Presented by
Good morning, robotics enthusiasts. AGIBOT just launched a way to rent a humanoid robot in the UK for less than £2,000 a day, no upfront purchase required.
That pricing move, plus a fresh funding bet into elder-care robots and a chore robot that skips arms and legs altogether, all point the same direction this week. Is the humanoid race actually about the humanoid at all, or just about who can get a useful robot into someone's hands first?
In today's recap:
AGIBOT prices humanoid rentals from £1,999 a day
Ant Group backs its 12th humanoid startup bet
Weave Robotics unveils an $8,000 chore robot
LATEST DEVELOPMENT
AGIBOT
DEAL
AGIBOT brings its A3 humanoid to Europe and prices UK rentals from £1,999 a day
WHAT
AGIBOT just debuted its A3 humanoid in London at UK APC2026, a 55kg robot standing 173cm tall with a dual-battery system rated for 10 hours and a 10-second swap. Alongside it, AGIBOT launched a UK Robot-as-a-Service model built with local partners, renting humanoids from £1,999 per day and quadrupeds from £899 per day.
WHY IT MATTERS
Upfront cost has kept humanoids stuck in pilot programs, and a day-rate rental model is the first real attempt to fix that math for schools, retailers, and logistics operators. If AGIBOT's UK partners can prove the RaaS model works, it becomes the template every humanoid maker copies for Western expansion.
PRESENTED BY VIKTOR
Six people doing the work. Your headcount is one.
Your finance close runs in #finance. Stripe and QuickBooks reconciled, runway updated, posted Sunday night without you asking.
Engineering review lands in #eng. Viktor pulled the open PRs, left comments on auth-refactor, flagged a dependency blocking api-pagination.
Campaign brief lands in #growth: Meta CPA up 18%, recommendation to pause broad match, a draft landing page already deployed for the variant test.
You hired him on day zero. He lives in Slack and Microsoft Teams alongside your contractors and investors, connects to 3,000+ tools, pushes back when you ship something dumb.
"Viktor is now an integral team member, and after weeks of use we still feel we haven't uncovered the full potential." Patrick, Director, Yarra Web.
ANT GROUP x ZEROTH ROBOTICS
FUNDING
Ant Group leads a $73.6 million round into humanoid startup Zeroth, its 12th robotics bet since 2025
WHAT
Alibaba affiliate Ant Group just led a 500 million yuan ($73.6 million) round in Zeroth Robotics, a pre-Series A raise that pushes the startup's total funding past 1 billion yuan. Zeroth says it's already booked orders for more than 30,000 units and posted first-half revenue up 600% year over year, with plans to start North America and Europe sales this fall.
WHY IT MATTERS
This is Ant's 12th humanoid robotics investment since the start of 2025, and it's betting on companionship and elder-care robots before Zeroth even ships an education model. If that order book holds up at scale, it's a sign Chinese platform capital sees home robots as a nearer-term market than industrial ones.
WEAVE ROBOTICS
LAUNCH
Weave Robotics' $7,999 Isaac 1 skips legs and fingers to fold your laundry
WHAT
Y Combinator-backed Weave Robotics just unveiled Isaac 1, a home robot up for preorder at $7,999 upfront or $449 a month, with the company promising it can do laundry, make beds, and tidy rooms on its own. The launch post on X pulled in more than 13 million views within a day, undercutting rival 1X's $20,000 Neo by a wide margin.
WHY IT MATTERS
Isaac 1 doesn't try to look human, it just tries to be useful at a handful of chores, and that price gap versus Neo could force competitors to choose between capability and affordability. If a non-humanoid form factor can nail even one category of chores at scale, it punctures the assumption that home robots need arms, legs, and a face to sell.
TOGETHER WITH TABS
Your Billing Process Is Slower Than You Think
Most SaaS finance teams underestimate how much billing lag is costing them.Most SaaS finance teams underestimate how much billing lag is costing them.
The Tabs Billing Lag Calculator benchmarks your process against top SaaS companies and puts a dollar figure on the gap — in two minutes.
QUICK HITS
NEWS
Proception launched its first product, the ProHand 1.0, a robotic hand with 22 total degrees of freedom. Reddit
Locus Robotics' CEO spoke about scaling the company's warehouse automation business, per a new interview shared on Reddit. Youtube
Japan is eyeing an AI-powered comeback in the factory robot race against China and Europe. Nikkei Asia
Dürr is building a CO2-efficient paint shop for Volkswagen's Autoeuropa plant in Portugal, which produced 236,100 vehicles in 2024, unifying three paint systems under one SCADA setup. Robotics and Automation News
CMU's robotics team sent snake-like robots to assist earthquake response efforts in Venezuela. Google News
Georgia Tech created a wearable that turns a robot's movements into warning music. Interesting Engineering
EE Times reports on how multimodal sensor inputs are helping robotic grippers get a better hold on objects. EE Times
Wichita is delaying the purchase of a second robotic police dog, city officials confirmed this week. Wichita Eagle
Bangor will start rolling small robots along its sidewalks to collect data for the city. Bangor Daily News
Sergey Levine shared the experiment that changed how he thinks about robotics research, in a new community discussion. Youtube
Industrial automation had a big week: fenceless robot debuts, humanoid IPO chatter, and a $100M facility expansion all landed in the same stretch. MarketScale
Industrial robotics is becoming the proving ground for physical AI, according to new industry analysis. SiliconANGLE
🧡 Enjoyed this issue?
🤝 Recommend our newsletter or leave a feedback.
How'd you like today's newsletter?
Cheers, Jason
