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Heavy-industry robotics company Kewazo raises $35 million with backing from Chevron and Asahi Kasei

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Kewazo, the robotics company transforming heavy industry worldwide, has completed a new funding round backed by Chevron Technology Ventures, Asahi Kasei, Benson Capital, Mana Ventures, Gaingels, and Atlas Ventures, alongside lead investor Schooner Capital and existing investors True Ventures and Cybernetix Ventures. Total funding now reaches $35 million.

Kewazo’s lifting robot Liftbot is already deployed at more than 20 industrial sites in North America and Europe, including refineries, petrochemical plants, chemical complexes, and power facilities.

Asset owners and service providers are increasingly adopting Liftbot to replace cranes and manual handling – improving safety and efficiency while bringing greater schedule predictability to maintenance, turnarounds, and capital projects. [Read more…] about Heavy-industry robotics company Kewazo raises $35 million with backing from Chevron and Asahi Kasei

Nebius teams with Nvidia to build cloud for robotics and physical AI

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Nebius, the AI cloud company, has announced it is collaborating with Nvidia to accelerate physical AI development with an end-to-end platform purpose-built for the full robotics lifecycle, from simulation and training to real-world deployment at scale.

Combining Nebius’s global AI cloud infrastructure with the Nvidia Physical AI Data Factory Blueprint, an open reference architecture for massive data generation and evaluation, Nebius will provide robotics developers and enterprises an agent-driven environment that addresses the two fundamental barriers to physical AI at scale: infrastructure and tooling fragmentation, and the lack of high-quality training data for rare, unpredictable scenarios that determine real-world success.

“Physical AI is going to be one of the defining technology shifts of this decade, and the teams building it today are being held back by infrastructure and tooling that was never designed for those workloads, ” said Evan Helda, head of physical AI at Nebius. [Read more…] about Nebius teams with Nvidia to build cloud for robotics and physical AI

From industrial robot arms to humanoids: Nvidia tightens its grip on the future of robotics

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Nvidia is rapidly emerging as the central technology provider to the global robotics industry, with a growing list of partners spanning traditional industrial robot manufacturers, surgical robotics firms, and a new wave of humanoid startups.

In a sweeping set of announcements at its GTC conference, the company revealed that many of the world’s best-known robotics companies – including ABB, Fanuc, Yaskawa and Kuka – are now building on its platforms, alongside newer entrants such as Agility Robotics, Figure AI and 1X.

The breadth of that ecosystem suggests a shift that has been under way for several years: robotics is becoming an AI-driven industry, and Nvidia is positioning itself as the default supplier of the underlying compute, simulation and software infrastructure. [Read more…] about From industrial robot arms to humanoids: Nvidia tightens its grip on the future of robotics

Niqo Robotics says AI weeding business nearing profitability as platform expands to new crops

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Niqo Robotics, a physical AI company building intelligent weeding robots for farms, has announced that its core business is “on track for profitability” in its first full commercial year, a milestone “no agricultural robotics company has publicly achieved”.

The company simultaneously unveiled plans to expand its AI weeding platform into new crops, new US markets, and an entirely new product form factor, signaling the next phase of growth for the rapidly scaling enterprise. [Read more…] about Niqo Robotics says AI weeding business nearing profitability as platform expands to new crops

ABB Robotics partners with Nvidia to launch ‘hyper real’ version of RobotStudio

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ABB Robotics is integrating Nvidia Omniverse libraries into ABB Robotics’ RobotStudio to help manufacturers deploy physical AI in real world robotics applications. (See video below.)

Marc Segura, president of ABB Robotics, said: “Today, using Nvidia accelerated computing and simulation technologies, we have removed the last barriers to making industrial and physical AI a reality at a global scale by closing the sim-to-real gap.

“For more than 50 years, ABB Robotics has led the evolution of intelligent industrial automation, from pioneering the first generation of fully electric industrial robots to advancing digital twin simulation through RobotStudio and shaping a new area of autonomous and versatile mobile robots. Today’s announcement with Nvidia brings physical AI to industry at scale.” [Read more…] about ABB Robotics partners with Nvidia to launch ‘hyper real’ version of RobotStudio

From affordable humanoids to robotaxis: Pittsburgh Robotics Network predicts the next wave of physical AI

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Pittsburgh has long been one of the world’s most influential robotics hubs. In this outlook for 2026, Jenn Apicella, executive director of the Pittsburgh Robotics Network, examines the trends shaping the next phase of robotics – from affordable humanoid robots to scaled autonomous transportation and the rise of physical AI

By any meaningful metric, Pittsburgh has earned its reputation as the robotics capital of the world. Anchored by decades of world-class research at Carnegie Mellon University and powered by a dense network of more than 250 robotics, AI, and deep tech companies, the region has become a proving ground for autonomous systems that are reshaping manufacturing, logistics, transportation, defense and more.

The Pittsburgh Robotics Network, which convenes and champions this ecosystem, is tracking converging technology and market trends indicating that the next phase of robotics across industries will likely be characterized by affordable humanoids, scaled robotaxi deployment, and the mainstreaming of physical AI. [Read more…] about From affordable humanoids to robotaxis: Pittsburgh Robotics Network predicts the next wave of physical AI

Texas Instruments and Nvidia partner to accelerate humanoid robot development

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Texas Instruments is accelerating the “safe deployment of humanoid robots into the real world” with Nvidia. By combining TI’s real-time motor control, sensing, radar and power technologies with Nvidia’s advanced robotics compute, Ethernet-based sensing and simulation technologies, robotics developers can validate perception, actuation and safety earlier and more accurately.

TI connects Nvidia physical AI compute to real-world applications with deterministic control, sensing, power and safety at every joint and subsystem. This partnership will help developers move faster from virtual development to production-ready, scalable and safety-compliant systems.

As part of this collaboration, TI designed a sensor fusion solution by integrating its mmWave radar technology with Nvidia Jetson Thor using Nvidia Holoscan Sensor Bridge to enable low-latency, 3D perception and safety awareness for humanoid robots. TI will showcase the solution at Nvidia GTC, March 16–19, 2026, in San Jose, California. [Read more…] about Texas Instruments and Nvidia partner to accelerate humanoid robot development

Deloitte expands partnership with Nvidia to develop physical AI solutions for industry

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Deloitte has announced an expansion of its collaboration with Nvidia to develop new physical AI solutions aimed at accelerating the adoption of intelligent systems in real-world industrial environments.

The initiative focuses on technologies such as digital twins, computer vision, edge computing and robotics, combining Deloitte’s engineering and industry expertise with Nvidia’s AI and simulation platforms.

According to Deloitte, the solutions will be built using libraries from Nvidia Omniverse and are designed to help organizations simulate operations, analyze physical environments and deploy intelligent machines in production. [Read more…] about Deloitte expands partnership with Nvidia to develop physical AI solutions for industry

KDDI and Avita partner to develop humanoid robots for real-world service roles

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KDDI and Avita have announced a strategic partnership aimed at developing humanoid robots powered by what the companies describe as “Physical AI”.

The collaboration, announced March 2, 2026, will focus on building humanoid systems designed for real-world service environments such as retail, healthcare, entertainment and cultural venues.

Under the partnership, Avita will contribute expertise in avatar creation, conversational AI and remote operation technologies, while KDDI will provide communications infrastructure and data systems to support real-time operation of the robots. [Read more…] about KDDI and Avita partner to develop humanoid robots for real-world service roles

Dexterity says its new world model delivers ‘major leap forward’ for physical AI-powered truck loading

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Dexterity, a developer of physical AI powered industrial robotics, has announced a “major leap forward” in its Physical AI stack, anchored by Foresight, a state-of-the-art world model and a 4D box packing agent.

These advancements help solve some of the most physically demanding and hardest-to-staff tasks, such as truck loading. Alongside the announcement, Dexterity is also launching the Foresight API Challenge with up to $50,000 in prizes for student teams.

Foresight is Dexterity’s physics-consistent world model, a real-time, transactable representation of the physical environment that enables robots to perceive, reason, and act. Foresight represents a new class of world model, built not for observation, but for physical manipulation at the production scale. [Read more…] about Dexterity says its new world model delivers ‘major leap forward’ for physical AI-powered truck loading