Which Humanoid Robot companies are poised to lead the trillion dollar market opportunity?

NVIDIA just announced Project GR00T, a general-purpose foundation model for humanoid robots, designed to further its work driving breakthroughs in robotics and AI.

Tesla has started the factory testing of their bot, Optimus, which is a general purpose humanoid robot that can perform unsafe, repetitive and boring tasks – following up with as many as 60 new job listings trying to draw employees to work on this ambitious project.

Humanoid Robots are a type of smart robots that are designed and programmed in a way such that they can perform multiple human-centric jobs with amazing efficiency and accuracy, at times even doing a better job than us.

For the last few decades, robotics has had quite a journey – sometimes there are glimpses that  they could completely replace humans and at other times, there is disappointment when production robots don’t live up to all the hype that sci-fi movies and certain R&D claims created.

The global market size for Humanoid Robots currently sits at $2 billion with North America commanding the largest share and the Asia-Pacific showing the fastest growth. Goldman Sachs thinks that the market will grow at a blistering 70% a year to reach $38 billion in 2035, and that’s on the low end. If hurdles are cleared in product design, use case, affordability, public acceptance, etc. GS predicts the market will hit north of $150 billion by 2035. Beyond that, robotics is a trillion dollar market opportunity. 

Humanoid Robots could develop into one of the hottest sectors of all time. We at Crustdata will keep a close eye on the sector. For now, we decided to do a deep dive into the sector. We went into the database and presented the most interesting robotics companies based on a variety of metrics.  

And here are the results:  

Shenzhen based UBTech Robotics has raised $943M over 5 rounds. Founded in 2012, the Chinese company manufactures smart robots for use in education, logistics, elderly care, and business services. Based on trends, FigureAI and possibly several others to pass UBTech in funding amount in the next couple of years.

With over 144% YoY growth, Figure AI just launched the world's first commercially viable autonomous humanoid robot in collaboration with OpenAI – followed by a massive $675M fundraise where the likes of Jeff Bezos, OpenAI and NVIDIA participated.The company is in the process of building robots that help with both in-home and commercial work and tasks. The robots are not yet commercially available.

We looked into Crustdata employee headcount data to get a true understanding of the company’s growth since most companies aren’t actively selling yet. To further cement the promise of the robotics industry, the data show that almost all of the top robotics companies have been continuously, even exponentially adding headcount even amidst one of the largest tech slowdowns and layoffs in recent memory. We predict that hiring will only increase as more and more money flows into these companies. 

Engineering teams form the backbone of any deeptech company.

Around 94% of the humanoid robot companies have 21-60% of their entire team working in an engineering function.

What's most interesting here is the abundance of early stage companies at the Seed & Pre Seed level with as many as 7 companies having raised a Seed round in the last 1 year or so. This shows that humanoid robotics is still a fairly nascent market. 

Overall, the sector is growing very fast (34% CAGR), has a good balance of companies across the globe, and has a mix of growth stage and early stage companies promising big acquisitions and a lot of innovation/disruption respectively.

Bigtech companies like NVIDIA, Softbank Robotics, Tesla, Xiaomi and Honda Robotics among others that are themselves foraying into this sector would do well to keep a keen eye on all these promising companies – the ones that are setting the stage for the next few decades of the Robotics Race.

About the data

The data seen above is from Crustdata - the most accurate headcount and founder data for private companies, pulled realtime. It indexes billions of public data points on companies every week to provide an edge over the private market.