Humanoid Robotics Funding: A Quarter-by-Quarter Analysis

All funding deals in the humanoid robotics market over the last years

Below is the table listing all the deals. You can find our methodology at the end of this page.

If you want a deeper understanding of the market and its current dynamics, get our humanoid robotics market report.

Is humanoid robotics funding actually booming right now?

Humanoid robotics funding is clearly much stronger today, although most of the extra money is flowing into very large rounds.

We counted 109 financings from Q2 2025 through Q2 2026. Deal volume rose from 21 to 27 between the two Q2 periods, while disclosed capital jumped from $461 million to $2.782 billion. Funding grew about sixfold while the number of deals increased by less than 30%.

The difference comes from the top end of the market. Deals of $50 million or less generated $308 million in Q2 2025 and $262 million in Q2 2026. The smaller and mid-sized part of the market has barely expanded in dollar terms.

The latest product developments fit that picture. Figure is ramping Figure 03 production, building a much larger physical-data pipeline through Index and, more recently, securing access to up to 100,000 next-generation GPUs for Helix. Apptronik has meanwhile moved into Apollo 2 and opened Robot Park sites built around continuous real-world data collection. The biggest companies are spending at a completely different scale from a year ago.

Quarter	Deals	Capital	Median round	Capital from deals ≤$50M
Q2 2025	21	$461M	$14.0M	$308M
Q3 2025	22	$1.365B	$14.0M	$72.8M
Q4 2025	16	$1.158B	$31.7M	$285M
Q1 2026	23	$2.397B	$64.0M	$250M
Q2 2026	27	$2.782B	$29.6M	$262M
Q2'25 → Q2'26	+28.6%	about +503%	about +111%	about -15%

When did humanoid robotics funding really take off?

Q1 2026 was the real turning point for humanoid robotics funding.

Q3 2025 produced a spectacular jump in capital, but the rest of the market barely moved with it. Deal count went from 21 to 22 and the median round stayed around $14 million. A spike in one quarter with little change elsewhere stands out; we go over how the past year shifted in our report on humanoid robots.

Q1 2026 looked very different. Deals jumped from 16 to 23, quarterly funding more than doubled from $1.158 billion to $2.397 billion, and the median round reached $64 million. Ten companies raised at least $100 million during the quarter, compared with four in Q4 2025.

The move continued into Q2, when deal count reached 27 and twelve rounds crossed $100 million. That two-quarter sequence is much more convincing than the earlier one-company spike.

Was the Q3 2025 humanoid robotics funding surge basically just Figure AI?

Pretty much. Figure AI explains most of the Q3 2025 humanoid robotics funding surge.

Figure announced more than $1 billion of committed Series C capital on September 16, 2025. That financing alone represents roughly 73% of the quarter's capital in our research.

The rest of the quarter looked much less extraordinary. The median round was still about $14 million, unchanged from Q2, and removing deals above $50 million brings known capital down to $72.8 million. Nine deals lacked a usable numerical amount, so that figure understates some smaller-round activity, but Figure's weight is still obvious.

The size of the round also makes more sense when we look at what Figure was already building. Earlier in 2025, the company launched Helix and announced BotQ, a factory designed for up to 12,000 humanoids per year on its first-generation line. Figure later said the Series C would fund production, GPU infrastructure and real-world data collection. Those are expensive problems, and the financing reflected that.

Why did humanoid robotics funding look healthier in Q4 2025 even with fewer deals?

Q4 2025 had fewer humanoid robotics deals, yet the money was spread much more evenly across the market.

Deal count dropped from 22 to 16 and total funding slipped 15%. Those headline numbers look weak until we look at round sizes.

The median financing more than doubled from about $14 million to $31.7 million. Known capital from deals of $50 million or less recovered from $72.8 million to $285 million. Four rounds topped $100 million, twice as many as in Q3.

The largest financing accounted for roughly 26% of quarterly capital, down from 73% one quarter earlier. Q4 was the first quarter where bigger checks began showing up across several companies rather than being almost entirely explained by Figure.

Did humanoid robotics really enter a scaling phase in Q1 2026?

Yes. Q1 2026 is where humanoid robotics financing starts to look like serious industrial scaling.

Apptronik gives us one of the clearest examples. On February 11, the company announced a $520 million Series A-X extension, taking its Series A above $935 million. Apptronik said the money would help ramp Apollo production, expand commercial and pilot deployments and build robot-training and data-collection infrastructure.

The investor mix also tells us something. Google, Mercedes-Benz and B Capital returned, while John Deere, QIA and AT&T Ventures joined. Mercedes-Benz was already testing Apollo inside manufacturing operations, and Google DeepMind had begun working with Apptronik on Gemini Robotics. Backers returning and new ones joining shows who is funding whom, which we lay out in our humanoid robotics market report.

Apptronik has since opened its expanded Robot Park and unveiled Apollo 2, with fleets collecting real-world training data across company and customer locations. Google DeepMind's latest Gemini Robotics 2 work also shows Apollo 2 carrying out whole-body tasks. Those more recent developments make the huge Q1 financing easier to understand: the money was going into production capacity, data, AI and deployment infrastructure that companies are now visibly using.

Was Q2 2026 broad growth in humanoid robotics, or mostly more giant rounds?

Q2 2026 broadened in deal count, while giant rounds still controlled almost all of the money.

The quarter reached 27 financings, the highest total in the five-quarter period. At the same time, the median round fell from $64 million to $29.6 million. More companies were getting funded again at the lower end.

Fifteen of the 27 deals were below $50 million. Yet twelve separate financings exceeded $100 million, and those twelve captured 90.6% of quarterly capital.

This is quite different from Q3 2025. The largest Q2 2026 round represented only 16.4% of the quarter. Funding was still extremely top-heavy, but the money was now spread across a whole group of large companies.

Quarter	<$5M	$5M–<$20M	$20M–<$50M	$50M–<$100M	$100M+	Amount unknown
Q2 2025	3	7	7	0	1	3
Q3 2025	5	3	1	2	2	9
Q4 2025	0	4	6	2	4	0
Q1 2026	0	3	7	1	10	2
Q2 2026	2	8	5	0	12	0
Q2'25 → Q2'26	3 → 2	7 → 8	7 → 5	0 → 0	1 → 12	3 → 0

Are more new humanoid robotics startups getting funded now?

No. New humanoid robotics startups are not taking a bigger share of funding today.

First financings moved from five in Q2 2025 to two, three, two and then four in Q2 2026. There is no sustained increase.

Follow-on financings dominate every quarter. Their median size is the more striking change: $13.9 million in Q2 2025, $42 million by Q4, $64 million in Q1 2026 and $102 million in Q2.

Most of the new money is going to companies that have already raised capital and are coming back for much bigger rounds as they build factories, train models, collect data and prepare deployments.

Financing status comes from our review of publicly available funding histories, so we treat borderline cases conservatively rather than pretending every company's historical financing record is perfectly complete.

Quarter	First financings	Follow-ons	Follow-on share	Follow-on median
Q2 2025	5	16	76.2%	$13.9M
Q3 2025	2	20	90.9%	$14.6M
Q4 2025	3	13	81.3%	$42M
Q1 2026	2	21	91.3%	$64M
Q2 2026	4	23	85.2%	$102M
Q2'25 → Q2'26	5 → 4	16 → 23	+9.0 pp	about 7.3×

Are humanoid robotics investors moving to later-stage companies?

Humanoid robotics checks are getting much bigger, while the stage mix keeps swinging around.

Early-stage financings represented 76.2% of deals in Q2 2025 and 81.8% in Q3. The share fell to 56.3% in Q4 and 34.8% in Q1 2026, then bounced back to 55.6% in Q2.

Company age is equally revealing. The median company raising money stayed around two years old for most of the period. Investors are therefore writing enormous checks surprisingly early in company life. Enormous checks going to two-year-old companies is notable; we lay out where the biggest rounds land in our humanoid robots market report.

TARS Robotics is the extreme example. The company was founded in 2025 and, according to Caixin, raised $455 million in a Pre-A round in April 2026. Calling a $455 million financing "Pre-A" shows how little the traditional stage label tells us here.

Stage coverage is also imperfect, reaching only 60.9% in Q1 and 70.4% in Q2. For humanoid robotics these days, round size, company history and what the money is funding often tell us more than the letter attached to the round.

Which humanoid robotics category has the strongest momentum right now?

Humanoid AI Platforms have the clearest momentum currently, while several other apparent category booms have already faded.

AI Platforms recorded three deals in Q2 2025, three in Q3, two in Q4, four in Q1 2026 and five in Q2. More importantly, their capital share rose from 5.0% in Q4 to 14.4% in Q1 and 24.7% in Q2. AI platforms drawing a growing share of capital is a clue to where the openings are, covered in our report covering humanoid robots.

Known median round size moved the same way, reaching $86 million in Q1 and $145 million in Q2. X Square Robot's roughly $290 million Series B is one example of investors putting large amounts behind companies combining embodied foundation models with robot hardware.

Consumer Home Robots went the other way. The category suddenly jumped to seven deals in Q1 2026 after recording only one in each of the previous two quarters, then immediately fell back to one deal in Q2. For now, that looks like a short-lived burst rather than a lasting rotation.

General Purpose Humanoids still attract huge amounts of capital, but AI Platforms show the cleanest quarter-to-quarter improvement across deal count, capital share and typical round size.

Are humanoid robot component suppliers finally attracting serious funding?

Humanoid robot component suppliers are getting much more investor attention, especially in the number of deals.

Actuation Component Suppliers went from two deals in Q2 2025 to five in Q3, four in Q4, two in Q1 and eight in Q2 2026. By the latest quarter they matched General Purpose Humanoids for 29.6% of all transactions.

The checks are still much smaller. Those eight Q2 component deals captured only 8.8% of the quarter's capital, with a median of about $14 million.

Linkerbot shows why we need several quarters before calling a change. Its roughly $215 million financing made component funding look unusually large in Q1. Q2 then brought many more supplier deals without another comparable giant round.

The breadth is real. Investors are increasingly financing dexterous hands, actuators and other pieces of the humanoid supply chain, even though most of the industry's biggest checks still go to full robot or AI-platform companies.

Is China taking over humanoid robotics funding?

China and the wider APAC region already dominate humanoid robotics deal volume, and by Q2 2026 they were dominating capital too.

APAC represented at least 75% of financings in every quarter we studied. Its deal share reached 96.3% in Q2 2026.

North America's earlier capital spikes came from very few companies. Figure alone pushed North America to 73.2% of Q3 2025 funding despite the region having only two deals. Apptronik had a similar, smaller effect in Q1 2026.

Q2 looked different: APAC accounted for 99.6% of known capital. The quarter included TARS's $455 million financing and several large Chinese platform and general-purpose robot rounds.

China is also pushing deployment more aggressively. In June 2026, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission launched a real-world training program for humanoid robots and embodied AI. The program targets more than 100 high-value application scenarios and the capacity for deployment at the scale of tens of thousands of units by the end of 2026.

That policy did not create the Q2 funding boom; several large financings had already closed. It does show how closely the country's capital activity now sits alongside manufacturing, training data and real deployment programs.

Are the same investors funding every humanoid robotics company?

No. The humanoid robotics lead-investor pool actually widened as funding activity increased.

We identified 18 distinct leads or co-leads in Q2 2025, followed by 21, 18, 21 and then 35 in Q2 2026.

Even in the latest quarter, repeat activity was limited. Shunwei Capital and HongShan each appeared on two deals. Over the full period, Shenzhen Capital Group and Matrix Partners China were among the more regular names, but neither came close to controlling a large share of the market.

The move from 21 to 35 identified leads between Q1 and Q2 is especially useful because deal count only increased from 23 to 27. More financing was coming from a noticeably wider set of investors.

Why are strategic investors writing much bigger checks in humanoid robotics?

Strategic investors now show up in much larger humanoid robotics rounds even though their share of deals has barely changed.

Strategic participation ranged from roughly 41% to 62% of deals across the period. Q2 2026 sat at 51.9%, so there is no steady march upward in frequency.

Round size changed far more. The median strategic-backed financing rose from $27 million in Q2 2025 to $143 million in Q1 2026 and $139 million in Q2. Strategic backers writing ever bigger checks is why we study which investors are making the biggest bets in our report on humanoid robots.

The names make the shift easy to understand. Google and Mercedes-Benz participated in Apptronik's $520 million extension as Apollo moved deeper into AI training and manufacturing deployments. Meituan Strategic Investment joined the $455 million TARS financing. Xiaomi Strategic Investment appears across several Chinese humanoid, AI-platform and component deals in our research.

Mercedes-Benz offers a particularly concrete example of what strategic capital can connect to. The automaker has tested Apptronik's Apollo in production environments, including intralogistics and quality-related tasks, and separately disclosed an investment in Apptronik. That is much closer to an industrial deployment relationship than a conventional financial bet.

Quarter	Strategic deals	Deal share	Median strategic-backed round	Main pattern
Q2 2025	13	61.9%	$27M	Frequent, smaller rounds
Q3 2025	9	40.9%	$83.6M	Figure lifts the median
Q4 2025	8	50.0%	$65.8M	Larger rounds spread out
Q1 2026	11	47.8%	$143M	Scaling rounds become common
Q2 2026	14	51.9%	$139M	Large strategic rounds persist
Q2'25 → Q2'26	13 → 14	-10.0 pp	about 5.1×	Ticket size changed far more than frequency

Are general-purpose humanoid robots losing investor interest?

General-purpose humanoid robots are losing share of the deal count, while still absorbing a huge share of the money.

General Purpose Humanoids fell from 11 deals in Q2 2025 to eight in Q2 2026. Their share of total transactions dropped from 52.4% to 29.6%.

Capital has held up much better. The category still captured 59.5% of Q2 2026 funding.

That makes sense as the industry fills out around the robot itself. More money is now reaching AI platforms, dexterous hands, actuators and other specialist layers. At the same time, building a complete humanoid remains brutally expensive, so companies such as TARS and Figure can still dominate the dollar totals.

Fresh developments at Figure underline how capital-intensive the full-stack model has become. The company said in April that BotQ had produced more than 350 Figure 03 robots and had improved output from one robot per day to one per hour. More recently, Figure announced Index, committed to spend more than $1 billion on data and compute over the following year, and signed an infrastructure agreement covering up to 100,000 GPUs. Full-stack humanoids increasingly require an AI-company-sized infrastructure budget on top of the hardware budget.

What's the biggest mistake people make when reading humanoid robotics funding right now?

The biggest mistake is treating the roughly sixfold jump in quarterly humanoid robotics capital as a sixfold expansion of the market.

Deal activity has grown, but nowhere near that fast. The extraordinary change is the number of companies now able to raise nine-figure sums.

As seen above, twelve $100 million-plus rounds appeared in Q2 2026, compared with only one a year earlier. At the same time, fifteen of Q2's 27 financings were still below $50 million and together accounted for less than 10% of capital.

The market has become much deeper at the top. That is a meaningful change, but headline funding totals can make the broader startup base look stronger than it really is.

Recent operating progress gives those huge financings more substance than they had a year ago. Figure says its latest Helix 2.5 system can generalize across 30 previously unseen homes, while Apptronik and Google DeepMind are working on full-body humanoid intelligence through Apollo 2 and Gemini Robotics 2. We still do not know how quickly these systems will become economical at large commercial scale, but the companies raising the biggest rounds are clearly spending the money on real manufacturing, data, compute and deployment work.

What is the humanoid robotics funding trend actually telling us?

Humanoid robotics funding has become substantially stronger since Q2 2025, with the clearest change happening at the top of the market. Nine-figure rounds went from rare to routine across multiple companies.

Q3 2025 gave an exaggerated early impression because Figure AI alone drove most of the quarter. Q4 broadened the increase in check sizes, and Q1 2026 was when the move became convincing across several companies. Q2 then showed that the big-round environment was still intact.

The startup base is expanding much more slowly. First financings remain scarce, follow-ons dominate, and the typical follow-on round has grown dramatically. Investors are mostly giving existing companies more money to scale rather than financing a wave of new entrants. With the money going mostly to existing companies, we ask who the likely future winners are in our humanoid robots report.

Humanoid AI Platforms currently have the cleanest category momentum. Actuation suppliers are also getting more attention, particularly in deal count. The short-lived Q1 spike in Consumer Home Robots shows why a single strong quarter should still be treated carefully.

Stage labels are becoming less useful in this market. A young company can raise hundreds of millions of dollars in a Seed, Series A or Pre-A round, so company age, previous financing history and what the capital is paying for often give a clearer picture.

Strategic investors are participating in much larger rounds, while the lead-investor base itself is broadening. That combination fits what we are seeing outside the funding data: more factory deployments, more real-world training programs, more physical-data collection and much heavier spending on compute.

Humanoid robotics has moved into a much more capital-intensive phase. The hard part now is converting that money into reliable robots that can work for long periods, learn from real environments and eventually deliver economics that justify the scale of investment.