Apptronik raises $935 million at about $5.3 billion valuation

On Wednesday, humanoid robot startup Apptronik announced that it has expanded its Series A—an early-stage venture capital funding round—to raise a total of $935 million. While the company did not publicly disclose its valuation, TechCrunch reported that the post-money valuation has reached about $5.3 billion. The massive total was accumulated through a series of extensions:

• Apptronik previously announced an initial Series A of $350 million.
• Due to strong investor demand, the company expanded that initial round to $415 million.
• The company has now raised another $520 million from earlier investors Google, Mercedes-Benz, and B Capital, alongside some new investors, bringing the total Series A funding to $935 million.

According to the company, investors have paid progressively more for shares in each subsequent extension of the round. PitchBook reported that the current valuation of about $5.3 billion is roughly triple the initial Series A valuation of around $1.75 billion. Despite the substantial capital injection, the company stated that it is still in the early stages of development and was not actively seeking funding, with the round driven instead by inbound investor interest.

Apptronik has partnered with Google DeepMind, GXO, and Mercedes-Benz to deliver embodied AI—which refers to robots capable of perceiving their environment and taking physical action. The scale of the funding highlights the immense capital requirements of the humanoid robotics sector. For comparison, competitor Figure AI, which was founded in 2022, had raised nearly $2 billion in total before announcing an additional $1 billion round.

Although Apptronik is still categorized under early-stage funding, its experience in humanoid robotics is long-standing. The company’s humanoid work dates back to 2013, three years before the company was formally founded in 2016. This work originated when members of the Human Centered Robotics Lab from the University of Austin at Texas competed in the NASA-DARPA (the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Robotics Challenge, working on a robot called Valkyrie. Since then, the space agency has maintained a partnership with Apptronik as the company has readied its own humanoid robot, named Apollo.

Why it matters

Apptronik’s ability to secure massive capital despite not actively seeking it underscores the intense investor appetite for embodied AI and the immense capital requirements of building bipedal robotics.