

Nvidia

Humanoid Robots

Nvidia, founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem, invented the modern GPU (GeForce 256, 1999) and then - via the 2006 CUDA platform - turned it into the engine of the AI revolution. It touched a record $5.06 trillion valuation in late July 2026 and then briefly slipped to about $4.77 trillion on July 27, 2026 as Apple reclaimed the world's-most-valuable-company title amid a broader AI-financing selloff, but Nvidia rallied back through early August - its biggest one-week market-cap gain ever - to reclaim the crown at about $5.42 trillion (Aug 7, 2026 close), before easing back to roughly $5.29 trillion (Aug 28, 2026 close, $217.89/share) after Q2 FY2027 gross-margin guidance drew a mixed reaction. Fiscal 2026 revenue hit $215.9B (+65%), and the momentum accelerated: Q2 FY2027 (ended July 2026, reported August 26, 2026) delivered a record $96.2B (+106% YoY, beating the $92.2B consensus) with data-center revenue of $89.0B (+117% YoY), CFO Colette Kress guiding Q3 to ~$108B and roughly 70% revenue growth for FY2028, and supply commitments more than doubling to $279B (mostly HBM memory) against a hyperscaler cloud backlog exceeding $2 trillion. The Blackwell Ultra GB300 platform drove the ramp, and Vera Rubin - the seven-chip platform Huang declared in full production at GTC 2026 - reached customers on July 21, 2026, shipping to OpenAI, CoreWeave, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Meta, and Dell, with OpenAI set to deploy it at scale in Q3 2026 and roughly $1 trillion in cumulative Blackwell-plus-Rubin orders projected through 2027. Nvidia has also become the AI buildout's central dealmaker: up to $100B invested in OpenAI (whose Ohio campus financing was finalized at $105B for an initial 4.25 IT-GW, online in phases from 2028), up to $10B in Anthropic, a key role in the $500B Stargate project, millions of GPUs committed to Meta, an August 10-11, 2026 financing coalition with Apollo, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR aiming to mobilize over $500B in third-party AI-compute capital, and - confirmed September 3, 2026 - a $12.93B deal to acquire AI model-hosting platform Hugging Face, Nvidia's largest acquisition ever, alongside talks to invest in Perplexity at a valuation above $30B, plus a confirmed August 31, 2026 $3.5 billion convertible-bond investment in MediaTek that opens NVLink Fusion to MediaTek custom XPUs in Nvidia rack-scale AI factories. That expanding web of AI financing, alongside a recurring circular-financing debate, remains the biggest swing factor in Nvidia's valuation. The China business is the big casualty - export restrictions triggered a $4.5B charge in 2025, and while H200 shipments to China stayed 'trivial' through mid-July 2026 under the deal with a 25% cut to the US government, ByteDance and Tencent each received roughly 10,000 H200 units in the weeks before August 19, 2026, still only about 13% of the 75,000-unit licenses each holds; Nvidia's 10-K still calls the company effectively foreclosed from China's data-center market and its guidance assumes zero China data-center revenue. Competition now comes less from AMD (still ~5-7% of AI accelerator revenue) than from customers' own silicon: Google TPUs, AWS Trainium, Broadcom-built custom ASICs, and OpenAI's own Jalapeno inference chip unveiled August 25, 2026.

Tesla

Humanoid Robots

Tesla is a vertically integrated automotive, energy storage, and AI company headquartered in Austin, Texas. After building its final Model S and Model X on May 10, 2026 and converting that Fremont line to Optimus, it now manufactures three consumer vehicles (Model 3, Model Y, Cybertruck), sells Full Self-Driving (Supervised) software, operates energy storage and solar businesses, runs an unsupervised Robotaxi service across seven US metros (Austin, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando, and Tampa driverless, plus a supervised Bay Area pilot), and is ramping new products including Cybercab (in production at Giga Texas since Feb 2026; commercial paid rides began in Austin on September 3, 2026, the same day NHTSA opened audit AQ26002 on how Tesla self-certified the steering-wheel-free vehicle), Tesla Semi (now in a commissioning phase at the new Nevada line as it works toward a 50,000-unit/year target), and Optimus (entered production on Fremont's converted first-generation line around August 27-28, 2026, feeding an internal training program rather than customer sales; the V3 public reveal remains undated). In Q2 2026, Tesla generated a record $28.24B in revenue (+26% YoY) on 480,126 vehicle deliveries, though GAAP operating margin narrowed to 1.4% amid heavy AI, Optimus, and Robotaxi investment, and guided to over $25B of full-year 2026 capital expenditure; it had 1.48M active FSD subscriptions and operated 8,704 Supercharger stations.